Involving citizens in the ethics of biobank research: informing institutional policy through structured public deliberation.

Research on lay categorization processes has revealed that it can lead to distortions. Yet researchers routinely categorize people into groups and cultures. We argue that researchers should be awar...

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Four problems for researchers using social categories

Facilitation is indispensable to organized deliberative practices, yet largely absent from deliberative theory. This article theorizes the role of the deliberative facilitator through the central dilemma of ‘following from the front’. The facilitator necessarily occupies a leadership position in the deliberating group, yet must follow the group as it unfolds its own discourse on the issue at hand. This article will specify this tension in the framing of publics, the handling of expertise, the conduct of deliberation, and the crucial phase of bringing a deliberation to a conclusion. The various criticisms of deliberative practice in these dimensions are treated not as decisive objections, but rather as tensions to be negotiated by those who organize and conduct deliberative minipublics. This article aims to show the value of critical empirical work on deliberative practices as describing potential dangers, which can be set against the normative ideals and democratic potentials involved in attempts to gener...

Following from the front: theorizing deliberative facilitation

In this paper we demonstrate that societal psychology makes a unique contribution to the study of change through its focus on the 'contextual politics' of change, examining the different interests at stake within any social context. Societal psychology explores the contexts which promote or inhibit social and societal change and can be seen as a bridge between social and political psychology. It focuses on how the context shapes the ways in which societal change is understood, supported or resisted. To understand the intellectual rationale of societal psychology, and how it aims to foster societal change, we first consider the history of the discipline. Second, we consider what is meant by 'context', as understanding the environment of change is the hallmark of societal psychology. Third, we lay out three distinct features of a societal psychological approach to change: the politics of change; interventions and planned change; emergent change processes. Finally, the paper examines possible future developments of societal psychology and its role in understanding and creating societal change, alongside its place within the wider canon of social and political psychology.

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Insights from Societal Psychology: The Contextual Politics of Change

Cette these etudie la maniere dont les institutions utilisent les procedures numeriques dans leur application des processus participatifs, afin d'analyser comment cette utilisation peut resoudre certains des problemes lies a la democratie participative que nous nommerons « traditionnelle ». L'exemple du Budget Participatif de Paris, notamment, rend possible la mise en valeur d'une nouvelle maniere de concevoir la citoyennete (qui insiste sur le role direct du citoyen dans les procedures de prise de decision, voire meme qui lui permet de prendre des decisions de maniere autonome), la representation (par une representation casuelle et ponctuelle) et la deliberation (qui motive le questionnement des phenomenes d'agregation dans les processus de prise de decision collective et l'etude de la valeur attribuee a de tels phenomenes). Ce travail cherche a ouvrir la voie, d'une maniere reflexive, a un eventail d'opportunites qui seraient permises par l'utilisation des outils numeriques dans le contexte de la perception, par nature evolutive, des problemes de la democratie.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02153331/document

Les normes de la démocratie à l'épreuve de la participation citoyenne numérique institutionnalisée : une étude de l'appropriation du numérique par le politique dans le cadre des processus de participation citoyenne

Helen J. Davidson

Papers

Subject Positioning and Deliberative Democracy: Understanding Social Processes Underlying Deliberation