Journal ArticleDOI
Practical Reason and Incompletely Theorized Agreements
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This article is published in Current Legal Problems.The article was published on 1998-01-01. It has received 13 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Practical reason.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
The ethics of scientific communication under uncertainty
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that scientists need to decide how to communicate knowledge effectively in a way that nonscientists can underscan it, and that the communication by scientists with policy makers and attentive publics raises ethical issues.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making Plans: Representation and Intention:
TL;DR: The idea of planning theory as a kind of practical reason shifts attention from making rational arguments justifying planning beliefs to the study of plan-making as a feature of practical reasoning as discussed by the authors.
DissertationDOI
Mimetic evolution : new comparative perspectives on the Court of Justice of the European Union in its federal judicial architecture
Journal ArticleDOI
Between Presumption and Despair: Augustine's Hope for the Commonwealth
TL;DR: This article argued that Augustine encourages hope for temporal goods as long as that hope is rightly ordered and avoids the corresponding vices of presumption and despair, and identified "civic peace" as a common object of hope that diverse citizens can share.
Dissertation
Deliberative democracy within parties
Abstract: Political parties serve a number of vital functions in representative democracies. Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one. This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. In recent times, observers have noted a growing disconnect between citizens and parties. Parties have gradually transformed from agents that mediate between state and civil society to agents of the state. This sits uncomfortably with the ideal of parties as connectors of citizens and government. How can their capacity to perform this function be restored?
This thesis seeks to offer a new answer to this question. Its main argument is that to revitalise their capacity to connect citizens and government, parties need to become more internally democratic, and that they need to become more internally democratic in a particular way, namely more internally deliberative. By this is meant that parties need to strengthen channels of communication from the bottom up and avail themselves of their internal deliberative resources: of the partisans on the ground, who deliberate over the demands of their community in local party branches. The theoretical part of the thesis proposes a model—called a “deliberative model of intraparty democracy”—showing how these traditional sites of partisanship can be empowered.
The empirical part of the thesis then asks whether such a model can be realised in real-world parties. The main focus is here on the deliberative capacity of organised party members, which is likely the first target of scepticism. I examine three questions, drawing on the findings of a small-scale study of deliberation in party branches in Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria: (1) Do party branches provide favourable preconditions for deliberation? (2) Are the political discussions in
the branches “deliberative”, in the sense that they are marked by respectful exchanges of reasons? (3) When does intra-party deliberation fail? Though mainly indicative, the analysis of the empirical material suggests that party members do possess the deliberative capacity required to realise a deliberative model of intra-party democracy, and that possible deliberative deficiencies can be countervailed using simple institutional fixes. In light of this, the thesis concludes that making parties more internally deliberative in order to reconnect citizens with government is well within
reach.