Aggregating Democratic Deliberation: Synthetic and Progressive Development of the Structure of Rationalization

Aggregating Democratic Deliberation: Synthetic and Progressive Development of the Structure of Rationalization内容摘要：

Aggregating Democratic Deliberation: Synthetic and Progressive Development of the Structure of Rationalization Walter F. Baber California State University Long Beach and Robert V. Bartlett University of Vermont Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Hollywood, California, 29 March 2013 Activists and scholars interested in what political theory can contribute to environmental governance debates and action worry about several conceptual and methodological problems that deliberative democratic theorists and experimenters currently confront. These include: 1. how do we define and relate the roles of those who deliberate environmental quandaries and those who convene such deliberations, 2. what part do (or should) substantive experts play in processes of environmental deliberation, 3. what do we mean when we call environmental arguments "rational" or "public," and 4. how do we conceive of the relationship between deliberation and decision? A different (but allied) discipline, law, has dealt with many of these conceptual and methodological problems in the ways it has conceived of the project of restatement. Like content analysis in political science, restatement begins with a range of theoretically relevant subjects--in this case, reasons that the law can recognize as permissible justifications for a specific kind of judicial outcome. But beyond documenting how frequently and in what ways concepts and ideas identified a priori by researchers occur in a given text or narrative (as in content analysis), the objective of restatement is synthetic and progressive. The idea is to craft a comprehensive and precise statement of the underlying legal rationale for a certain category of decisions and to explore the potential paths along which we might expect (or want) that structure of rationalization to develop. Here we analyze the practice of legal restatement and we assess the usefulness of its premises, principles, and rules for political science, for the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, and for environmental governance. Our objective is to show that restatement is a 1 potentially useful mechanism for aggregating the considered opinions of deliberating citizens in ways that allow us progressively to develop legal structures that can contribute to the rationalization of the human relationship to the environment. We begin with a detailed discussion of the similarities and contrasts between legal restatement and its distant relative, content analysis as it is practiced in the social sciences. We then apply that pair of analytical techniques to a concrete example of citizen participation--juristic deliberation. We then employ the insights from that process to craft responses to the four questions posed above, responses that should guide the further development of the deliberative technique we present here. Finally, we offer a brief argument in favor of social scientific approaches to the development of new structures of regulatory law. Content Analysis and Restatement: The Dynamic Duo? Content analysis, as it is practiced in the humanities and social sciences, is a method of analyzing the text of various forms of communication. It involves a summarizing, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis of, messages. It relies on the classical values of scientific methodology--attention to objectivity, intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalizability, replicability, and hypothesis testing (Neuendorf, 2002). The underlying assumption is that the words and phrases that occur most often and most prominently in any communication reflect the core concerns of the message being conveyed. Word frequencies in print material, time counts in radio and television, keyword-in-context routines, and synonym and homonym analysis are common quantitative techniques. Qualitatively, content analysis can involve any methodology by which the content of communication is categorized and classified. 2 But the focus of content analysis and its methodological characteristics in any given instance depends on the purpose of the researcher. Practitioners of content analysis generally pursue one of a number of research purposes. By focusing on the source of communication, the encoding process used, and why the communication under examination was initiated and structured in the way that it was, a researcher can draw inferences about the antecedent conditions and int