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Building bridges across political divides: experiments on deliberative democracy in deeply divided Belgium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2013

Didier Caluwaerts  and
Kris Deschouwer
Didier Caluwaerts*
Affiliation:
Post-doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Political Science, Brussels, Belgium and Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, Belgium
Kris Deschouwer
Affiliation:
Research Professor, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Political Science, Brussels, Belgium
*
*E-mail: dcaluwae@vub.ac.be
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Abstract

In recent years, deliberative democracy has moved from a philosophical ideal into an empirical theory with numerous experiments testing the theoretical assumptions. Despite the wealth of evidence on the potential for deliberation, scholars have remained hesitant to test the theoretical premises under rather more adverse circumstances. This article, in contrast, tries to push deliberative scholarship to its edge by focusing on the viability of citizen deliberation in deeply divided societies. Our research questions are whether contact between citizens of competing segments undermines the potential for deliberation, and under which institutional conditions this is so. Based on a deliberative experiment in Belgium, in which we varied the group composition and the decision-making rule, we argue that decision rules are strong predictors of deliberative quality, but more importantly that the confrontation between citizens from both sides of the divide does not undermine the quality of deliberation. On the contrary even, our results indicate that the quality of intergroup deliberation is higher than that of intragroup deliberation, no matter what the rule.

Keywords

deliberative democracyBelgiumdivided societies
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 427 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2013 

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