How should a democratic assembly be designed to attract large and diverse groups of citizens? We addressed this question by conducting a population survey in three communities with institutionalized participatory deliberative democracy in Switzerland. To examine participatory disposition in light of both individual characteristics and design features of the assembly that citizens contemplate joining, the survey comprised a conjoint experiment in which each respondent was asked to indicate his or her likelihood of participating in democratic assemblies with varying design features. The main result is that design features emphasizing the communitarian character of the assembly increase citizens’ willingness to participate, especially among disengaged citizens. Moreover, citizens were found to be less attracted by both very consensual and very adversarial meeting styles. Rather, we found meeting styles combining both controversy and consensus to be most favorable to assembly turnout. The implication is that practitioners of participatory or deliberative democracy must engage in community-building to foster turnout and inclusiveness in democratic assemblies.

This article addresses power-sharing constitutions that include powers of veto wielded by discrete ethnonational groups. Such constitutional arrangements – seen, for example, in Northern Ireland and Bosnia – have often prompted severe deadlock, a problem that in turn threatens democratic functioning and raises the risk of renewed communal violence. We consider the use of ‘umpires’ of power-sharing constitutional systems to vet the use of vetoes and (potentially) to prevent their overuse or misuse. Power-sharing umpires are not uncommon in practice. However, as yet there is little scholarship evaluating how, in substance, power-sharing veto umpires should approach their task. Relying on deliberative democracy theory, the article outlines three forms of ‘deliberative agreement’ that, in principle, deeply divided groups may reach in the course of policymaking. It goes on to explain how existing proportionality doctrines drawn from federalism and rights cases can be imported into the power-sharing context to ‘scaffold’ these broad ideals. This approach, it is argued, may provide a more detailed, coherent and practically workable approach to umpiring power-sharing constitutions.

The neologism “mansplaining” captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that, by virtue of being a woman, she lacks the man’s knowledge. Mansplaining has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, conceptualizing the phenomenon and identifying its epistemic harm. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory. Setting the problem of mansplaining against the norms we expect of democracy—equality, inclusion, and recognition—I argue that mansplaining poses harms that are not only individual and epistemic but also collective and relational. I distinguish two types of mansplaining based on women’s expertise and experience to elaborate on its collective epistemic harms to decision making and its relational harm of political exclusion. Mansplaining poses further relational harms of inequality and misrecognition, undermining the equal social relations and social trust required for deliberation.

In a 1998 article, Bohman argued that the contemporary deliberative turn in democratic theory had reached its ‘coming of age’, as deliberative democrats began to show greater interest in the institutionalization of their proposal. Moreover, Bohman referred to this growing interest with an expression that was unprecedented at the time: ‘deliberative constitutionalism’. At present, deliberative constitutionalism has become one of the most original and relevant contemporary proposals. In this context, my article proceeds as follows. I begin by arguing that the contemporary deliberative turn in democratic theory also gave rise to a deliberative turn in constitutionalism—that is, a trend aimed at orienting constitutionalism and judicial review towards democratic deliberation. Next, I argue that, at that embryonic yet promising stage, deliberative constitutionalism had shortcomings that hindered the aim assumed since its origins. Finally, I argue that, over recent decades, these shortcomings have been finessed, which shows that deliberative constitutionalism has also reached its coming of age.

This Article addresses the question of how to explain and justify the allocation of politically sensitive legal questions to civil courts in the European Union. It proposes a pluralist theoretical view on interactions of private law adjudication with legislative initiatives in the process of building a European political community. This is elaborated on the basis of a reconstruction of the interaction between judicial and legislative processes in three high-profile cases (concerning non-discrimination, housing and climate change) in light of three theoretical perspectives: social justice, constitutionalism and public sphere theory. The first two perspectives shed light on the legal-political dimension of private legal questions in the European Union and manners in which to handle the plurality of sources and institutions in this field. They do, however, not fully clarify the distinction and relation between Habermasian discourses of justification and discourses of application of law in European Private Law adjudication. The Article suggests that public sphere theory, with a basis in Fraser’s work on transnationalisation, can complement the theoretical understanding of the role of judges in European Private Law. It is submitted that the interaction between national and European levels of adjudication helps maintain transnational deliberative spheres in which the legal-political stakes behind private law can be discussed. This opens up space for the inclusion of different voices in democratic deliberations on questions of social justice. Private law adjudication may thus be considered to contribute to the initiation of discourses of justification which serve the re-imagination of a European political community.

This paper advocates a move beyond the systemic approach in the field of Deliberative Democracy. It argues that the notion of deliberative ecology can deliver the necessary conceptual elements that deliberative democrats seek in deliberative systems without some of the problems they either overlook or embrace. To advocate the advantages of an ecological perspective to deliberation, the article focuses on six axes of comparison: (i) performances of actants (instead of functions of arenas and players); (ii) articulations and translations (instead of transmission); (iii) vulnerabilities (instead of pathologies and dysfunctions); (iv) practice (instead of institutionally-oriented design); (v) diverse temporalities (instead of linear temporality) and; (vi) hologram-based analysis (instead of systemic analysis). In a nutshell, the article claims that the ecological approach to deliberation has the advantage of conceptualizing an ever-changing web of relations of interdependency, which connects diverse entities that are either relevant to a public discussion or that hinder its enactment.

The literature on deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) establishes a link between political dissatisfaction and support for DMPs. However, little is known about the sources of political dissatisfaction that trigger this support. Our research tackles this specific question and claims that citizen dissatisfaction is rooted in a position of ‘losers of representative democracy’, which leads citizens to be more open to reforms that move away from the representative model. Building on the literature on loser's consent, we focus on the effect of voting for a party not associated with the government and of descriptive and substantive (under)-representation in support of DMPs. We rely on a comparative survey conducted across fifteen Western European countries. Supporters of opposition parties and those who are badly represented, both descriptively and substantively, are more supportive of DMPs. These findings have important implications for understanding the public appeal for deliberative democracy instruments.

This Article interrogates the role of national constitutional courts within the Article 267 TFEU preliminary reference mechanism from both descriptive and normative angles. First, I demonstrate that although a clear majority of the constitutional courts submit references to the ECJ on a more frequent basis, differences in individual approaches remain significant. Subsequently, I argue that the core normative attractivity of the questions submitted in the course of domestic constitutional review lies in their participative and deliberative potential. Compared to ordinary courts, constitutional courts are better suited to amplify the ‘unheard’ voices of immobile EU citizens. By counterbalancing the demands of the EU's functional constitution, which is primarily based on the ideals of market capitalism, constitutional courts’ questions may contribute to the EU's capacity to generate legitimate decisions. Finally, I put my theoretical claims in context and analyse the main ways in which such deliberative potential can translate into practice.

As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as institutions for social and environmental governance in the global economy has received much scholarly attention over the past years. To date, however, research has yet to focus on assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in their interactions with other actors within larger systems of deliberation. Drawing on the deliberative systems perspective developed within deliberative democracy theory, we theorise a normative framework to evaluate the roles of MSIs within the broader systems of governance they co-construct through their interactions with other initiatives, governments, non-governmental organisations, and other external actors. As we demonstrate in our evaluation of the illustrative case of the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety as a MSI in the context of the Bangladeshi garment industry, this framework can help researchers assess whether a MSI ultimately serves to enhance or undermine the deliberative legitimacy of the overall system of which it forms a part.

In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the ‘new demarcation problem,’ has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In this paper, I appeal to Rawls’s theory of justice (1971) on the basis of which I defend a Rawlsian solution to the new demarcation problem. As I argue, the Rawlsian solution places plausible constraints on which values ought to influence scientific inquiry, and, moreover, can be fruitfully applied to concrete cases to determine how the conflicting interests of stakeholders should be balanced. After considering and responding to the objection that Rawls’s theory of justice applies only to the “basic structure” of society, I compare the Rawlsian solution to some other approaches to the new demarcation problem, especially those that emphasize democratic criteria.