Symposium on Deliberation Introduction
| Published date | 01 July 2007 |
| Author | Keith Dowding |
| Date | 01 July 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629807080710 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
SYMPOSIUM ON DELIBERATION
INTRODUCTION
Keith Dowding
The relationship between deliberation and democracy has in the last two dec-
ades emerged as one of the key concerns of democratic theory. In terms of sheer
volume, by far the greatest contribution to the analysis of this relationship has
come from political philosophers, whose work has focused largely on the nor-
mative pre-requisites of democratic deliberation and its effects on political
legitimacy. By and large, this work takes as given that deliberation will succeed
in communicating arguments and transmitting information to and from the parti-
cipants. A growing body of game-theoretic work on cheap-talk communication
has, however, argued that this should not be assumed by fiat: incentive problems
can and often do substantially complicate the willingness of participants to
reveal what they know to others and so limit the nature of the claims that can be
made on behalf of deliberation.
Two key questions in relation to this work and its connection to the norma-
tive literature on deliberation remain open: (1) What is or are the right way(s) to
model deliberation? and (2) What institutional and other circumstances mitigate
the incentive problems in communication and move the deliberative interaction
closer to the normative ideal? The present symposium brings together two
game-theoretic articles that speak directly to these questions. Both these articles
have already proved influential in developing these arguments.
1
Each article
develops distinct approaches to thinking about deliberation though they are not
contradictory. They each point toward and explore parallel research agendas.
Adam Meirowitz’s article, ‘In Defense of Exclusionary Deliberation: Com-
munication and Voting with Private Beliefs and Values’, belongs to a tradition
of modeling communication that dates back to Crawford and Sobel (1982). In
this tradition, communication is cheap talk – it involves sending and receiving
costless and unverifiable signals. The meanings of these signals are endogenous
to the deliberative interaction and its particular equilibrium play. Here whether
information is revealed or transmitted under a particular strategy profile depends
upon common knowledge. If, given that strategy profile, there is common
knowledge that the sender means to be informative (to a particular degree given
by the dependence of the signals chosen on the states of the world) and the
1. These articles were first presented well over three years ago and have been discussed and cited
by, for example, Austen-Smith and Fedderson, 2006, Patty, 2007 and Lupia et al., 2006.
Journal of Theoretical Politics 19(3): 297–299 Copyright Ó2007 Sage Publications
DOI: 10.1177/0951629807080710 Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
http://jtp.sagepub.com
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