Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Provides an overview of the development of deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK. Critically analyses the success of consecutive UK national governments in fostering deliberative and participatory processes. Surveys the development of deliberative and participatory processes in the UK at sub‐national and local level. Provides a starting point for comparative politics on deliberative and participatory democracy between the UK and other polities. This article responds to Michael Saward's call for a more context‐specific approach to the study of democracy by exploring developments in, obstacles to, and prospects for, a more deliberative and participatory model of democracy in the UK. A review is undertaken first of the New Labour and coalition governments' attempts at constitutional reform, in order to assess the implications these efforts have had, and continue to have, for the institutionalisation of such a model of democracy. Despite proclamations of lofty ambition successive UK governments have wrapped themselves in the straightjacketing logic of the Westminster model of parliamentary government. As a consequence their actual proposals lack ambition and are often incoherent. The story told in this respect is therefore one of largely unrealised rhetoric. The ‘largely’ qualifier is included, however, in recognition of the space created by Labour's constitutional reforms for participation at the peripheries of governance. The second section of the article focuses on these spaces by, first, commenting briefly on whether the participatory aspirations of the architects of Scottish devolution have been realised before, second, examining the use of specific deliberative mechanisms—such as citizens' juries, deliberative polls and participatory budgeting—at varying locations within the political system and in public agencies and services. Evidence of democratic innovation is presented; however, any optimism on this front must be tempered, as the power‐sharing potential of such mechanisms, and their capacity to move us towards a more comprehensive and joined‐up deliberative system in the UK, is hampered by the lack of a facilitating institutional landscape. Finally, an overview is provided of the three remaining articles that make up this special section on deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK.
Leader debates have become a pre-eminent means of campaign communication in numerous countries and were introduced in the UK relatively recently. However, the quality of such communication is, to put it mildly, open to question. This article uses the Discourse Quality Index (DQI) to assess the deliberative quality of the 2010 UK party leaders' debates. When scrutinized in isolation, and viewed through the full prism of the DQI categories, the quality of discourse evidenced in the debates is a relatively poor reflection of mainstream idealizations of democratic deliberation. However, when the analysis is rehoused within the wider project of constructing a deliberative system in the UK, and is given a comparative institutional dimension, the epistemic value of the debates is revealed. The relatively high level of justification employed by the party leaders suggests that the debates are a valuable means for the mass communication of reasoned defenses of manifesto pledges to the public sphere, and that they are likely to have a significant educative effect. Moreover, we argue that sequencing such debates with representative deliberative fora will force elites to improve the deliberative quality of their communication and enhance the reflective capacity of the viewing public. We therefore agree with Shephard and Johns (2012, p.15) that, 'given the centrality of the debates to the dynamics of the 2010 campaign (and, albeit less directly than anticipated, to the eventual outcome), they warrant closer scrutiny'. This article scrutinizes the debates in a very specific manner. Our aim is to evaluate the leaders' debates through the lens of deliberative democracy. More specifically, we aim to measure the 'deliberativeness' of the discourse employed during the debates and to comment on the role leaders' debates may fulfil as part of a wider deliberative system in the UK.There are differing anecdotal impressions of the British leader debates' deliberative credentials. During the 2010 and 2015 campaigns, various commentators expressed concerns and were therefore sceptical about the debates' contribution to the democratic process. The main criticisms were that the debates promoted 'style over substance ' (see Freedland, 2010;Marqusee, 2010;Waweru, 2010); that their novelty, in the words of the outgoing and incoming Prime Ministers respectively, 'clouded the need for policy to be debated' (Watt, 2010) and 'sucked the life' out of the election campaign (LUCRC, 2015); and that ultimately 'as Socratic dialogues aimed at uncovering the truth the debates were, almost inevitably, failures ' (Pattie and Johnston, 2011, p.150). These appraisals echo criticisms leveled at the use of the televised debate in the USA, where it is an established feature of the campaign landscape (see, inter alia, Auer, 1962; Bitzer and Router, 1980;Lanoue and Schrott, 1991).If true, this would seriously undermine one of the main justifications for such debates, which is that their educative effect will improve the quality of democratic decision maki...
This article analyses the institutionalisation of public and civic forms of deliberation within the Scottish Parliament. The analysis focuses on the committee system of the Parliament and is constructed around a unique database, created by the authors, which records the nature of all deliberative instances involving parliamentary committees and members of the public/stake-holding groups between 1999 and 2009. Findings emerge from the data that are of relevance to two main audiences. First, those with a concern for the abstractions of deliberative theory are provided with much needed empirical evidence about the institutionalisation of deliberative processes within a national legislature. And second, those with a concern for legislative studies and devolved politics are provided with a novel evaluation of deliberation that feeds into wider debates about the principles of the Scottish Parliament. Our findings show that the committees of the Scottish Parliament have been relatively successful in institutionalising a deliberative system comprised of a range of discursive spheres of varying complexity. However, this optimism must be tempered by the observation that this is a system in decline.
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