Cultural Rights and Deliberative Policy. Beyond Habermas’ “Between Facts and Norms”

Abstract

A framework derived from Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms is utilized to address the question of how claims for minority rights that emerge from ethical-political discourses may receive public recognition. The major difficulty in this regard turns upon discrepancies between the interpretations of minority cultural needs by the members of a given community and interpretations of the same needs on the part of those outside of the community in question. The discussion includes a critical analysis of proposed resolutions of this problem put forward in Between Facts and Norms, in other works of Habermas, and in the various publications of James Bohman, Jorge Valadez, Michael Rabinder James, and Monique Deveaux. I argue that the best way to assess the cogency of discourses across cultural "barriers" does not involve minimizing requirements for their deliberativeness, as the latter four of these authors tend to accept, but rather strictly differentiating between the procedure and substance of the deliberation.

Deliberative democracy and historical perspectives on American Indian/Alaska native political decision-making practices

“…Understanding deliberation in minority political and ethnic groups is not without precedent. Though some studies have looked at the challenges that ethnic and cultural heterogeneity posed to deliberative practices (see Mendelberg and Oleske, 2000;Makariev, 2013 or De La Fuente, 2013 for instance), other studies have looked at ethnic, cultural, and religious minority populations' deliberative practices. Molina-Markham (2014), for instance, looked at Quaker meeting groups and their notion of interaction.…”