Rhetoric and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.

From government to governance? (Non-) Effects of deliberation on decision-making structures for nuclear waste management in Germany and Switzerland

“…Chambers 2009;Ba¨chtiger et al 2010;Lehtonen 2010). In this article, the integration of small group deliberation in decision-making structures and the changes they induce in those structures are analysed.…”

Editorial introduction: The fourth generation of deliberative democracy

“…Besides their strong interest in implementing deliberation in the context of 'real-life' politics, the third-generation scholars have also sought for suitable methods enabling the systematic and close investigation of deliberative processes and to determine the required parameters for institutional design (Sulkin and Simon 2001). In doing so, however, the third generation adopted mainly a micro approach to deliberation that isolated mini-publics and other institutions from the broader discursive environment and macro context within which they operate (Thompson 2008;Chambers 2009;Dryzek 2010b;Mansbridge et al 2012).…”

Mediatization of Politics

“…What our findings firmly confirm -in line also with previous research -is that readers' comments are an independent genre, partly detached from the journalistic text source but at the same time following similar frames used in political news-making that have a strong appeal to the more traditional, non-commenting members of the news audience. The new genre of news-commenting becomes one of the arenas for mass self-communication (Castells 2009), which is more emotional and more passionate than the original content provided by the journalist, but not necessarily more biased as readers often display the pleasure of dispute, draw attention through provocation and challenge the dominant frames and interpretations. From an audience perspective, the new genre of news-commenting becomes an important reference point for news consumption.…”