Journal of Public Deliberation

I am proud to announce the debut of the Journal of Public Deliberation, a peer-reviewed, free, online, “open access” publication that will include scholarly articles and essays aimed at practitioners. I serve on the editorial board and have spent considerable time over the last six months reviewing articles and discussing matters of editorial policy. The first issue contains five articles:

  • Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jane Mansbridge, “Disagreement and Consensus: The Need for Dynamic Updating in Public Deliberation” (This is a version of a chapter from the Handbook of Public Deliberation that John Gastil and I are editing. It tells a cautionary tale about a deliberative process that went wrong because the pressure to obtain consensus about the “common good” was unfair to the less advantaged people in the meetings. A standard public hearing turned out, in this case, to work better.)
  • Peter Muhlberger, “The Virtual Agora Project: A Research Design for Studying Democratic Deliberation” (This is an essay on an important experiment in online deliberation.)
  • Ethan J. Leib, “The Chinese Communist Party and Deliberative Democracy” (A report of an extraordinary meeting that convened some of the West’s leading authorities on deliberative democracy along with leaders of the Chinese CP.)
  • Ramon Daubon, “A Primer for Promoting Deliberative Democracy and the Dynamics of Development at the Grassroots” (An essay by a Kettering Foundation colleague on deliberation as a tool in economic development)
  • Peter Levine, Archon Fung, and John Gastil, “Future Directions for Public Deliberation” (A longish piece by yours truly and two friends.)