Judging Deliberation: An Assessment of the Crowdsourced Icelandic Constitutional Project

This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualization...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Deliberative Democracy
Main Authors: Popescu, Delia, Loveland, Matthew
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: University of Westminster Press 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.974
https://delibdemjournal.org/article/id/974/
Description
Summary:This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualizations and operationalize a measure of deliberation, and then apply the measure to the case of the debate fostered by the Constitutional Council online public platform dedicated to drafting the Icelandic constitution - the first “crowdsourced” constitutional project in the world. This is the first effort to both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the nature of deliberation in the case of Iceland. Generally, this exploration is meant to identify and analyze markers of deliberation in a setting that aspires to foster such exchanges. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future political theory and related empirical investigation.