Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I am grateful for the privilege to add some thoughts on the contributions to this
volume (although I was not able to participate in the actual conference). Far
from being capable of writing a kind of review, my comments only resonate
some reactions to the inspiring reading of papers from a field of research I am
not familiar with.
It will not come as a surprise that I am most satisfied with the
operationalization of online Deliberation that D. Janssen and R. Kies extract
from Lincoln Dahlbergs research (2002). One set of criteria for measuring the
quality of discourse refers to structural features: the reciprocity of raising and
responding to validity claims; the connection of this exchange with justifying
reasons; the direct or indirect inclusion of all those affected; and the absence of
interfering pressures with the exception of the forceless force of the better
argument. The remaining three criteria concern required dispositions of
participants: a reflexive attitude towards ones own claims and background
assumptions; ideal role taking or willingness to take the demands and
counterarguments of the others seriously; and sincerity or the absence of
manipulation and self-deception.
At first glance, it might appear puzzling that a list of criteria for evaluating
internet discussions should fit best to my own description and presuppositional
analysis of practical discourse (Habermas, 1983, 93119; 1991, 15266; 1996a,
5664). However, issue-oriented chat rooms provide the researcher with selfdefined, weakly institutionalized, spontaneous and rather isolated discourse
units, which can be analysed apart from any larger political context. These
abstract units invite an empirical analysis of how informal yet focused
deliberations deviate from the model of rational discourse. Experimental
groups, such as S. Fishkins focus groups for deliberative polling, provide
another approach to discourse analysis. The conception of rational discourse
serves as standard for an evaluation of the cognitive potential of actual
communications, in the first case, and as design for the construction of
cognitively enhanced communications in the second case.1
Jurgen Habermas
Some Comments
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Jurgen Habermas
Some Comments
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Jurgen Habermas
Some Comments
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Jurgen Habermas
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Jurgen Habermas
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with mass communication, and how it generates the agenda setting pressure
of relevant issues and the political influence of conflicting public opinions,
they analyse the public sphere from two perspectives (c) as an arena of
citizens who make up their own mind and (d) as an audience reacting to
political elites.
(a) In the light of the sobering results of research on voters ignorance, all
approaches to deliberative politics seem to miss the point of really existing
democracy from the beginning. All the more important is the evidence from
studies that focus on actual political deliberation among citizens. They reach
from induced reasoning in experimental groups to everyday talk in focus
groups. Fishkins and Luskins research of deliberative polling is designed for
mobilizing capacities of ordinary citizens that most people cannot makes use of
under normal conditions. There is a largely neglected disposition for the
rational appropriation of political information and an information-driven
preference change on the basis of normative criteria. Large-scale democracies
obviously do not take advantage of this potential. The study of everyday
political talk by Pamela Johnston Conover and D. Searing suggests that the
daily routines and interactions foster reasonable political attitudes and
interests among potential voters even within existing institutions and cultural
contexts. This kind of data fit to the image of how individual citizens
cognitively process a more or less inattentively perceived flow of rather
accidental and scattered information over a longer period in such a way that
the constant input piles up to an intuitive knowledge as the tacit background
for still rationally motivated pro and con attitudes towards political issues at
elections.
(b) The splendid comparative study of Jurg Steiner, Andre Bachtiger,
Markus Sporndli and Marco R. Steenbergen on the deliberative dimension of
four national legislatures reaches just to the centre of the whole approach to
deliberative politics. Deliberative politics inconspicuously derives its name
from historical ideas of a pre-1848 liberalism that received its inspiration from
what deliberierende Versammlungen the early modern parliaments were
expected to achieve, namely the rationalization of an in-transparent use of
governmental power. I admire the careful research design for testing ambitious
hypotheses as much as I admire the inventive introduction of a Discourse
Quality Index for capturing essential features of proper deliberation. Both
achievements would deserve a detailed commentary, which I cannot provide in
the present context. Nor can I take up the discussion on procedure vs
substance at the principled level, where the controversy depends on the choice
of epistemic vs non-epistemic concepts of truth and rightness.7 At the level of
the actual democratic process, the procedural institutionalization of parliamentary deliberation feeds on the normative substance of the constitutional
frame anyway.8
Acta Politica 2005 40
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Jurgen Habermas
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Jurgen Habermas
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References
Brandom, R. (1994) Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dahlberg, L. (2002) Net-public sphere research: beyond the first phase, Euricom colloquium:
electronic networks and democracy; 912 October, 2002, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Grice, H.P. (1975) Logic and Conversation, in D.D. and G. Harman (eds.) The Logic of Grammar,
Encino, CA: Dickenson.
Grice, H.P. (2001) Aspects of Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Habermas, J. (1983) Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1991) Erlauterungen zur Diskursethik, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1996a) Die Einbeziehung des Andern, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1996c) Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1999) Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, Teil III.
Sporndli, M. (2004) Diskurs und Entscheidung. Eine empirische Analyse kommunikativen Handelns
im deutschen Vermittlungsausschuss, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften.
Tyler, T.R. (1990) Why People Obey the Law, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Notes
1 For this research strategy, the work of Michael A. Neblo is representative, too.
2 The so-called voters paradox is an artefact of a theory that reduces by definition all action
orientations to those resulting from rational choice.
3 Tyler (1990).
4 Habermas (1999).
5 Habermas (1996c).
6 Habermas (1996c, Chapter 4).
7 Habermas (1999, Teil III; 1991, 164ff).
8 Habermas (1996c).
9 Sporndli (2004, Kapitel 5, 6 and 9).
10 Sporndli (2004, 161).