Measuring the Quality of Deliberation Within: A Proposal of Reasoning Quality Index

Deliberative democratic theories have flourished over the past decades and empirical studies have accordingly developed some indices to measure the quality of deliberation. By building on the work of ‘Discourse Quality Index’ (Steenbergen et al. 2003), we aim to rigorously measure the degree of ‘deliberation within’ and ‘deliberation with’ (Goodin, 2000) separately with the following research design. We asked respondents in Japan about their opinion over nuclear power plants with full information provided and the reasons for their opinion as well as for the supposed reasons of the opponent view. We then content analyzed the open-ended reasons with multiple coders and compared with the chosen response items of the common reasons. This newly developed index of Reasoning Quality Index allows us to distinguish the depth/width of ‘deliberation within’ from ‘deliberation with’, which was not possible with the existing index, and would contribute to the future empirical studies on deliberative democracy.