Neither Systematic nor Idiosyncratic: Drawing on Family Resemblances and Eclectic Affinities to Compare Deliberative Systems

There is a move to draw on the rich research traditions of comparative politics in the effort to begin studying deliberative systems in practice. However, in this paper, we caution that the dominant research traditions in comparative political science--on the one hand, rigidly systematic comparison or thickly descriptive area studies--may be of only limited utility in this enterprise. On the one hand, deliberative systems are fuzzy, porous, shifting constructs on which rigid efforts to systematize comparative analysis—either through large-n statistical comparison or, more pointedly, through the sort of systematic qualitative comparison pioneered by Lijphardt—will map uncomfortably and perhaps even perversely. On the other hand, these swirling complexities mean that to draw meaningful comparative insights about deliberative systems we also need to move beyond idiosyncratic accounts produced in the thick descriptions of area studies specialists. Instead, we emphasise the value of two alternative, more marginal traditions in comparative political scholarship in making up for these limitations. The first is through the use of ‘family resemblances’ in comparative research design. The second is through post facto comparisons which draw together eclectic affinities between systems, and in the process shed new light on important institutional, cultural and discursive dynamics. Both approaches, we hold, are sensitive to the contextual complexities and shifting, fuzzy nature of the systems conception. Both, in different ways, can tell us a great deal about why and how deliberative practices and institutions emerge, flourish, interact, shift, or fail, and why and how they enable, enhance or undermine the democratic and deliberative qualities of the system overall. We draw on promising examples of these two approaches in the nascent or foregrounding work in deliberative systems scholarship to emphasise their value in understanding deliberative systems in practice.