From Deliberative System to Dialogic Network: A Framework for Qualitative Analysis of Democratic Discourse and Action

Since its inception deliberative democracy has undergone several important turns. Recent systemic one distances itself both from older normative accounts and empirical research on real-world practices. By stressing the connection between micro and macro levels, namely between individual sites of discourse, mini-publics in the first place, and larger public sphere with formal decision-making institutions, it changes the way deliberation is and should be defined. The reason behind this re-conceptualization is to defend a notion of deliberative politics which thus can become a substantial and not merely marginal part of democratic process. Though the systemic turn is a move in the right direction, its empirical and normative agenda seems vague and largely underdeveloped. First, deliberative-system approach lacks a research methodology suitable for the purpose of analyzing the embeddedness of deliberation in broader political life. Second, emphasizing systemic connections is likely to undermine the radical thrust with which the idea of deliberative democracy was originally associated. Hence the intention of this paper is to provide a solution for these two deficiencies. Instead of focusing on the rigid system I advance a more flexible network approach to deliberation understood in a distributed way: as distinct forms of public dialogue present in multiple contexts, performing different functions and affecting one another. In order to complement this framework with a normative outlook I apply a critical discourse analysis to study the positions in the network (nodes) as well as connections existing between them (ties).