Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Deliberative democracy is a diverse and rapidly growing field of research. But how can deliberative democracy be studied? Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy provides a unique collection of over 30 methods to study deliberative democracy. Written in an accessible style, it provides guidance for scholars and students on how to conduct rigorous and creative research on the public sphere, structured forums, and political institutions. Each chapter introduces a particular method, elaborates its utility in deliberative democracy research, and provides guidance on its application, as well as illustrations from previous studies. This book celebrates the methodological pluralism in the field, and hopes to inspire scholars to undertake methodologically robust, intellectually creative, and politically relevant empirical research.

About the Author :
Selen A. Ercan is a Professor of Political Science and Director at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Her research interests include theory and practice of deliberative democracy, identity politics and multiculturalism, and alternative forms of political participation. Selen's work has been published in International Political Science Review, Political Studies, Policy and Politics, and Social Movement Studies, amongst others. She is the author of Mending Democracy: Democratic Repair in Disconnected Times (with Hendriks and Boswell; OUP, 2020); and the editor of Deliberative Systems in Theory and Practice (with Elstub and Mendonça; Routledge, 2019). Hans Asenbaum is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. His research interests include identity and inclusion in new participatory spaces, digital politics, and feminist and gender theory. Hans' work has been published in the American Political Science Review, New Media & Society, Communication Theory, and Politics & Gender. He is Co-convener of the Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association in the UK. Nicole Curato is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She is the author of Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedy to Deliberative Action (OUP, 2019) and the editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. Her work examines how democratic innovations can take root in the aftermath of tragedies, including disasters, conflict, and urban crime. Ricardo F. Mendonça is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil and a Research Fellow at the Brazilian National Institute for Digital Democracy. He is the coordinator of Margem - Research Group on Democracy and Justice. He holds a fellowship from CNPq (Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) and a fellowship from Fapemig (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais). His research focuses on the theory and practice of democracy, political communication, and contentious politics. His publications include Deliberative Systems in Theory and Practice (with Elstub and Ercan; Routledge, 2019), Introduction to Democratic Theory (with Cunha; UFMG, 2018), Online Deliberation in Brazil (with Sampaio and Barros; UDUFBA, 2016).

Review :
Deliberative democracy emerged a few decades ago as a theory on how to deepen democracy. Its success has been so great that many scholars took the important step of transforming the theory into a method to study a variety of experiences of deliberation in North and South. This book is an attempt to systematize thirty-one different methods employed by scholars to study deliberative democracy. The result is the most complete book to date on the state of the art of both the theory and methods of deliberative democracy. This book is a must-have for anyone studying deliberative democracy. It brings together the crème de la crème scholars in the field, who explain and discuss well-known as well as novel theoretical and empirical approaches. It provides a methodological overview urgently needed by scholars, students and practitioners. In recent years, we can observe huge forward advances in research on deliberation and on democratic innovations in general. Needed are rigorous research and evidence-based insights, which enable us to develop convincing scenarios for the future of democracy. This book shows the way. This volume is a much-needed collective endeavour with impressive results. It offers a plural and reflexive analysis of research and methods in deliberative democracy. It includes more than thirty methods and shows different ways in which researchers produce knowledge and seek to enhance the role of meaningful political communication in our societies. With a scope as massive and diverse as democracy itself, the book captures the dynamic nature of the field and shows how practitioners' attempts to make deliberation more inclusive, agile, and influential have been accompanied by researchers' attempts to gauge progress in all these directions. With its commendable mixture of ambition and humility, this book will help us conceptualize, construct, and assess many future democratic innovations. This book offers the most compelling and comprehensive overview of methods currently found in the toolbox of empirical and theoretical scholars within deliberative democracy. Bringing together an excellent set of scholars from different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, it is the go-to resource for anyone interested in the study of deliberative democracy. This book provides an in-depth and well-rounded exploration of methods and theories of deliberation. For scholars whose aim is to provide insight on the causes and consequences of deliberations, this book is essential reading.