Deliberatiivisen demokratian ihanteet ja kokeilut

Authors

• Kaisa Herne
• Maija Setälä

Abstract

In the recent years, theories of deliberative democracy have dominated the academic debate on democracy. At the same time, various deliberative forums have been experimented in different countries. These include deliberative polls, consensus conferences and citizens’ juries. Citizens’ juries and consensus conferences have been adopted primarily for the purpose of integrating citizens in policy making, whereas deliberative polls have been designed more clearly as scientific quasi-experiments. This paper aims to outline six evaluative criteria based on theories of deliberative democracy and to make a systematic evaluation of different deliberative experiments. The aim of this evaluation is to comment on mostly the organisational aspects of the deliberative experiments, but methodological points of view are raised when there is no sufficient data for evaluation. The ultimate purpose is to give some comments on how deliberative forums could be improved.