Harnessing and legitimising public expressions online: A theoretical design for inter-discourse e-deliberation.

Recent research shows that Irish civil society organisations have adapted their lobbying techniques to include street protests, media campaigns, and social media communication strategies to adjust to the impact of the economic crisis on Ireland’s social partnership corporatist structures (Carney et al, 2011). As social partnership has become replaced by ‘social dialogue’, a transformation is occurring in the dynamics of decision-making in Ireland. Citizens also are expressing dissatisfaction with the statism of the public sphere calling for greater participation in local government decision processes as expressed through the ‘We the Citizens’ citizen assembly in Ireland in 2011. Despite these transformations in use and expectations of the public sphere there is confusion as to how such changes can be conceptualised within the framework of legitimate representation. In this paper we present a design for a computer mediated e-deliberative model that demonstrates how the participative web, already an integral part to citizens’ social and political engagement, can be used to redefine the public sphere as part of this new era of decision making. The model (entitled SOWIT) enables citizens, civil society organisations and political representatives to engage directly on policy development processes on an ongoing basis. While many online fora for political discussion exist, SOWIT is integrated to local authority decision processes and is rooted in innovations and empirical studies on deliberative democracy. It implements Young’s (2000) claim for harnessing differences in social interests, claims and expressions, through the notion of meta-consensus and inter-subjective rationality Dryzek (2003, 2006) and involves a sequential approach to deliberation Bächtiger et al. (2010) that provides that overcomes issues of inclusion identified in Habermasian communicative rationality (1998). The model specifically attends to the question of how the use of new media for political engagement can be considered legitimately representative and overcome problems with self-selection to which technological approaches can be vulnerable. In this respect, we draw upon Dryzek’s concept of discourse representation and illustrate how the model can discern and map discourse patterns within public sphere information, as well as measure movement during deliberations towards meta-consensus using discourse space theory (Chilton, 2005). This approach is particularly relevant in the case where the scope of the public constituency is open and not territorially defined. The SOWIT model is grounded in networking at the public sphere level, with graduated levels of inclusion as the policy process proceeds (Dovi, 2009). It includes the following sequential components: a public sphere where discourses evolve, are articulated, and deliberators emerge via an influence rating; a dialogue sphere where discourse influencers deliberate with elected representatives with the aim of achieving increased levels of inter-group policy resonance and; links into local Council (or other democratic institution) where the negotiated policy positions in the dialogue sphere are presented to Council. Feedback between these levels provides the dynamic for system learning and the goal of a final policy that resonates with discourses in the public sphere (Dryzek, 2010). Our paper presents this theoretical model; its technical innovations; and its justifications in the empirical and theoretical literature on deliberative democracy. References Bächtiger, A., Niemeyer, S., Neblo, M., Steenbergen, M. R., & Steiner, J. (2010). Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Blind Spots and Complementarities. Journal of Political Philosophy, 18,,32-63. Carney , G., Dundon, T, Ni Leime, A. and Loftus C. (2011) Community engagement in Ireland’s developmental welfare state: A study of the Life Cycle Approach. Irish Centre for Social Gerontology: National University of Ireland Galway. Chilton, P. (2005) Vectors, viewpoint and viewpoint shift: Toward a Discourse Space Theory, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3 (2005), 78–116. Dryzek, J. S. (2010). Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dovi, S. (2007). The Good Representative, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Habermas, J. (1998). Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, I.M. (2000). Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.