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Why do we need a Framework for Deliberation
==Why do we need a Framework for Deliberation==
The theory of deliberation has so far defied a strong connection with empirical research. There are two main reasons for this: the lack One of conceptual clarity specifying which types of discussions classify as the deliberative type, and reason for that is the confusion betweenthe causes and the consequences complexty of deliberation<ref>Thompson, Dthis field.F. (2008). Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical PoliticalScience, Annual Review of Political Science 11: 497–520.</ref>. The Public Deliberation research field is not an eay easy field for research. It includes the fields of political science, social interactions, individual psychology, interpersonal communication, the processing of knowledge and much more. In each of it's subfields there are many areas of intradisciplnary and interdisciplinary questions, each making the field more complex. This makes the research of deliberation highly complex. In order to make deliberation empirical, falsifiable theories of deliberation must be produced. Such theories which describes measurable elements and interactions of between elemnts,were produced in the last decade by several groups: steenberger et al 2003<ref>Steenbergen, M. R., Bächtiger, A., Spörndli, M., & Steiner, J. (2003). Measuring political deliberation: a discourse quality index. Comparative European Politics, 1(1), 21–48.</ref>, stormer-Galley 2005<ref>Stromer-Galley, J., & Martinson, A. (2005). Conceptualizing and measuring coherence in online chat. In Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association.</ref>, bachtiger et al 2009<ref>Bachtiger, A., Shikano, S., Pedrini, S., & Ryser, M. (2009). Measuring deliberation 2.0: standards, discourse types, and sequenzialization. In ECPR General Conference, Potsdam (pp. 5–12).</ref> and black and Gastil 2008<ref>Gastil, J., Black, L., & Moscovitz, K. (2008). Ideology, attitude change, and deliberation in small face-to-face groups. Political Communication, 25(1), 23–46.</ref>, yet these theories only answers partly to the phenomena we find in real world deliberation. Many aspects like the inadequaty of rationality, communication styles, storytelling, social interaction, communication methods, type of medium used and much more are not described by these theoris. The current framework does not try to give a single description of deliberation, but rather aims at describing the building blocks of deliberation, and the ways to measure these building blocks. We will examine four areas that to our understanding construct the major elements of deliberation: knowledge, psychology, sociology and the structures as procedures which produce public decision making by deliberation. We then ask about the quality and democratic values of the decisions which were made by their end product. It then examines several methods of deliberation used by practioners, and tries to describe the elements and their interaction. Based on these understanding, we hope to make measurements of deliberation more clear and to improve old practices and construct new advanced deliberation settings.
==Goals of this Framework==