Deliberation

aspects of deliberation

1 Democratic assessment of collaborative planning processes‏
- 1.1 On using Experts in Deliberation
2 Epistemic Considerations
3 Measuring Deliberation
4 Settings of Deliberation
5 Distortions in Reason
6 Psychological considerations
7 methods of deliberation
8 Criticism on deliberation
9 See Also
10 References

Democratic assessment of collaborative planning processes‏

Dahl’s five criteria for evaluating democratic processes have been widely accepted, at least among students of democracy (Dahl, 1979, 1998; see Habermas^[1], Saward^[2]).The five criteria are: effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding,control of the agenda and inclusion of all adults^[3] (fromCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag.

Epistemic - Good deliberation should produce well corroborated and inter-subjective SON. It should produced unbiased decisions, and eliminate as much as possible group thinking. The decision by the citizens will be well informed.
Ethic - Good deliberation will take the needs of all members and will produce optimal inclusive solutions. A solution that will enable all members to feel that they are benefiting from being a members in the group.
Democratic - People will engage shared challenges, will recognize and understand on other citizens, and will be responsible for the acts taken by the state. This will make the citizens influential, involved and responsible. It will strength the social capital and the education of the citizens. It will strive to get as much inclusive solution so that everybody will feel that she or he is been concerned as important and equal citizen.

On using Experts in Deliberation

Although experts are sometimes crucial for deliberation, because they hold more corroborated SON, there are some concern that should be addresses when expert are taking part in a deliberation. Expert may harm deliberation in those aspects:

Epistemically, delegation of deliberation to expert can promote citizen ignorance.
Experts may be biased (as was suggested by Loerenz et al.^[4])
The world view of the experts can be very narrow, and may have low representation of variety of important SON to the decision making. The may have lack of emotional perspective of the population, or may ignore ethical or democratic principles.
Experts can be influenced by some major school of thoughts that prevail in the academy, which is not part of the wider population ideas.
Expert may be part of well educated elite which are not good representative of the whole public, and may promote decision in the lite of their elite world-view.
Experts may also lack the will or the understanding of reaching the ability of a group to act, or to reach high degree of consensus. Groups needs some inner adjustment to happen, so the can act. Some more able people need should be addressed, so they will want to move the group towards it's goals. Or a group should reach high degree of consensus to avoid grudge between groups. Experts decisions may not take these factors into account.
Experts may need to distance themselves from the some times half-backed thoughts of populism, but they should also avoid alienation from the crowds.
Exclusion of non-experts from the process of decision making may threatens the foundations of democracy itself, as the rule by the people.
Even if Experts do not include non-experts in the process of building the models from which deliberation is growing, can shift the decision making, and let experts control the decision making.