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Mini publics have become cornerstones of the European Union's Future of Europe (FoE) initiative. However, weaknesses in their designs bring their political influence into question. Often-unsystematic in design, they fail to strengthen participants' understandings of the issues under evaluation and induce silo-thinking and the formation of pseudo-preferences. These come at a cost to informed and deliberatively deduced recommendations which speak to underlying functional/operational technicalities which fundamentally determine the form and delivery of policy interests. Guided by the adage that form follows function, this paper argues that mini publics pertaining to the FoE must primarily encourage participants to think about the ways policies are made in the EU before they formulate policy recommendations. To do this, they must consider the EU's overall form (or prospective forms). Utilising data from focus group analysis, the paper demonstrates that scenario (vignette) models are conducive to strengthening participants' understandings of both existing and alternative EU forms, and their functional consequences for EU policies, thus enabling them to formulate concrete and potentially deliverable policy recommendations. Subsequently, the paper encourages organisers of relevant mini-publics to employ the European Commission's 'Five Scenarios for the FoE' as entry-points to strengthen the deliberative quality and democratic outputs of such exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The proposed concept of secure/insecure lifeattachment reflects the experience of the world and life as a good (or insecure/threatening) place to be. The present article describes the theoretical foundation, development, and validation of a revised measure that captures the phenomenon of secure/insecure life attachment. The revised scale consists of seven dimensions: (1) Coexistence, (2) Reliability, (3) Safetiness, (4) Integration, (5) Inclusion, (6) Participation, and (7) Deliberation. Methods: In three studies (N = 1,059), we examined the factor structure and the convergent and predictive validity of the Life Attachment Scale–Revised (LAS‐R). Results: Our results support a seven‐factor structure of the scale, reflecting the aforementioned dimensions. Furthermore, convergent and predictive validity were established through correlations with related concepts of life satisfaction, flourishing, openness to the future, and perceived stress. Conclusion: We have devised and substantiated a scale adept at gauging dimensions of secure and insecure/disordered life attachment. Empirical evidence from statistical analyses supports the assumption that the LAS‐R is psychometrically sound, establishing its reliability and validity as a dependable instrument. Thus, the scale has promising implications for developing the empirical base for research in many areas of psychology, sociology, and the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consequences of physical attractiveness (PA) are ubiquitous, however not often become a topic of discussion. The consequences, in general, are attributed to preference or discrimination without much deliberation. There is a very thin line between the two. The study makes an attempt to distinguish between preference and discrimination based on PA. In an organizational context, this distinction seems warranted since PA does impact work-related outcomes. The distinction was addressed by examining published studies between 1970 and 2021 on PA in the management and economics field of research. The study highlights when and how preference turns into discrimination and furthers discusses the causes of such discrimination. The causes are equivalent to antecedents; the antecedent to being physically attractive is mostly genes. The antecedents to the discrimination are the attributions that we have associated with being physically attractive. The study highlights these attributions and the reasons for these attributions. To completely understand a phenomenon, it is essential to understand what causes it. Therefore, this study tries to understand what causes discrimination based on PA. The study has implications for diversity and inclusion literature and practice. It also adds to the literature on PA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadly speaking, John R. Commons's theory of reasonable values has been interpreted as either a theory of reasonable prices or reasonable process of policy formation. Comparing newly discovered manuscripts written in 1928–1929 with Institutional Economics, this study shows that Commons's theory of reasonable value has a two-layered structure consisting of the theory of reasonable price and the theory of reasonable process of policy formation. The essential meaning of reasonableness in the first layer is investigating all facts and giving due weight to each, whereas in the second layer is the voluntary transformation of understandings, leading to the conciliation of conflicting interests through deliberation. In this regard, his theory of reasonable value is related to debates on reasonableness and deliberative democracy in contemporary political philosophy. Then, using the analytical concepts of contemporary political philosophy, this study explains the necessity of a two-layered structure for his theory of reasonable value by clarifying where the two layers overlap and differ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can recognition theories distinguish legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition put forward by social movements? This paper identifies an under-theorised problem of recognition theories: in viewing struggles for recognition as a force for social progress in the mould of the New Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, existing accounts have trouble identifying and ruling out illegitimate claims to recognition as formulated by contemporary counter-movements like white supremacists or men's rights activists. I refer to this issue as the symmetry problem of recognition since it amounts to difficulties in identifying grounds for excluding illegitimate claims to recognition that do not also symmetrically justify the exclusion of legitimate ones (and vice versa). I argue that criteria for telling apart legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition need to include interpretation issues as a dimension of analysis, which consequently requires incorporating democratic deliberation as a necessary component of recognition theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The people can tolerate elitists' claims to be superior on three conditions, relating to distributive justice, open access, and transparent deliberation. Hierarchy is acceptable as long as the elite redistribute wealth and include new deserving members, and as long as they maintain open a channel of communication with a general audience at large. To be sustainable in the long run any hierarchy must be at least tolerated and at most fully accepted by those who are at its roots. When it is so, hierarchy and democracy can cohabit: unequal people are treated unequally according to variations of merit, services to society, and vision of the future, whereas shared and refined knowledge can bring people the benefits of a just hierarchy without sacrificing basic equality and individual rights in the process. This applies to regimes where power is strictly compartmentalized (successor regimes of the British revolution; later on, countries organized according to the Westminster's system) and regimes where individual rights prevail (once in Athens; now in Europe). The recipe could work also in patriarchal regimes of the Middle East, despite a trend to be estranged from sources of constitutional inspiration and a tendency to have an excessive respect for grey power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating the quality of research ethics committees (RECs) is crucial but challenging due to the difficulty of developing meaningful quality measures. Recently, commentators assessed ten quality instruments for RECs, including the Research Ethics Committee Quality Assurance Self‐Assessment Tool developed for RECs in the Arab Middle East. They identified several missing items in this tool regarding safeguarding participants' rights and welfare.To address these gaps, we aimed to redesign the tool. Using the Delphi method, we involved 15 REC chairs to provide feedback and recommendations for a revised tool. This process led to a modified instrument that incorporated the missing items and additional elements regarding the monitoring of research conduct (an essential oversight function of RECs), and the independence of the RECs from institutional and external influences.We conclude that the revised tool effectively addresses the quality of RECs by including elements relevant to participant outcomes, board deliberations, and participant protection. The added focus on ethics oversight enhances its robustness, significantly impacting participants' rights and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal sentencing has grown into an increasingly interactive process featuring a multiplicity of potential actors—prosecution, defence, the individual convicted of the crime, probation officers and case workers, victims or their families, the police, community representatives, community workers, and even academics. The philosophical foundations of sentencing scholarship, however, regularly assume a model of judicial solitude in which sentencing judges are separate and apart from other actors. This article suggests the need to take sentencing’s interactivity and its politics seriously and draws on democratic theory to address this gap. Accordingly, it argues that listening—as conceived of by deliberative democrats—is essential to a relational ethic that ensures both the legitimacy and quality of sentencing decisions, particularly in cases involving marginalized communities. In doing so, it turns to judicial practice and highlights both the need and possibilities for listening to be taken up as an explicit feature of judicial ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the democratic legitimacy of randomly selecting legislators through minipublics, discussing arguments for and against this concept. Eric Shoemaker defends the use of empowered minipublics as a "micro-deliberative shortcut," countering criticisms from Cristina Lafont. Lafont's participatory democracy emphasizes public deliberation and participation, challenging the legitimacy of second-best alternatives like empowered minipublics. The text delves into the complexities of democratic theory and political philosophy surrounding the use of empowered minipublics in decision-making processes, highlighting the challenges in aligning public opinion with decision-making processes. [Extracted from the article]

The article substantiates the presence of correlation dependence of such processes as the growth of digital literacy and legal awareness, and also reveals other factors of legal capacity in the era of digital transformation. It has been proven that understanding this essential interdependence provides answers to a number of questions regarding the priority ways of developing the legal system of Ukraine. Increasing digital and legal awareness is depicted as a logical step towards active participation in the management of public affairs. Online deliberation is depicted as a means of positive influence on the perception of the relevant tools of democracy. In this context, political crowdsourcing is defined as a way of finding effective solutions and a positive impact on civic cohesion. It has been demonstrated that the era of digital technologies provides wider opportunities for the realization of human and citizen rights and freedoms, but at the same time creates new challenges and threats to ensure these rights and freedoms. Legislation regulating relations in the field of digitization is also becoming less transparent. It is noted that virtual space opens up new opportunities for manipulating public opinion, and deliberate functioning in the conditions of new threats of instrumentalization of virtual communication depends on the appropriate configuration of communication platforms. With this in mind, priority issues of scientific discourse and regulatory improvement are highlighted, namely: political crowdsourcing and participatory democracy, online deliberation and principles of cooperation with stakeholders, dissemination and support of fact-checking initiatives to verify the reliability of information, legal status of bloggers, fixers and other media participants as opinion leaders. It is concluded that a certain level of legal literacy, together with digital competence, is a prerequisite for effective participation in modern democratic practices, but this participation can also increase the level of legal awareness of citizens, in particular due to the fact that the Internet plays an important role in shaping the agenda and developing the critical potential of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a setting in which a community wishes to identify a strongly supported proposal from a space of alternatives, in order to change the status quo. We describe a deliberation process in which agents dynamically form coalitions around proposals that they prefer over the status quo. We formulate conditions on the space of proposals and on the ways in which coalitions are formed that guarantee deliberation to succeed, that is, to terminate by identifying a proposal with the largest possible support. Our results provide theoretical foundations for the analysis of deliberative processes such as the ones that take place in online systems for democratic deliberation support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imagine that the judgments of some individuals on some issues are aggregated into collective judgments. Social deliberation about the issues prior to aggregation can lead to improved judgments, at both the individual and the collective level. In this paper I argue that the epistemic justification for a social deliberation design depends on the chosen judgment aggregation rule, and vice versa. This claim consists of two parts. First, the epistemic superiority of one deliberation design over another or over the absence of any deliberation depends on which procedure is subsequently used to aggregate individual judgments. Second, the epistemic superiority of one aggregation procedure over another depends on how the preceding social deliberation was designed. In short, the choice of deliberation design and of aggregation rule are intertwined. This claim is substantiated by two models. Both models display a tragic rise in competence: social deliberation raises individual competence while reducing collective competence. Here, individual and social epistemology come interestingly apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibility, in case of belief and taste heterogeneity, to aggregate individual preferences through a deliberation process enabling society to reach a consensus. However, we show that the same deliberation process, even characterized by a convergent matrix, may lead to different consensus depending on the updating rule which is chosen by individuals, i.e., deliberation is sufficient to determine social preferences but not univocally. Then, we prove that the Pareto condition allows to choose from possible consensus the one whereby social deliberated beliefs and tastes are of a utilitarian shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants' attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators' attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents' informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals' information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals' information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does deliberation produce any lasting effects? "America in One Room" was a national field experiment in which more than 500 randomly selected registered voters were brought from all over the country to deliberate on five major issues facing the country. A pre-post control group was also surveyed on the same questions after the weekend and about a year later. There were significant differences in voting intention and in actual voting behavior a year later among the deliberators compared to the control group. This article accounts for these differences by showing how deliberation stimulated a latent variable of political engagement. If deliberation has lasting effects on political engagement, then it provides a rationale for attempts to scale the deliberative process to much larger numbers. The article considers methods for doing so in the context of the broader debate about mini-publics, isolated spheres of deliberation situated within a largely non-deliberative society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberation among the public appears wanting, even in many of the world's established democracies. This apparent lack of mutually respectful conversation among citizens about politics involving a give-and-take of reasons is often ascribed to growing affective polarisation. The more the citizens come to think of each other as belonging to opposing groups, the less likely it allegedly becomes that they will show respect towards each other or exchange arguments while talking politics. However, the empirical support for this common supposition remains tentative, as prior research suffers from potential endogeneity problems and selection bias. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel experimental design involving an imagined conversation on refugee policy in Poland. Our experimental test shows that, on average, participants' inclination to deliberate did not significantly differ based on whether they imagined talking to someone from an ingroup or to someone from an outgroup instead. Our findings thereby suggest that the relationship between group identification and public deliberation might not be as straightforward as is often assumed. At least in some contexts, a lack of mutual group identification does not spell disaster for deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies on mind‐wandering reveal its potential role in goal exploration and planning future actions. How to understand these explorative functions and their impact on planning remains unclear. Given certain conceptions of intentions and beliefs, the explorative functions of mind‐wandering could lead to regular reconsideration of one's intentions. However, this would be in tension with the stability of intentions central to rational planning agency. We analyze the potential issue of excessive reconsideration caused by mind‐wandering. Our response resolves this tension, presenting a model that aligns the roles of mind‐wandering in planning with empirical evidence and the sustained stability of intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While classroom discussion is often cherished as a cornerstone of effective social science teaching, knowledge on when and where discussions tend to turn deliberative is lacking. To make up for this lack of knowledge, the present study examined classroom discussion in three conditions: a whole-class condition, a small group condition, and a pair condition. The study made use of video observations from a classroom intervention to evaluate how each condition affected the deliberative quality of the discussion process. To this end, 585 student utterances were coded for aspects of deliberation using the Stromer-Galley observation manual. The results showed that both the small group and pair conditions promoted key aspects of deliberation compared to the whole-class condition. The small group condition generated the highest levels of contestation and engagement, whereas the pair condition generated the highest level of equality. While these results suggest that the deliberative quality of classroom discussion might sometimes benefit from the teacher's absence, more research is needed to determine the circumstances in which this is likely to be the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a yearlong ethnographic study, we actively participated as members of the national planning committee for fourteen local climate conferences, we examined how citizen participation was imagined and enacted. We introduce a framework for studying the relationship between cognitive engagement, learning, and civic engagement in the public sphere. We describe the different levels of cognitive and civic engagement in the design of climate conference activities. The findings suggest that the planners' approach to democracy, the involvement of environmental NGOs, and individual attitudes toward environmental change, may collectively contribute to diminished levels of cognitive and civic engagement among residents. Furthermore, we observed that more collaborative interpretations of cognitive and civic engagement align closely with deliberative democracy approaches, emphasizing inclusive, dialogical processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future design of climate conferences and how they relate to the evolving roles of environmental NGOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many higher cognitive tasks, such as problem-solving and deliberation are accompanied by the experience of an inner voice in our heads. In this paper, we develop the idea that our own inner speech supports these tasks. We approach the phenomenon of inner speech through a comparison with overt speech – a comparison that is suggested by a Vygotskian approach that focuses on how inner speech develops from overt speech during ontogeny. We argue for the cognitive potency of inner speech by hypothesizing that condensed inner speech may help reduce cognitive load; yet by being pragmatically expanded upon, inner speech may scaffold further cognitive accomplishments. More specifically, as we adopt a Vygotskian perspective, we begin by introducing his notion of internalization and examine in what way inner speech might be condensed. Then the question of whether inner speech is governed by the same pragmatic mechanisms that govern overt speech is posed and answered in the affirmative. We advocate the idea that inner speech aids deliberation due, to some degree, to the manner in which pragmatic principles governing overt speech are re-purposed in inner speech. We close by addressing two objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Football migration, including flows and effects, is measured over the first 27 years of the independent Czech Football League. Hierarchical multi-level analysis is used to test previous sport migration effects. Particular attention is paid to the economic and sport position of both sending and receiving nations by examining results through the world-systems theory. Though the number of football migrants continues to rapidly increase, the statistical results of this study indicate that receiving football migrants into the semi-periphery nation of Czech, where football is a primary sport, may increase winning percentage in the short term, but it does not lead to increases in fan attendance or improve the nation's FIFA rankings. Longer term deliberation needs to be taken by individual club teams, as well as national federations, in order maximize the benefits of migration flows in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication faces significant challenges due to an increasing polarization of public discourses. This polarization oversimplifies societal differences into "us versus them" dynamics, complicating consensus building and eroding trust in democratic processes. Traditionally, CSR communication research has focused on how organizations negotiate meanings between various stakeholders. However, the rise in polarization necessitates a broader research scope to understand its impact on CSR practices and organizational relationships. This Special Issue of Management Communication Quarterly explores these evolving challenges, analyzing how polarization reshapes CSR communication and outlining strategies for businesses to navigate this fragmented landscape. The issue also reflects on the broader role of corporations amidst tendencies of polarization and suggests directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that tahakkum [ التَّحَكُّمِ ], an indigenous intercultural communication concept, impedes the functioning of the public sphere and underlines the failure (or unwillingness) of the authoritarian state and political actors to set conditions for plural deliberation and good governance. Using the critical cases of the sliding back of Islamist influence and the hirak (movement) against water privatization in an oasis town in southeast Morocco, the article theorizes tahakkum and proposes "other-interculturality" as an-other epistemological and ethical framework to articulate an intercultural communication model that interrogates embedded layers of power and domination, champions collective solidarity, and celebrates diversity without occluding difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealed preferences between alternatives can be systematically reversed across a variety of elicitation procedures (e.g., choice, valuation, matching, joint/separate evaluation). These puzzling findings have been usually invoked to challenge the procedure invariance principle. Yet procedure-dependent preferences can be endogenous. This paper presents a unifying theory of contextual deliberation to account for seemingly disparate phenomena of preference reversals. When attribute importance is ex ante imperfectly known, people can engage in costly information retrieval/acquisition activities (i.e., deliberation) prior to making decisions. Elicitation procedures can influence revealed preferences through affecting the incentive for deliberation. Therefore, contextual deliberation can endogenously yield procedure-dependent preference reversals, offer a common microfoundation for extant psychological accounts (e.g., the prominence hypothesis, the evaluability hypothesis), and coherently organize apparently unrelated/inconsistent findings in the literature. We also run five experiments and document new findings that are inconsistent with extant hypotheses but can be reconciled by contextual deliberation. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) General Research Fund [Grant 16500614]. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02640. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the complex realm of ethical decision making, organizations are increasingly developing comprehensive ethical frameworks as guides. These frameworks prescribe ethical principles and decision-making processes to steer organizational actors toward addressing the elusive question of "what is the right thing to do?" in specific situations. However, the interplay between these prescriptive frameworks and collective processes of ethical sensemaking remains underexplored. Based on an extensive qualitative study within publicly funded healthcare organizations, we examine how organizational actors, confronted with the challenge of making exceptional funding decisions, enact an organizational ethical framework. Our findings reveal the manifold ways through which such a framework both streamlines ethical sensemaking and induces new and unexpected interpretive challenges. These challenges generate ethical equivocality, which decision makers seek to reduce through particular sensegiving interventions, and, on occasion, through problematizing the abstract principles prescribed by the framework, based on what is intuitively felt right in situ. We contribute to the literature by developing a conceptual model of three distinct modes in which organizational actors enact the prescriptions of an ethical framework. Our article sheds new light on the unintended consequences of using organizational ethical frameworks in real-world ethical deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial "Democracy under siege: how actors, communication strategies, and emerging phenomena are changing the rules in the public sphere" explores the challenges democracy faces in the digital age. It discusses the rise of populism, manipulation of emotions, spread of disinformation, and control of communication in non-democratic regions. The articles featured in this research topic shed light on the evolving dynamics in the public sphere and the implications for democratic governance, emphasizing the need for a nuanced approach to regulating digital media and a renewed commitment to democratic norms and values. [Extracted from the article]

Incorporating public participation into planning and construction practice is challenging, however, it is seen as a pre-requisite for the successful implementation of sustainable urban development. Sustainability certification schemes such as BREEAM have been instrumental in guiding practitioners and developers to plan, design and build to high sustainability standards, yet the evidence for how these standards draw on and are framed by public participation inputs and processes is scarce. This paper unpacks such evidence concerning the application of BREEAM Communities in England, by examining data from 12 certified developments, selected out of 28 such developments, which is then analysed through Chantry's heuristic of seven political spaces of citizen engagement. Overall, the study finds uneven levels of public engagement across the various political spaces of engagement. Requirements for public participation are stringent at the later 'proposal' and 'implementation' stages, with the potential to facilitate high-quality engagement. However, such requirements are vague or poor at the earlier 'information provision' and 'deliberation' stages, where the public should be provided with tools to generate realistic and informed proposals. The paper reflects on implications for BREAM Communities processes and guidance and further extends Chantry's heuristic by adding two new political spaces, 'attitudes to participation' and 'timing of engagement'. This enhanced heuristic builds a more complete picture of the key politicised stages of the participation process during BREEAM Communities certification, and contributes to current theoretical and empirical debates on gauging the effectiveness of public participation in sustainable urban development not just in an English context but internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite long‐standing recognition in collective memory scholarship that commemorative sites are places of deep cultural meaning, fieldwork evidence collected at the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC, suggests that visitors primarily engaged with mnemonic resources in a superficial fashion. This paper explores how interpretive park rangers, who are tasked with engaging the public to discuss the nation's history, nevertheless strived to deliver informational, interpretive services to the visiting public. Findings show that rangers, conceptualized in this paper as street‐level bureaucrats, developed roles and routine lines of action that hinged on how they imagined and constructed their audiences. This paper demonstrates how street‐level bureaucrats variably conceive of their clients at the pre‐interactional stage, thus identifying an underexplored dimension of discretion in frontline service work. Additionally, this paper contributes to collective memory research by contextualizing mnemonic deliberation within contexts of mnemonic agents' workplace dynamics, showing how organizational expectations shape discourses of difficult, contentious histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the concept of militant democracy and its paradoxes, with a focus on the ideas of Otto Kirchheimer. Kirchheimer analyzed the challenges faced by Weimar democracy in defending itself against legal revolutionaries and identified weaknesses in its defensive measures. The text discusses Kirchheimer's views on the German Basic Law and the use of political rights restrictions to counter antidemocratic organizations. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and confronting antidemocratic organizations early on and the need for careful governance when implementing political rights restrictions. The article also acknowledges the potential for abuse and highlights the importance of addressing underlying socioeconomic issues. The text concludes by providing a list of academic resources on the topic for further research. [Extracted from the article]

How should we, as philosophers, respond to the pure moral testimony of people in marginalized positions? Some philosophers argue that marginalized people have an epistemic advantage concerning their experiences of marginalization, such that, if we are non‐marginalized, then we should defer to their moral testimony concerning these experiences. We might accept this as a requirement for ordinary conversation but doubt that any such requirement obtains when we do philosophy, since philosophy requires a critical stance. This paper argues that philosophers should also defer in such cases. It concludes that non‐marginalized philosophers can only properly address certain moral propositions concerning the experiences of marginalized people if they engage in ongoing philosophical discussions with such people, starting from a position of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, political philosophers have debated the role of religious reasons in public deliberations, such as appealing to religious convictions and religious classics. Exclusivists, such as Rawls, Quong, Hartley, and Watson, argue that democratic governments and citizens should restrict or exclude the use of religious reasons in making laws and policies, while inclusivists, such as Gaus, Vallier, and Billingham, oppose such categorical exclusion. Nevertheless, the debate mainly focuses on the role of religious reasons in public deliberation. In this paper, I will argue that religious behaviors—defined as highly altruistic actions motivated by religious beliefs, such as dedicating substantial time and effort to serving the poor and advancing the common good—can exert positive influences on public deliberation. Through this kind of altruistic action, religious believers can subtly influence non-religious citizens. While religious believers may not rationally persuade non-religious citizens through religious reasoning, the altruistic actions exhibited by religious believers could emotionally inspire admiration and motivate non-religious citizens to learn more about those religions. This enhances mutual understanding among different religious and secular sects and thus improves public deliberation. Furthermore, I argue that the improved understanding fostered by religious behaviors can facilitate exclusivism and inclusivism to overcome certain philosophical challenges, such as the problems of incompleteness and anarchy, which are among the most frequent criticisms directed at exclusivism and inclusivism. Hence, this paper highlights an aspect overlooked in the exclusivism–inclusivism debate: no matter whether the democratic government and citizens should permit or restrict religious reasons, religious behavior is still beneficial in public deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Gematria in the Hebrew Bible, focusing on the application of numerical values to letters. It explores the historical use of Gematria in Jewish religious literature and the dispute over its recognition in the Hebrew Bible. The text presents examples of both "overt" and "secret" Gematria in the Hebrew Bible, highlighting the application of numerical values to letters in ancient Israel. The article also delves into the use of alphabetic numerals in ancient Greek and the significance of numbers in biblical texts, offering insights into the complex practice of Gematria. [Extracted from the article]

Environmental governance occurs through and is shaped by communication. We propose a typology of public communication, classifying it by directionality (one-way or two-way) and objective (informational or operational). We then review how communication types influence individuals' conceptual frames, values, and environmental behaviors. Though one-way communication is common, its impact is often limited to influencing conceptual frames. Research on two-way informational communication demonstrates a greater ability to align conceptual frames and values among individuals, and research on two-way operational communication demonstrates the greatest impact on conceptual frames, values, and environmental behaviors. Factors that affect the impact of communication include the medium through which it occurs, trust, timing, and social-material context. Among these, our review considers new directions in public communication research that focus on the role of digital platforms, misinformation, and disinformation. We conclude by synthesizing research on deliberative communication, a case of communication among citizens guided by democratic ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to recent academic and public debates on how European democracies should respond to a scenario of "post-truth politics", this article explores the idea of democracy that underlies current regulatory responses in the "European Democracy Action Plan" (EDAP). It offers a conceptual analysis of the institutional narratives in the EDAP illustrating normative expectations of the public sphere and transformations of the basic concepts in the European polity. It revisits the famous Habermasian systemic view of deliberation emphasizing the interconnections of the social and institutional realms through the public sphere in democracies. We argue that previous scholarship has focused too much on the presumed loss of consensus originated from the digital transformations in the public sphere without taking into consideration other institutional changes within the EU. The analysis of the key concepts illustrates the normative expectations of specific measures and shows that there is evidence of a systemic view in the EDAP, with different modes of intervention, partially coherent with Habermas' normative expectations. We conclude that the vision of democracy in the EDAP has been developed for decades to legitimate the EU's development and initiatives, but that it also incorporates a reformulation of some concepts justified by a post-truth scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a model of social design inquiry directed toward shaping shared societal goals. Drawing on Dewey and McKeon, the approach is based on means-end evaluation and communication in plurality. This presents a response to the double challenge of dealing with conflicting aspirations for the future and the current need to balance differences in perspectives. The social design inquiry model provides the basis for meliorism in design insofar as it offers a way of working through these challenges by making use of imagination and deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals are normatively expected to consume diverse viewpoints to become good citizens capable of deliberation although empirical evidence does not necessarily support this norm. To explain this inconsistency, this study proposes three motivations for disagreement processing – defensive dismissal, defensive deliberation, and balanced deliberation – by drawing from theory of motivated reasoning and the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Analyses of a two-wave survey conducted in the U.S. highlight the importance of motivations behind diverse exposure – rather than mere exposure – in facilitating deliberative practices. Specifically, balanced deliberation motivations can promote cross-cutting discussion through diverse exposure whereas defensive motivations facilitate diverse news sharing on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In debates about the role(s) and scale of entrepreneurial philanthropy in democracies, scholars discuss the erosion of distinctive public and private spheres and interests, and the replacement of the public sphere. This has occurred at the expense of public deliberation and participation, in favor of the reification of individuals and the role of experts/expertise. Drawing upon John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016), I argue that there is an eclipse of the publicity of the public. This informs my case for the (re)conceptualization of philanthropy as a public, characterized by (a) the philanthropist as a social rather than an atomistic being, (b) the philanthropy-state dynamic and the publics' claims, and (c) part of the radical vision of philanthropy. To ensure that private and public have analytical and practical resonance, it is imperative to (re)frame and (re)conceptualize what these concepts mean to entrepreneurial philanthropy and for its role in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a pragma-dialectic approach to explore inclusion in real-world argumentation. Having outlined theories of deliberative democracy—focussing on Habermas's discourse model—and pragma-dialectic methods for analysing argumentative exchanges in the real world, we then relate them. From this we identify the potential for using the enhanced detail of pragma-dialectic analysis to constructively understand dynamics of inclusion in the political decision processes of central concern to deliberative democratic theories. In the remainder of the article we illustrate this potential with our own pragma-dialectic analysis of an instance of real-world argumentation in a political policymaking process—a deliberative forum in the contentious field of mental health. The detail afforded by the pragma-dialectic method allows us to more clearly identify the complex layers and dynamics of argument involved in these policy deliberations, allowing insights into mechanisms for inclusion in deliberations, relative to the parties to such deliberations, their roles and competing interests and perspectives. By relating the two fields of deliberative democratic theory and pragma-dialectics this article aims to develop their complementary potential—in particular by suggesting, and briefly illustrating—how pragma-dialectic methods might enhance analysis of the dynamics of argumentation in political policymaking processes, in particular as an aid to constructive reflection on those processes by theorists and participants together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial "Introduction: Philosophical Discussions with Pragma-Dialectics" published in the journal "Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy" commemorates the anniversaries of two seminal works in argumentation theory. The special issue explores the philosophy of argument underlying pragma-dialectical theory, emphasizing the pragmatic perspective on argumentation. The pragma-dialectical approach defines argumentation as a speech act, focusing on actions in context and normative standards of rationality. The editorial highlights the significant role pragma-dialectics has played in contemporary argumentation studies and its ongoing impact on philosophical inquiry. [Extracted from the article]

Aristotle follows the Socrates of Plato's Gorgias in contrasting rhetoric with teaching. For him, premises of arguments must in rhetoric be reputable (endoxa), but in teaching be archai of the relevant science. And teaching requires recognition of the speaker's authority, rhetoric does not. Like Socrates, he thinks teaching but not rhetoric requires knowledge of your subject. Unlike Socrates, Aristotle does not for this reason reject rhetoric as dangerous, but accepts it as useful for public and interpersonal deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the dissonance between the values of the democracy of local communities and the liberal democracy of the Minangkabau community in West Sumatra, Indonesia. A direct election system is adopted to elect the leader of the Minangkabau community. However, a qualitative study shows that, culturally, the Minangkabau community chooses its leader through a clan-based deliberation system, relying on communal rather than individual representation. Adopting direct election with the one-person-onevote principle to elect the community leader has instead been a source of conflict. The ambiguous understanding of the community members regarding the principles of individual and collective representation has given rise to the conflict. The institutionalisation of a clan-based deliberation system in the community is a solution to solve the conflict. This scholarly inquiry underscores that the Minangkabau ethnic group's democratic ethos fosters an environment conducive to communal deliberations, thereby sustaining their social cohesion and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Incorporating prediction models developed based on machine learning algorithms into the traditional prediction market creates hybrid intelligence. We design and conduct an online controlled experiment to investigate the impacts of two dimensions of human–machine interaction, whether to introduce machines as traders and whether to disclose their presence, on the prediction performance. The results of the experiment reveal that the introduction of machines creates two competing effects on prediction accuracy. The positive influence comes from the intensified competition brought by machines, which fosters a strong desire to win among human participants and motivates them to engage in more deliberate decision-making efforts. Conversely, in the context of intensive competition, humans are inclined to trade at a large magnitude, consequently leading to a decrease in prediction performance. Furthermore, the results indicate that simply disclosing the presence of machines can have a detrimental impact on prediction performance, as it may lead to a reduction in human deliberation efforts. Furthermore, this article delves into the potential mechanisms involved. This study contributes to the understanding of human behaviors in hybrid prediction markets and highlights the need for careful human–machine interaction design to optimize prediction market performance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current development of Russian state, society, and law is dynamic but ambiguous. The author studied the Russian law-making system through the prism of legal co-creation between official public authorities and civil society that join forces to create laws that meet the interests of both the state and the society. Legal co-creation is an essential resource for optimizing and improving the law-making system. General scientific and special scientific methods made it possible to establish the importance of legal co-creation of the authorities and the population as part of the domestic law-making system with its theoretical constructs and practical benefits. A constructive dialogue between the government and the society in the law-making sphere produces co-creative law-making decisions. This opinion is supported by domestic jurists and politicians. In addition to the general theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of legal co-creation, the author selected opinions of like-minded foreign researchers. Mechanisms of legal co-creation in the law-making system have good prospects and need to be developed.

Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces' behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of "organised immaturity." Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst's concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners. In Experiment 1, the punishment decisions were made without or with time pressure. In Experiment 2, the punishment decisions were immediate or delayed by pauses in which participants deliberated their decisions. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to deliberate self-interest or fairness before deciding whether to punish their partners. Different types of punishment were distinguished using the cooperation-and-punishment model. In Experiment 1, time pressure decreased moral punishment. In Experiment 2, deliberation increased moral punishment. So far, the evidence supports the deliberate-morality account. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the effect of deliberation depends on what is deliberated. When participants deliberated self-interest rather than fairness, moral punishment was decreased. The results suggest that unguided deliberation increases moral punishment, but the effects of deliberation are modulated by the type of deliberation that takes place. These results strengthen a process-based account of punishment which offers a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effect of deliberation on moral punishment than the deliberate-morality account.

Establishing a decision-making scheme for multiple land use types in a shrinking society is an urgent and persistent task. In particular, residents and governments face the complexity of cross-sectoral visions over concerned landscapes. This study examined the preference of residents for future visions and the effects of group deliberation in a Japanese rural community to enhance the current understanding of decision and learning processes on cross-sectoral land use types (i.e., agricultural land, forest land, and boundary areas) across ages and groups. This study posed the following questions: (i) what types of interactions do residents find among options on cross-sectoral land uses? and (ii) how do group deliberation influence the individual preferences of residents for land use? In the survey, the residents disclosed their preferences for the prepared visions over three land use types. The survey also enabled the comparison of choices before and after group deliberation. Regarding question (i), the residents' choice prior to the deliberation demonstrated thematic coherence through land use categories. Smart technology and potential productivity improvement were selected across agriculture and forests. However, regarding question (ii), thematic coherence decreased after the group deliberation. The residents could communicate disagreements during group deliberation and consider the issues relatively independently over land use types, which separately views agriculture lands and forests. The choice after group discussions became increasingly embedded and influenced by residential areas and land ownership of residents. These findings provide unique insights into the group discussion on how individual decisions are affected. In summary, the preferences of cross-sectoral land use types did not converge but tended to diverge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Might practical reason be a species of theoretical reason? Can we make sense of practical deliberation as a special kind of theoretical cogitation over what you will do? The prospects of such a reduction may appear dim: it seems like it is one thing to be weighing up what you should (intend to) do, in light of your various reasons for action, and quite another thing altogether to be figuring out what you should believe you will do, in light of your evidence. Here I aim to show how this reduction of our powers of practical reason to a branch of theoretical reason might be defensibly pulled off. On the view to be defended, your intentions to act are really beliefs about what you are will do, practical reasoning is nothing over and above the enterprise of predicting what you are going to do in light of evidence alone, and the constitutive aim of action turns out to be the same as the constitutive object of theoretical reason – namely, to believe the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of two types of democratic representation for the two wills of the people, focusing on the empirical self and the post-learning self. It argues that conventional electoral competition and deliberative sortition are insufficient by themselves in representing both sides of the self adequately. The author proposes a new dualistic system of elections plus deliberative sortition, called "representative dualism," to enfranchise both sides of the self effectively. The article emphasizes the importance of rethinking the self that democracy represents and highlights the intrinsic anti-deliberative tendencies of electoral competition. [Extracted from the article]