Markus Spörndli

Deliberation in Legislatures: Antecedents and Outcomes

In the study of deliberation, classical representative institutions such as legislatures have been largely neglected.1 While students of deliberation have mainly focused on the deliberation in the civic sphere, students of legislatures have mainly concentrated on formal outcomes (e.g., votes) and how these are affected by institutional rules and legislators preferences. One reason for neglecting the topic of deliberation in the context of legislatures is that many political scientists do not conceive of them as genuine deliberative bodies. A fairly typical example is Uhr (1998) who argues that while the major purpose of legislatures is indeed debate and diversity, it does not imply unanimity and rational consensus. While we certainly do not deny that adversarial and rhetorical forms of debate play an important role in legislative interactions, we think that genuine and consequential deliberation is possible in legislatures, but — in line with new institutionally oriented research programs on legislatures (see Doring, 1995) — that this is largely dependent on favorable institutional contexts.

Deliberative Politics in Action: The philosophical literature on deliberative politics

The previous chapter left us with the challenge of how to conceptualize in a systematic way what consociational scholars call the spirit of accommodation. We have demonstrated on the basis of several empirical cases that the concept of the spirit of accommodation is too vague to be used in cross-national empirical research. We need a concept that goes beyond everyday language and is grounded systematically in a theoretical literature. We found such an anchor in the philosophical literature on deliberative politics. In this literature, a high deliberative quality has a very specific meaning. Of course, this meaning is somewhat differently defined from author to author. We base our project on the rationalistic argumentative version of authors such as Jurgen Habermas. This version corresponds best with the emphasis on rationality in most theories of institutionalism; we will develop this argument fully in chapter 4, where we will present the theoretical framework of how the quality of political deliberation can play a role in theories of institutionalism. Immersing ourselves in the literature on deliberation, our research interest has broadened from the narrower perspective of consociational theory to the larger questions of deliberative politics. In our thinking, consociational theory has become just one of many applications of the deliberative model. Normative theories of deliberative politics Instead of deliberative politics, one may also speak of discursive politics. We use the two terms as synonyms. The key for both terms is the dialogical aspect.

Deliberative Politics in Action: Antecedents of deliberation: institutions and issues

The preceding chapters laid out the theoretical framework for our study. It is now time to engage in an empirical analysis of political discourse as it can be found in the real world. We start by considering the institutional antecedents of discourse quality. Under what institutional arrangements does discourse in legislatures flourish? Which aspects of discourse are affected by those institutional arrangements? And how do issue attributes affect those aspects? These are the central questions of this chapter. In this chapter, we test the first six hypotheses that were laid out in chapter 4 (the remaining hypotheses are tested in the next chapter). Thus discourse quality is correlated with five different institutional characteristic and one issue characteristic. The institutional characteristics, again, are: (1) consensus versus competitive democracy, (2) the influence of veto points and veto players, (3) presidential versus parliamentary systems, (4) second versus first chambers of the legislature, and (5) public versus non-public arenas. The issue characteristic is the extent to which prior positions on an issue are polarized. As we argued in the previous chapter, these institutional and issue characteristics provide a great deal of leverage on understanding the antecedents of discourse quality, and hence we expect them to give good insight into the conditions under which legislative discourse flourishes. Our empirical analysis takes us to a variety of debates from four legislative settings: Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries were selected because they provide variance on key institutional factors.

Deliberative Politics in Action: Institutions and behavior: the example of consociational theory

In its intellectual history, this book evolved from an interest in consociational theory and an increasing dissatisfaction with the integration of the behavior aspect into the theory. As consociational theory moved from studies of single countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria to the analysis of a large number of countries all over the world, the emphasis shifted increasingly to the institutional aspect. How political actors interact and speak with each other in consociational institutions was more and more neglected. In this opening chapter we use consociational theory as an illustration to show how the culture of how politicians interact and speak with each other is an important element that must be integrated into any institutional theory. Our basic argument is that speech is not cheap but may very well matter in many important theoretical ways (Noel 1990). While we illustrate this argument for consociational theory, it also applies to other institutional theories. As we discuss in greater detail in chapter 4, much institutional research to date draws on two intellectual traditions. On the one hand, rational choice theories typically focus on a logic of consequentialism, which assumes that political actors seek the most efficient means to desired ends (Risse 2000). Institutional rules and structures are formulated to aid in this process. On the other hand, sociological theories frequently postulate a logic of appropriateness. In this view, institutions create behavioral norms that guide the actions of politicians (Risse 2000).