A democracy built on communicative action: Bahá'í political practice as a prefigurative resource for institutional effectiveness, accountability, and inclusivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Goal 16 of the UN sustainable development goals, which calls on the global community to “build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels,” can be conceptualized as aiming at fostering communicative action, a concept developed by Jürgen Habermas to describe a mode for coordinating society grounded in deliberation. However, Habermas simultaneously provides an account of the structural transformation of the public sphere that suggests a hard limit on the capacity of mainstream capitalist liberal democracies to foster genuine communicative action in the relationships between institutions, individuals and communities. This paper therefore argues for the critical role of prefigurative politics, in which communities strive to internally embody desired socio-political forms rather than focusing on changing the wider socio-political order, as a vital resource for generating examples to inform institutional progress. The prefigurative example of the Baha'i community demonstrates norms and practices that may illustrate a path out of the dynamic Habermas identifies of system colonizing lifeworld, by fostering and protecting communicative action as the mode of social coordination. The form of communicative action found in the Baha'i community is situated in a context of a telic- organic model of relationships between individuals, communities and institutions. The paper contrasts the conceptual underpinnings of this model with individualistic conceptions of human nature that are argued to undermine liberal democracy's capacity for communicative action. At the core of communicative action within a Baha'i context is a distinctive model of deliberation, known within the community as “consultation”. The paper argues that rational-critical consultation can offer a vital nuance to Habermas' ideal of communicative action as rational-critical debate in the public sphere. The formal democratic structures and processes of the Bahá'í community are also explored as an institutional example that arguably meets the challenge of Goal 16. The paper concludes with initial reflections on a process by which the prefigurative example of a Baha'i model might be brought to bear on institutional performance in wider society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".