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“What Would the Public Think if It Had a Chance to Think?” (Deliberative Forums as a Cure for Democratic Deficit)

2025· article· en· W7083300968 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Political Theory Political Philosophy and Sociology of Politics Politeia · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Development and Urbanization
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDeliberative democracyDemocracyPoliticsConventionWork (physics)Transformational leadershipLiberal democracy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The theory of deliberative democracy is well known and has been studied thoroughly so far; however, the practical side of the functioning of different types of deliberative forums is discussed not so frequently, especially in Russian-language literature. Meanwhile, over the past decades, various countries around the world have accumulated a great deal of experience in the work of consultative mini-publics: one can recall the National Forum in Iceland, convened to discuss the draft of a new Constitution, regular National Public Policy Conferences in Brazil, the Citizens’ Convention on Climate in France, the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in Canada, and much more. The article presents an analysis of this experience. Having focused on two most common types of deliberative institutions — citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polls, — the author attempts to find an answer to the question: can deliberative democracy help to solve key problems of representative political system, such as depoliticization of society, decline of trust in political institutions, etc? Drawing on the results of the conducted research, the author comes to the conclusion that deliberative practices can really contribute to the revival of liberal democracy and repoliticization of society by supplementing customary institutions of political participation with new forms of citizens’ involvement in politics, and many experiments of that kind look truly promising. At the same time, according to the author, deliberative democracy does not have sufficient transformational capabilities to drastically change the political status quo.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.766
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.006
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.035
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.307 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it