Some of the inspiration for my thesis comes from an article in the student newspaper in Trondheim, Under Dusken, and similar comments over the following years. Political science professor Anders Todal Jenssen insisted that the student democracy in Trondheim lacked legitimacy because of the low voter turnout and that the introduction of political parties would be the solution to this problem. Binding platforms would make student politicians accountable to the voters and increase support for democracy. As a student representative myself at the time, I was provoked. We were proud of the lack of polarization within the student democracy and, although I didn’t know the term at the time, the level of deliberation. This started me on the quest for an alternative to Professor Todal Jenssen’s strong belief in the salience of political parties.

Democracy does of course seem unthinkable without political parties. Almost every democracy is dominated by a system of organized factions that structure, educate and drive the political process forwards. The necessity for such a system is no longer seriously questioned in political science. I do not believe, however, that any institution should be beyond question. Even if we have no intention to get rid of political parties, we should strive to understand the effect they have on democracy. As I will show in this thesis, one such effect may be reducing open and free deliberation among decision-makers. This may be a cost we are willing to pay, but not a cost we should pay without knowing its size. Deliberation should not be considered merely as a normative ideal for democracy, but also a descriptive model for understanding the workings of democracy. The amount and quality of deliberation may explain political decisions and outcomes that aggregative models do not. This should make deliberation a topic of interest even if one does not accept its normative justification.

Institutions influence the way democracy works. If deliberation is an important characteristic of democracy, we should take interest in how institutional design affects deliberation. There has been some research on this, but political parties, integral to almost all modern democracies, seem to have been neglected in this respect. I will show that there are sufficient theoretical reservations about their effect on deliberation that this should be a topic of proper empirical testing. To test the relationship between political parties and deliberation empirically, we need an approach for measuring deliberation. We should have a method with a theoretically sound basis, that measures what we want it to, and that is acceptable within the wider sphere of political science (a discipline that is both theoretically and empirically oriented).

I will examine various proposals for examining the amount and quality of deliberation and consider their respective strengths and weaknesses. The Discourse Quality Index seems to be the most promising such method in use today. I have tested the utility of the method for addressing whether political parties weaken deliberation in a political system. To do this I applied the method to two democratic bodies: the student parliaments of the universities in Trondheim and Oslo, Norway. Due to a limited amount of data I did not get significant results concerning the question itself, but I have collected practical experiences and new insight into the method and its applicability.

Quickly summarized, I find in my thesis that there seems to be sufficient theoretical grounds to support the assumption that political party systems are detrimental to deliberation. A major obstacle to empirical testing of this and other theories about deliberation is found in the current state of empirical methods. Several methods have been tried, but none seem to be able to completely combine the demands needed for the conclusions to gain general acceptance. The Discourse Quality Index seems to be the most sophisticated and promising of such methods, but there are still a number of problems that should be addressed. Read the entire thesis (PDF)

Put simply, deliberation is a term that is used about discussion when people engage in a rational dialogue about something in which they are dedicated to the “forceless force of the better argument”. According to Jürgen Habermas, its most famous theoretician, it should be characterized by sincerity, inclusiveness, equality, reasoned critique, reflexivity, respect and be free from the influence of money and coercive power¹ . In the more realistic conceptions of the term, we are willing to consider a discussion as more or less deliberative, realizing that a few real world discussions are likely to be perfect.

As I mentioned, I’ve been looking for methods to analyse discussion in order to determine how deliberative it really is. I’ve been trying to find a method that satisfies the criteria of:

1. Significance – Must be a method we can expect a large portion of empirically oriented political science to accept.
2. Usefulness – Must be a method that is suitable for comparative study of cases, preferably on a large scale and with a multitude of institutional arrangements.
3. Completeness – Must be a method that is theoretically consistent with established theory of deliberation, for example Habermas’ discourse ethics.

Lately I’ve been looking at two such methods: Pragma-dialectics² and the Discourse Quality Index³ . They both have their strength and weaknesses, but they share one interesting problem with validity.

In order to determine whether or not a debate is really deliberative, they both focus on the correctness of arguments presented. According to the DQI method, they evaluate the level of justification, classifying each speech act as either containing no justification (0), inferior justification (1), qualified justification (2) or sophisticated justification (3). The pragma-dialectical method does something similar when it examines entire debates for logical consistency, identifying so-called fallacies that constitute bad arguments which should not be part of  reasoned discussion.

My claim is that both these methods measure something separate from the level of deliberation, they measure the level of sophistication of the debatants. They measure how good their rhetorical and logical skills are, not their dedication to reasoned debate and fair discussion. This is not a major problem when you compare debates where you can expect people to be at a similar skill level, as when comparing two parliaments. The problem arises when you want to compare the debates in parliament to debates in other areas of society. If you compare two groups with different levels of rhetorical skill, the less sophisticated group will register as less deliberative even if they really were more dedicated to the ideals of deliberation. The core principles of deliberation dictate that the best argument should prevail no matter who presents it, but if we use rhetorical sophistication as a measurement criterion, we are already violating it by derogating the arguments of the less educated.

This is still a work in progress, but it seems likely that this specific find will play a major part in the conclusions to my thesis.

1. My rewrite of the rules presented in his book discourse ethics
2. described most elegantly in a conference paper by Nicole Curato
3. Outlined in: Steiner, Jürg, André Bächtiger, Markus Spörndli and Marco R. Steenbergen (2004). Deliberative Politics in Action: Analyzing Parliamentary Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.