As defined herein, deliberation includes both analytic and social processes and provides a unifying conceptual and critical framework for studying nearly the full range of political communication topics, including informal conversation, media and public opinion, elections, government institutional behavior, jury decision making, public meetings, and civic and community life. To address this problem, we advance a flexible yet precise definition of deliberation that has the power to organize not only deliberation theory and research but also much of the larger body of work in political communication. This has sometimes led to a variety of narrow conceptualizations that limit deliberation to particular forms of interaction, such as small group discussion, or to divergent conceptualizations deployed in different contexts, such as for media systems versus face-to-face discussions. The article then examines these stories to discern how deliberative democrats might rearticulate their conception of public reasoning, and their normative hopes for it, in light of Haidt’s findings by introducing the “embedded” conception of public reasoning.ĭuring the past fifteen years, public deliberation has become an important focus of research, theory, and public practice. This article analyzes four different explanatory “stories” that Haidt weaves together: (1) a “causal” evolutionary account of the development of morality (2) a “causal” story about the psychological mechanisms explaining human action (3) a “causal” story about the historical and cultural determinants of our political attitudes and (4) a “normative” story about the grounds and justification of human action. However, Haidt’s empirical studies give reasons to suggest that the “faith” of deliberative democrats in reasoning may be misplaced, particularly as that faith tends be inflected in terms of a “Kantian” moral psychology. Deliberative democrats also have a significant stake in understanding the sources of our disagreements and see rational deliberation as the key to civility and democratic legitimacy. The aim of the book is to encourage understanding and civility in our public life. Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist whose influential book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, explains the origins of our political disagreements.
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