Announcements       John Dryzek granted Federation Fellowship in Deliberative Global Governance Professor John Dryzek Political Science RSSS is amongst the winning researchers in the 2008 round of ARC Federaton Fellowships. Only 14 Fellowships were awarded (instead of the standard 25), two successful candidates came from the Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences assessment panel. The research program under the Fellowship will involve applying the theory of deliberative democracy to the practice of global governance and comparative politics of democratisation. His work will help to advance the understanding of deliberative democracy and its application in new domains—for example, the democratisation of the international system, with special reference to climate change, and the democratisation of authoritarian systems, such as China. ...more soon Deliberative Democracy Group succeeds with two ARC proposals!! Australian Citizens' Parliament (Led by John Dryzek) The Deliberative Democracy Research Group (in partnership with New Democracy, The University of Sydney and Murdoch University) has successfully secured funding to conduct an analyse a Citizen's Parliament on the topic of reform of Australia's political system. Click here for more information Climate Change and the Public Sphere (Led by Simon Niemeyer) the group has also been granted an ARC Discovery project investigating public responses to climate change, which will incorporate the use of scenarios and deliberative engagement to develop and understanding of governance issues and appropriate policy responses. Click here for more information

Welcome to Deliberative Democracy at the Australian National University.

Around 1990 democratic theory took a deliberative turn, in that the essence of democratic legitimacy increasingly came to be seen in terms of the right or capacity of citizens to participate in deliberation about the content of policies affecting them. Since then, some of the best work on deliberation has been done by staff members in the Research School of Social Sciences working in political theory which, in a quality audit report for Australian National University conducted in 2004, was highlighted as one of the areas in which ANU could justifiably claim to be the best in the world. Deliberative democracy is a burgeoning field in interdisciplinary political theory and beyond, engaging lawyers, philosophers, economists, and political scientists. ANU has been at the forefront of this field.