Achievements

Important books published in the deliberative democracy by ANU staff members. John Dryzek’s Discursive Democracy is one of the original works marking the deliberative turn. Gerry Mackie’s Democracy Defended won the Gladys Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book on U.S. national policy published in 2003; Robert Goodin’s Reflective Democracy; John Dryzek’s Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. The Goodin and Dryzek books were published in Oxford University Press’s Oxford Political Theory series, the world’s most prestigious book series in political theory. Dryzek’s Deliberative Global Politics book is to be published in 2006 by Polity Press. Staff members Dryzek, Goodin, Mackie, Christian List, Philip Pettit, and Simon Niemeyer have published many articles on deliberative democracy in top international journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Ethics, Political Theory, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophical Issues, Political Studies, and Politics and Society, as well as numerous book chapters. List has co-edited a book on Deliberation and Decision. Important work on deliberative democracy has been done by John Uhr in the Crawford School of Economics and Government, whose book Deliberative Democracy in Australia is the definitive work on the topic. Dryzek’s work with Val Braithwaite of Regnet has been published in Political Psychology. A number of Regnet scholars apply deliberative ideas to regulation and restorative justice. The School was Australian co-sponsor of the nationally televised deliberative polls on the republic and reconciliation issues (led by James Fishkin, now of Stanford University, Center for Deliberative Democracy).

With the current round of Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research, the school is also at the forefront of the move toward appraising deliberative theory using empirical methods and evaluating the possibilities for institutionalizing deliberation. This research includes conducting and analyzing deliberative processes as well as following up examples of deliberation to assess their impact on decision making. As part of this applied research, government agencies and research bodies have been briefed on deliberative mechanisms for public consultation by RSSS staff and PhD students. In all this work there is no ‘party line’ – staff, students, and visitors have brought many different perspectives to bear. Substantively, these range from Dryzek’s emphasis on the engagement of discourses in the public sphere to Goodin’s focus on deliberation as a matter of internal cogitation rather than participation to Uhr’s emphasis on formal institutions such as parliament. List’s work is highly theoretical and formal; other studies have been empirical and oriented to real-world case studies of deliberation. To date, four students have completed PhDs on deliberative democracy topics: Simon Niemeyer on ‘Deliberation in the Wilderness’, Carolyn Hendriks on ‘Public Deliberation and Interest Organizations’, John Parkinson on ‘The Legitimation of Deliberative Democracy’, and Bora Kanra on ‘Deliberating Across Difference in Turkey’. They have published this research in Political Studies (Niemeyer, Hendriks, and Parkinson), Australian Journal of Political Science (Parkinson), Public Administration (Parkinson), Environmental Politics (Niemeyer) Government and Opposition (Kanra), Australian Journal of Public Administration (Hendriks) and Policy Sciences (Hendrik); and PhD student Nic Southwood has published an article on deliberation in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. Research students currently studying deliberative topics are Katherine Curchin, Jensen Sass, and Selen Ayirtman.