Today Australian National University is home to what we believe is the world’s largest concentration of deliberative democracy scholars, who can build on a history of substantial achievements.

John Dryzek’s 1990 Cambridge University Press book Discursive Democracy is one of the foundational works marking the deliberative turn. Gerry Mackie’s Democracy Defended (also published by Cambridge) won the Gladys Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book on U.S. national policy published in 2003; he did much of the work on this while a Research Fellow at ANU.  Two important books published in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Oxford Political Theory series are Robert Goodin’s Reflective Democracy, and John Dryzek’s Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. Subsequently Goodin published another book with Oxford: Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn, while Dryzek took on global issues in Deliberative Global Politics (Polity Press). John Uhr’s Deliberative Democracy in Australia (Cambridge University Press) is the definitive work on the topic. He is in ANU’s Crawford School of Economics of Economic and Government. Two books which began life as ANU PhDs are John Parkinson’s Deliberating in the Real World: Problems of Legitimacy in Deliberative Democracy (Oxford University Press) and Bora Kanra’s Islam, Democracy and Dialogue in Turkey (Ashgate).

Current and former staff members John Dryzek, Bob Goodin, Gerry Mackie, Bora Kanra, Simon Niemeyer, Carolyn Hendriks, Christian List, Philip Pettit, and Aviezer Tucker have published many articles on deliberative democracy in top international journals such as Acta Politica, American Political Science Review,  American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Ethics, Environmental Politics, Governance, Government and Opposition, Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophical Issues, Policy Sciences, Political Studies, Politics and Society, Politics Philosophy and Economics, Public Administration, Public Administration Review, Science Technology and Human Values as well as numerous book chapters. List has co-edited a book on Deliberation and Decision. Dryzek’s work with Val Braithwaite of Regnet has been published in Political Psychology.  Carolyn Hendriks won the Harold Lasswell award for the best article published in Policy Sciences for her paper on “Participatory Storylines and their Impact on Deliberative Forums.”

In cooperation with the New Democracy Foundation (Luca Belgiorno-Nettis) and individuals at the University of Sydney (Lyn Carson and Ron Lubensky), Curtin University (Janette Hartz-Karp), and University of Tasmania (Ian Marsh), in 2008-2009 John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer organized and ran the Australian Citizens’ Parliament, a world first. Earlier, the Research School of Social Sciences 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).

In the peak days of ANU’s Social and Political Theory Program in the early 2000s, deliberative democracy was, as Bob Goodin once put it, the ‘lingua franca’ of that Program.  Much of the work done at that time was theoretical. Soon ANU scholars were at the forefront of the turn toward appraising and informing deliberative theory using empirical methods, and exploring possibilities for institutionalizing deliberation.  Some of this research involves conducting and analyzing deliberative processes, with special reference to how individuals experience their participation, and how and to what effect their preferences, judgments, and values change as a result. Some looks at the way deliberative forums take effect within larger political processes. Some involves detailed case studies of governance from a deliberative perspective.  Some looks at the prospects for dialogue in problematic settings. The Federation Fellowship awarded to John Dryzek in 2008 added a global turn, with the addition of research on global governance and the democratization of authoritarian states.

In all this work there is no ‘party line’ – staff, students, and visitors have brought many different perspectives to bear. Substantive topics vary from global systems to national institutions to local forums. Theoretical perspectives range from rational choice to critical theory to decision psychology to post-structuralism. Methods vary from large-n statistics to Q methodology to interpretive case studies to logical deduction.

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’ (which won the inaugural best PhD thesis prize of the Australasian Political Studies Association), John Parkinson on ‘The Legitimation of Deliberative Democracy’, and Bora Kanra on ‘Deliberating Across Difference in Turkey’. Jensen Sass completed a MPhil thesis on ‘Deliberative Democracy in Complex Societies.’ Research students currently studying deliberative topics are Selen Ayirtman, Michael Bennell, Mani Ram Banjade (based at the Fenner School), Katherine Curchin, Maria (Weng) Dano, Kathryn Kelly, Melissa Lovell, Jonathan Kuyper, Alex Lo (based at CSIRO), Penelope Marshall.

ANU has also hosted visits long and short from a string of distinguished scholars in the field over the years. They include André Bächtiger (Bern), Henrik Bang (Copenhagen), James Bohman (St Louis), Zsuzsanna Chappell (LSE), Thomas Christiano (Arizona), Suzanne Dovi (Arizona), David Estlund (Brown), John Ferejohn (Stanford), Frank Fischer (Rutgers), John Gastil (Washington), Kimmo Grönland (Abo Akademie University), Kasper Moller Hansen (Copenhagen), Baogang He (Deakin), Peter John (Manchester), Claudia Landwehr (Hamburg), Jane Mansbridge (Harvard), Andrew Knops (Birmingham),  Monique Leyanaar (Nijmegen), Ank Michels (Utrecht), Karolina Milewicz (Bern), Claus Offe (Hertie School), SoonYawl Park (Seoul National), Anne Phillips (LSE),  Henry Richardson (Georgetown), David Schlosberg (Northern Arizona), Maija Setälä (Turku), Geoffrey Stokes (Deakin), Tetsuki Tamura (Nagoya), Cor van Montfort (Tilburg). Visiting PhD students have included Ricardo Mendonça (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Nicole Curato (Birmingham), Tom Flynn (York), Meena Krishnamurty (Cornell), James Wong (LSE).

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