André Bächtiger – författare

Deliberative democracy has been one of the main games in contemporary political theory for two decades, growing enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, in philosophy, in various research programmes in the social sciences and law, and in political practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought and discusses their philosophical origins.The Handbook locates deliberation in political systems with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliaments, courts, governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution, documenting the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world and in global governance.

Deliberative democracy has challenged two widely-accepted nostrums about democratic politics: that people lack the capacities for effective self-government; and that democratic procedures are arbitrary and do not reflect popular will; indeed, that the idea of popular will is itself illusory. On the contrary, deliberative democrats have shown that people are capable of being sophisticated, creative problem solvers, given the right opportunities in the right kinds of democratic institutions. But deliberative empirical research has its own problems. In this book two leading deliberative scholars review decades of that research and reveal three important issues. First, the concept 'deliberation' has been inflated so much as to lose empirical bite; second, deliberation has been equated with entire processes of which it is just one feature; and third, such processes are confused with democracy in a deliberative mode more generally. In other words, studies frequently apply micro-level tools and concepts to make macro- and meso-level judgements, and vice versa. Instead, Bächtiger and Parkinson argue that deliberation must be understood as contingent, performative, and distributed. They argue that deliberation needs to be disentangled from other communicative modes; that appropriate tools need to be deployed at the right level of analysis; and that scholars need to be clear about whether they are making additive judgements or summative ones. They then apply that understanding to set out a new agenda and new empirical tools for deliberative empirical scholarship at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

​Experiment und Simulation gehören mittlerweile fest zum Kanon der etablierten Forschungsmethoden in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften. In der Grundlagenforschung dienen Laborexperimente dazu, Erklärungen des sozialen Verhaltens und Handelns modellgetreu zu überprüfen, während in Feld- und natürlichen Experimenten reale Handlungsbedingungen abgebildet werden sollen. Mit agentenbasierten Simulationen wiederum lassen sich komplexe und wiederholte Interaktionen zwischen Individuen untersuchen. Das Jahrbuch stellt das Potenzial dieser beiden neuen Forschungsmethoden vor. In einem ersten Teil werden die methodischen Grundlagen und Annahmen von sozialwissenschaftlichem Experiment und agentenbasierter Simulation beschrieben. Die Beiträge des zweiten Teils zeigen exemplarisch die Bandbreite von Labor- und Feldexperimenten und Simulationen in der politik- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung auf. ​

Der vorliegende Band umfasst eine große Bandbreite theoretischer Beiträge und empirischer Anwendungen räumlicher Modelle auf dem Gebiet der Politikwissenschaft. Räumliche Modelle existieren in diesem Fachgebiet in unterschiedlicher Form und verschiedenen Abstraktionsstufen. Häufig werden Politikräume konstruiert, um die Positionen von Wählern, Parteien und Koalitionen in politischen Prozessen näher zu bestimmen. Wie solche Modelle entstehen, auf welchen Grundlagen sie aufbauen und wie sie auf aktuelle Ereignisse in der Politik angewandt werden können ist Thema dieses Sammelbandes.