Methods Café: Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy

Description

Designed and delivered by Prof Selen Ercan, this Methods Café offers a practical and conceptually grounded space to reflect on how deliberation can be studied across different methodological traditions. Rather than promoting a single approach, the session introduces four complementary ways of researching deliberation: theorizing, measuring, exploring, and enacting. We begin by examining the normative underpinnings and implications of deliberative democracy, discussing different forms of theorizing (normative, critical, and explanatory) and approaches such as formal theory and grounded theory. We then turn to measuring deliberation, focusing on how normative ideals are translated into empirical indicators of quality, including tools such as the Deliberative Quality Index (DQI), and Listening Quality Index. The session also explores how deliberation is experienced in real-world contexts, drawing on methods such as ethnography, frame analysis, and narrative analysis, before considering how deliberation can be enacted through research itself, including action research and deliberative policy analysis, which reconceptualize research as a democratic practice. Designed as an interactive conversation, the café invites participants of the summer school to reflect on their own projects and methodological choices, and to consider how different approaches to researching deliberation might inform their work.

Period	9 Feb 2024
Held at	Centre for Deliberative Democracy
Degree of Recognition	International