Open Collections

Harvey, Julia

University of British Columbia

The rise of partisan polarization in the United States has led to a contemporary debilitating practice of negative partisanship that promotes immediate disagreement and conflict based on out-party aversion. In this regard, affected partisans not only dislike each other but form their political opinions in opposition to one another simply because they dislike each other. Such aversion and animosity erode effective democratic participation and have grave social implications due to a lack of mutual understanding, respect and trust, balanced information processing, and deliberative reciprocity. Employing the theory of deliberative democracy, this thesis proposes the widespread implementation of mini-publics to address persistent democratic and deliberative deficits. Deliberative mini-publics utilize random sampling techniques to ensure successful representation and facilitate trustworthy judgements through neutral moderators. Through this process of learning and trust, opinion and attitude can become malleable, and compromise and consensus can transpire. Recommending a problem-based systems approach and a contextual design that is receptive to the complexity of the American political system, it is argued that deliberative mini-publics can reduce negative partisanship, enhance citizen participation and decision-making, and make America democratically deliberate again.

Text

2021-12-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/80379

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/