| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 新聞研究所 === 98 === This paper tries to illustrate that deliberative democracy is not a decision-making method but a kind of thoughts. The core element of deliberative democracy is not about the legitimacy of policies but the process of deepening democracy. It means that deliberative democracy theory should widen its possible contribution from only a decision-making method to a complete process of deepening democracy.
When we regard deliberative democracy as a process, then we should develop accompanying measures (so-called “intermediate realm” in this paper) for the real-life practice. For achieving this purpose, this paper infers four elements, that is, openness, coherence, inter-subjectiveness and cumulativeness, from theoretical foundations on the one side. For avoiding three another predicaments of democratic practice, that is , cyberbalkanization, discourse failure and the dominating ideology, this paper also proposes three accompanying elements, that is, effectiveness, simpleness and dynamic contextualization on the other hand. All these seven elements, applying to all kinds of deliberative democracy practice apart from Debatepedia which we take as an example in this paper, constitute the content of intermediate realm for deliberative democracy practice.
This paper in a further step divides these seven elements into fourteen items in order to respond to the core value of deliberative democracy, i.e. deepening democracy. In other words, these items are the basic requirement for real-life deliberative democracy practice. These fourteen items have no intention to include all possibilities of democratic practice but merely to provide some concrete examination methods in my sphere. These examination methods have their practical and theoretical meaning at the same time.
In practice, these fourteen items means deliberative democracy theory should not stay as a theory is. If democracy theory is an ideal for our better life, we then should realize it and, that is more important, develop some methods to realize it. In terms of theory, this paper reveals the close relationship between deliberative democracy theory and its practice. That means it is important to know how to realize deliberative democracy, it is also important to know how to improve democracy theory. But these two situations can only be done when we can find a valid connection between them. This paper takes Debatepedia as an example to describe how this kind of connection could be possible.
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