Deliberative Democracy Quotes

“government is legitimate not so much because it represents the 'general will', but because its policies are, ideally and counterfactually, the result of the public deliberation of all who are concerned by the decision”
― Frédéric Vandenberghe

“This research, and research that followed on from it, showed that strong arguments can be persuasive, but only when people are motivated to deliberate on the issue. Recently, a team led by Joseph Paxton of Harvard University showed that, in the domain of moral arguments, strong arguments were only persuasive if people were given some deliberation time before being forced to answer. Like crimes, it seems, reasoning requires both motive and opportunity. If both are there, even in crude psychology experiments, we can show that strong arguments alone have power to persuade.”
― Tom Stafford, For argument's sake: evidence that reason can change minds