ANALYZING THE CONTENT IN PUBLIC DELIBERATION: THE CASE OF CITIZENS JURY ON CHIYEN NEW COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Lee, Kuo-Cheng
Abstract
Thriving from 2002, the theories and practices of deliberative democracy in Taiwan have caused many applications, but less discussion have been made to investigate how citizens’ involvement in tasks when deliberating and the content of negotiations in the processes.
This paper presents a content analysis and a coding scheme to measure the quality of political deliberation in face-to-face and online groups. After reviewing the concepts from Habermas, Stromer-Galley (2007) offered six indexes which can be used to observe public deliberation as follows: Reasoned Opinion Expression, Sourcing, Equality, Disagreement, Engagement, and Topic. She also developed a coding scheme of content analysis out of the studies on small groups, deliberation, online-based political talks and conversation analysis. This study, based on Stromer-Galley’s theories, was to observe and explore the processes and procedures of the Citizens Jury on Chiyan New Community Development Project.
The study results can be presented in two angles. From the aspect of Reseaoned Opinion Expression, Sourcing, and Topic, the citizens in paid high attention on the topics and expressed themselves actively during the jury sessions. While they were giving their opinions, they were able to supporting themselves by reasoning, although they did so simply in accordance with their personal experiences. From the aspect of Equality, Disagreement, and Engagement, though the citizens had equal opportunities to express their points of view, a limited number of them spoke more often than the others and offered more topics that drew the others’ attraction to discuss during the jury processes. The disagreement among the citizens was not clearly observable.
The study aimed to help the public to understand how conclusions given by the public deliberation were produced and support the future researchers with a scheme to inspect other types of public deliberation by comparison among one another. The study can be applied for the references while optimization is needed.
Subjects
Deliberative Democracy
Citizen’s Participation
Citizens Jury
Content Analysis
Type
thesis
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