Assessing and Measuring Deliberativeness

Chapter seven takes the results of the four previous chapters and discusses their implications for the analysis of deliberation per se (a micro phenomenon) and the deliberative quality of democratic systems (a macro one). After specifying contrasting implications of the additive and summative views, it then looks at what kinds of methods can address the key research questions that have arisen in the discussion, recommending a problem-led, pluralist approach rather than insisting that deliberative democracy can only be studied by either qualitative or quantitative means. The chapter then surveys a number of novel methods that can be used to map and measure deliberative quality, from formal indicators to more qualitative tools, including new computer-aided methods developed in corpus linguistics and psychology, and gives examples from a current project on Scottish independence.