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Publications (26)
This study describes an innovative educational proposal to develop deliberative skills – motivation and ability to explain points of view based on reflected considerations, reciprocal involvement, and more inclusive and respectful communication. Based on theories of deliberative democracy – and expanding citizen participatory initiatives and experi...
What are the impacts of teaching deliberation on students’ attitudes in practical discussions? This study presents research findings from a field experiment involving more than 500 students from five public schools in the Brazilian cities of Belo Horizonte and Belém. We found a small effect of deliberative training on students’ justifications of th...
Starting from the premise that, in deliberative politics, the justifications must be submitted to the critical scrutiny of citizens, this chapter investigates the reasons offered by ordinary citizens about the law reform at stake, parallel to the arenas of the elites. The aim is to compare citizens’ reasoning practices, when exposed to debates in l...
This chapter presents empirical research on the interplay of emotions and argumentation. The goal is to investigate the collective expression of fear, anger, compassion, and indignation to reveal patterns of variation in these types of emotions in argumentation in both formal and informal settings. We use data from discussions in internal meetings...
This concluding chapter summarizes the benefits of a systemic approach to track and analyze communicative exchanges within and across different settings. By mapping arguments, reasoning perspectives, and emotional concerns, our research enabled us to examine several communicative environments, including legislatures, mainstream media, activist sett...
This chapter asserts that emotions play important roles in both deliberation and public debates, and that emotional concerns cannot be separated from reasoning and argumentation. We make three related claims: first, emotions are inherent in political judgment, which is a central component of any deliberation practice; second, emotions are not just...
Proponents of the systemic approach argue that different parts of a political system have distinct roles in promoting deliberation. This chapter investigates the distributed epistemic division of labor and presents empirical data on discussions about a law reform in Brazil (the bill for lowering the age of criminal responsibility) in three elite ar...
This chapter explores the development of the systemic turn in the study of deliberative democracy. It discusses the main controversies in this field, including: (a) the problem of analyzing only separated forums and the efforts to investigate connections between different parts of the political system; (b) criticisms addressed to this research agen...
This chapter discusses the challenges of conceptualizing links and connections in the political system, and conceives the practice of reason-giving as a means of dealing with these challenges. Offering reasons is seen as a social practice that provides a mechanism for assessing justifications that attach or divide actors across a set of institution...
This chapter focuses on the renewed attention given to citizens’ everyday discussions and the public sphere in the systemic approach to deliberation. The need to understand discussion processes beyond single forums has brought media studies to the center of our research. The main argument presented in this chapter is that the public sphere is not a...
Adopting a systemic perspective, this book explores media-based communication and reason-giving as a linkage process that transcends time and space. Arguments, reasoning perspectives and emotional concerns link elites’ and citizens’ political judgement within and across a set of interrelated arenas in the political system.
Offers a multidimensional...
This article aims to understand how anti-environmentalism connects with the conservative, authoritarian and populist discourse of Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Indeed, we argue that anti-environmentalism is one of the critical factors for understanding the postures and practices of Bolsonarism. We analyse 852 speech acts, drawn from...
Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo investigar a relação existente entre emoção e razão em comentários sobre a redução da maioridade penal em dois ambientes online distintos: página ativista no Facebook e portal legislativo. Ao focalizar a associação entre justificação e emoção - e distintos padrões que daí emergem em discussões interpessoais onl...
This article discusses the role of the media in deliberative systems, focusing on the relationship between the news media and the formal arena that is the Brazilian National Congress. We investigate the different ways in which the news media are appropriated by politicians, experts and ordinary citizens in public hearings. We focus on a case study...
Hartmut Wessler is a professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He is a member of the Institute for Media and Communication Studies and Principal Investigator at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES). His research mainly explores comparative analyses of media systems in different countries...
The purpose of this article is to analyze how ordinary citizens understand and discuss lethal violence against women and the relation of these discussions to the framing that news articles give to this type of occurrence. Content analysis was the methodological strategy used to analyze comments posted on O Globo's Facebook page in response to news...
This study adopts a systemic approach, focusing on real-world online discussions in legislative-, media-, and activist-based forums, to explore a set of factors that affects reasoned disagreement in digital environments. While conventional analysis investigates the effects of disagreement on civic and political participation, this study unpacks for...
This study investigates the role of emotions in the context of a controversial debate surrounding criminal legislation in Brazil. While several thinkers have criticized deliberation for requiring purely rational discourse, we argue that emotion is a central component in the reasoning process. Whereas existing research on the link between justificat...
In the original publication of the article, the second author’s name was misspelt. The correct name is given in this Correction.
Review of Habermas and the Media by Hartmut Wessler (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018)
O livro “Deliberation across Deeply Divided Societies: Transformative Moments”, do pesquisador suíço Jürg Steiner, em parceria com as pesquisadoras Maria Clara Jaramillo, Rousiley Maia e Simona Mameli, enfrenta uma importante questão da Teoria Deliberativa: é possível deliberar em sociedades e contextos de divisões profundas? Para respondê-la, os a...
Most research dealing with deliberation focuses on individual-level data, and the epistemic dimension of deliberation is rarely analyzed. Drawing on Habermas’s “space of reasons” account, we offer a novel analytical perspective on the variation in the stock of reasons in a given discussion, and disentangle how it transforms throughout the process....
Informal debates have attracted increasing attention in deliberation studies. However, studies that explore how people make sense of plural information in the media are rare. This paper analyses how subjects from antagonizing social groups engage with a variety of media arguments to negotiate their opinions on a sensitive issue: the reduction of th...
Este artigo analisa o papel das emoções na deliberação mediada sobre a redução da maioridade penal no Brasil. Para isso, consideramos os media enquanto arena deliberativa, analisando as trocas argumentativas e as conversações políticas nos meios de comunicação, e enquanto um dos principais provedores de informações que circulam na esfera pública. N...