The Media and the Public Sphere: A Deliberative Model of Democracy 9781138306011, 9780203728642

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‘In the deliberative model of democracy, a free press is of crucial importance for linking the public sphere and political decision making. Häussler shows in a sophisticated way the potential and the pitfalls for the media to fulfil this role. The philosophical background of the deliberative model is linked in a successful way with complex empirical analyses. The book is highly relevant for journalism, communication, and political science.’ Jürg Steiner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ‘This very substantial and well researched book is an exceptionally valuable contribution to the growing body of empirical literature on deliberative democracy. It should find a wide readership in politics and media studies.’ William Outhwaite, FAcSS, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University ‘This important rethinking of the mediated public sphere shows that the range of actors and the qualities of their deliberation differ depending on whether we look at the sphere of civil society or the sphere of governmentcentered media discourses. Each sphere displays its own strengths and weaknesses, suggesting both the imperfections and the promises of democratic communication processes.’ Lance Bennett, Professor of Political Science and Communication, University of Washington

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The Media and the Public Sphere

At the heart of modern democracy lies the public sphere, which is most centrally shaped by those actors that integrate it discursively: the mass media. The media draw together the different strands of political debates; they grant access to some actors and arguments while excluding others and thus decisively mould the political process. In this book, Thomas Häussler examines how the media reflect and react to the wider context in which they are embedded. More specifically, he focuses on whether their discourse demonstrates systematic differences with regard to the two main public sphere types that they co-constitute, according to deliberative theory, focussing in particular on the work of Jürgen Habermas. The Media and the Public Sphere promotes a deeper and more detailed understanding of the political process by foregrounding the complex relationships between the media and the public discourse they constitute. It examines how the media co-create relationships of power, analyses the structure of these discursive networks, and illuminates the effects different deliberative coalition types have on political debates. Thomas Häussler is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern. His research interests include political communication; online mobilisation and campaigning of civil society actors; social (online) network analysis; (Swiss) media history; and social and political philosophy – in particular, theoretical models of and empirical research on deliberative democracy. He teaches courses at bachelor’s and master’s levels on different aspects of political communication.

Routledge Studies in Global Information, Politics and Society Edited by Kenneth Rogerson, Duke University and Laura Roselle, Elon University

International communication encompasses everything from one-to-one cross-cultural interactions to the global reach of a broad range of information and communications technologies and processes. Routledge Studies in Global Information, Politics and Society celebrates – and embraces – this depth and breadth. To completely understand communication, it must be studied in concert with many factors, since, most often, it is the foundational principle on which other subjects rest. This series provides a publishing space for scholarship in the expansive, yet intersecting, categories of communication and information processes and other disciplines. Twitter and Elections Around the World Campaigning in 140 Characters or Less Edited by Richard Davis, Christina Holtz-Bacha, and Marion Just Political Communication in Real Time Theoretical and Applied Research Approaches Edited by Dan Schill, Rita Kirk, Amy Jasperson Disability Rights Advocacy Online Voice, Empowerment and Global Connectivity Filippo Trevisan Media Relations of the Anti-War Movement The Battle for Hearts and Minds Ian Taylor The Politics of Data Transfer Transatlantic Conflict and Cooperation over Data Privacy Yuko Suda The Media and the Public Sphere A Deliberative Model of Democracy Thomas Häussler

The Media and the Public Sphere A Deliberative Model of Democracy

Thomas Häussler

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Thomas Häussler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-30601-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-72864-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

For Wolfgang and Hanne Häussler

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Foreword 1

Introduction Note 10 References 10

2

Democracy, discourse and the public sphere: the deliberative approach 2.1 Deliberative democracy: a general definition 14 2.2 Morality, legitimacy and democracy: the Habermasian perspective 15 2.2.1 Challenges and criticism of deliberative democracy 18 2.3 The deliberative public sphere 25 2.4 Hypotheses 34 Notes 36 References 39

3

Methods and measures of deliberation 3.1 From the ideal to the real: the measurement of discourse quality 43 3.1.1 Empirical approaches to deliberation 44 3.1.2 Measuring the quality of political discourse: three approaches 48 3.1.3 Building discourse quality dimensions for the media 55 3.2 Assessing discourse quality: the social network paradigm and the power of coalitions 62 3.2.1 The discursive space: social network analysis and deliberative quality 63

xii xiv xv 1

13

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x Contents 3.2.2 Discourse quality and discourse coalitions 65 3.3 Selecting the national context: the UK 65 3.4 Sampling the media coverage 67 3.5 Political debates and public spheres types 68 3.5.1 Unilateral disarmament (1960) 70 3.5.2 Commonwealth immigration (1965) 71 3.5.3 Secondary picketing (1980) 72 3.5.4 The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) 73 3.5.5 Fuel protest (2000) 74 3.5.6 Anti-terrorism legislation (2005) 74 3.6 Summary of research design 75 Notes 77 References 79 4

The media and the deliberative quality of public spheres 4.1 Inclusiveness 86 4.1.1 Who is the most balanced of them all? 87 4.1.2 Inclusion or exclusion? Discursive access to the public sphere 91 4.1.3 Inclusiveness as diversity 95 4.1.4 Conclusion 97 4.2 Role change 98 4.2.1 Deliberation and symmetric interaction: initial observations 100 4.2.2 The deliberative symmetry of public spheres 102 4.2.3 Deliberative roles and discursive spaces 103 4.2.4 Conclusion 109 4.3 Reciprocity 112 4.3.1 Monologue or dialogue? 113 4.3.2 Inclusion or exclusion? The reciprocity of discursive spaces 115 4.3.3 Reciprocal density and discursive integration 119 4.3.4 Conclusion 120 4.4 Reflexivity 122 4.4.1 Dumbing down or reflexive? 123 4.4.2 The equality of reason? 126 4.4.3 Who’s the most reflexive of them all? 128 4.4.4 Conclusion 130 4.5 Perspectives: the content of justifications 131 4.5.1 The breadth of democratic debate 132 4.5.2 The public sphere as a web of reasons 135

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4.5.3 The centres and peripheries of reason 138 4.5.4 Conclusion: actors, reasons and the drivers of deliberation 141 Notes 144 References 146 5

Democratic conflict and deliberative coalitions 5.1 Agreement and endorsement coalitions 151 5.2 Demand coalitions 153 5.3 Criticism coalitions 155 5.4 Political conflict and disagreement as the driving forces of deliberation 160 Notes 161 References 162

148

6

Conclusion 6.1 Strong and weak public spheres 164 6.2 Disagreement and deliberation 168 Notes 172 References 172

163

Sources sampled Codebook Index

174 175 188

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

Arenas of political communication Periphery public sphere speaker-addressee relationships Centre public sphere speaker-addressee relationships Periphery public sphere, reciprocity network Centre public sphere, reciprocity network Periphery public sphere, reflexivity network Centre public sphere, reflexivity network Two-mode network of actors and justifications in challenger public spheres 4.8 Two-mode network of actors and justifications in centre public spheres

33 105 106 116 118 127 128 136 137

Tables 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10

Inter-coder and intra-coder reliability Debates sampled Summary of research design Actor type distribution by % in the public sphere types Chi-square test and HHI of actor distribution between public sphere types Wilcoxon rank sum test of civil society Wilcoxon rank sum test of media presence Wilcoxon rank sum test of overall inclusiveness Speaker-addressee distribution in the public sphere types (%) Chi-square test of speaker/addressee congruence Core/periphery model of role change actors in challenger and centre public spheres Frequencies of reciprocal speech acts Chi-square test of reciprocity actors vs total actors in both public sphere types

62 70 76 88 92 93 94 95 100 102 108 114 115

List of illustrations 4.11 Reciprocity core/periphery actors and densities in challenger and centre public spheres 4.12 Overall rationality in % 4.13 Chi-square test of reflexive actors vs total actors in both public sphere types 4.14 Reflexivity core/periphery actors and densities in challenger and centre public spheres 4.15 Frequencies and Chi-square test of justifications in challenger and centre public spheres 4.16 Perspectives core/periphery actors and densities in challenger and centre public spheres 4.17 Chi-square test of the argumentative responsiveness of the core political actors towards civil society in challenger and centre public spheres (in %) 5.1 Regression analysis of the support coalition of the political elite and civil society 5.2 Regression analysis of demand coalitions directed towards the political elite, the economy and civil society 5.3 Regression analysis of criticism coalitions directed towards the political elite, the economy and civil society 5.4 Frequency of illocution types (total) 5.5 Regression of deliberative quality on criticism

xiii 120 124 125 129 134 139

140 152 154 157 159 160

Acknowledgements

A book on deliberation can only ever mark an intermediate step in an ongoing discussion process. As preliminary as these thanks must therefore be, they go to some of the finest interlocutors. I could not have hoped for better discussion partners along the various stages of this study, who were willing to lend their ears, share their views, suggestions and generous advice. In no particular order I will simply list the innermost circle of a long list of names: Roger Blum, Silke Adam, Lance Bennett, William Outhwaite, Adrian Vatter, Robert Goodin and Marco Steenbergen. From an institutional perspective, this book has tremendously profited from the numerous encounters, research stays and colloquia at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern, the Centre for Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex and the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, particularly the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. On the funding side, part of the work on this book was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant no. PBBE11– 116999. It allowed me to spend enough time at the Centre for Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex to sample the excellent thoughts and inputs of exquisite people. Finally, the list would not be complete without thanking everyone at Routledge, particularly Natalja Mortensen for her thoughtful guidance through the whole process.

Series Editor’s Foreword

There has never been a more important time to deepen the global discourse about the role of media in the public sphere. As peoples, governments and civil society organizations clash over ideas, doctrines and philosophies, the role of the media will become either more important or less relevant. But it is not only up to the media to decide which. It is an exchange between a variety of groups and institutions. Thomas Häussler’s contribution to this discussion is timely and invaluable. His analysis of the public sphere as a ‘sphere of publics’ helps us better understand why the status quo of conflict may be useful in how the media might be used for improved communication. Ken Rogerson

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1

Introduction

He was probably nervous when he got out of the car, and he must have known that his presence would not open everyone’s hearts, but he certainly did not anticipate what followed. When Tom King, the Conservative Government’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, arrived in Belfast on 20 November 1985, five days after Margaret Thatcher and the Republic of Ireland’s Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald had signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, he got a small foretaste of loyalist anger as The Sun reported (21.11.1985, p. 7): ‘Ulster supremo Tom King was attacked yesterday by an egg-throwing mob. The Loyalist demonstrators scuffled with Mr King’s bodyguards when he arrived for a luncheon in Belfast. The jeering crowd, led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, were protesting the new Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gives the Dublin government a say in running Ulster. Mr King escaped unhurt as the mob smashed a headlight on his car.’ While politicians of all parties were quick to condemn the attack, Paisley was rather unrepentant, warning King that ‘[h]e should only to go [sic] those places where he is welcome, but he should not go out on to the streets of Northern Ireland, where the people look upon him as a traitor’ (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19). Other loyalist politicians went as far as saying that they would ‘follow Mr King around the province and give him a rough ride’ (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19). The Agreement proved to be an important milestone in the Northern Ireland peace process, leading eventually to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which set out the terms for devolved, power-sharing institutions and addressed the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. But at the time, the reactions to it were fierce, particularly in the unionist camp, and King’s skirmish outside Belfast’s City Hall was just the first sign of a broad and sustained opposition to any Irish involvement in matters they felt pertained to the Crown. The Anglo-Irish Agreement resulted from consultations between the British Government and the Government of the Republic of Ireland that were held in near secrecy, the results

2 Introduction of which ensured that the Republic had, for the first time, a role to play in the affairs of Northern Ireland as part of the newly founded Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. The Conference’s scope extended to legal, security and political matters, as well as to cross-border co-operation between the two governments, although its role was to be purely consultative.1 Still, this did little to appease the unionists’ hostile stance towards the Agreement and the newly founded Conference. Protests, strikes and rallies; acts of civil disobedience; as well as the mass resignation of all unionist Members of Parliament (MPs) from the House of Commons followed. A petition against the Agreement collected 400,000 signatures, and unionists started the ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign. Two days after the Belfast City Hall incident, unionists organised a mass protest on the same spot, where Ian Paisley held his pugnacious speech: ‘Where do the terrorists operate from? From the Irish Republic! That’s where they come from! Where do the terrorists return to for sanctuary? To the Irish Republic! And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our Province. We say never, never, never, never!’ (Tonge et al., 2014, p. 10). In one of his less blustering moments, Paisley said ‘Everyone recognises that talks between Governments should be confidential, but these talks about Northern Ireland are only confidential as far as the majority population there are concerned’ (The Daily Telegraph, 7.11.1985, p. 10). As much as unionists were disaffected by the results of the talks, the way the process had been structured was the real issue – Paisley bemoaned a lack of inclusiveness, as none of those affected had been heard during the negotiations. This points to an important and equally intuitive aspect of political legitimacy: the acceptability of political decisions is tied to the process by which they come about. And this process reaches clearly beyond the arcane dealings in the back room talks between heads of states and votes taken in parliaments – in fact, it extends to society as a whole. In the case of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, both unionists and republicans felt that the British Government had ignored their voices, although both sides were equally affected by the accord. For unionists, any say the Irish Republic would have in matters of Northern Ireland, even if it was merely consultative, was an unacceptable infringement of a foreign power in domestic politics: ‘“The Province” inhabitants can now justifiably consider themselves second class citizens, since no other part of the Kingdom is subject to legalised interference by a foreign Power’, as Lord Monson wrote in The Daily Telegraph (20.11.1985, p. 18). Republicans took the opposite view, as, for them, the Agreement cemented Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK and foreclosed any possibility of an Irish reunification. Yet, inclusion in the political process alone does not guarantee that the parties involved agree on an outcome or accept it as legitimate. Thus, while being an important dimension, it has to be supplemented by others. In recounting his version of the events in front of Belfast City Hall, Tom King gives us an important clue in this respect: it all ‘started with 30 to 40 people,

Introduction

3

a number of them elected representatives, and some were quite clearly beside themselves and beyond rational thought at all. I am prepared to engage in discussions and sensible consultations with anybody as long as it is done constitutionally and without violence. I will not get involved with people who behave that way’, King told reporters (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19). In other words, King was open to discussions, even contentious ones, as long as they were held within rational boundaries. This, it appears, is a second basic dimension of the political process. Taken together, inclusion and rationality are the main components of a deliberative model of democracy that spells out ‘the intuitive ideal of a democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens’, as Cohen (1989, p. 21) states. Deliberative democracy is one of the most productive areas in political theory (Dryzek, 2007). The deliberative approach sees the communicative process in which decision-making procedures are embedded as the primary source of political legitimacy. As political decisions are informed by the preceding discussions and debates, the attention shifts accordingly to how these are structured. Importantly, this includes the informal, extra-institutional space occupied by civil society and other actors, and the deliberative perspective therefore allows for a more comprehensive – and, as we will see, more critical – analysis than those approaches that restrict themselves to the actual decision-making stage alone. In other words, if the quality of political decisions is only as good as the preceding discussions allow, then investigating these communicative processes and the standards by which they are governed becomes central to any analysis of the political process. While the field of deliberative democracy comprises different definitions of deliberation and directions of research, the general idea is that it is the discussions among free and equals that confer legitimacy onto political decisions. At its most basic level, deliberation thus allows the parties in a political conflict to solve their differences without having to resort to violence (e.g. the cases of deliberation in divided societies discussed in Steiner, 2012). More than this, however, deliberative democrats claim that with respect to preference formation, negotiating the common good, decision-making and the political process as a whole, their models better capture the normative theoretical and empirical essence of politics than do the established alternatives. Unlike rational choice models, they do not take individual preferences as a given and can shed light on their genesis, their articulation and transformation through the public use of reason. Similarly, the common good as the object of political conflict is not an obvious, invariant a priori of politics, but rather the product of the deliberative process itself, which can therefore help to reduce the conflict between multiple notions of the common good that are characteristic of pluralistic and multicultural settings. Deliberation does so not by aggregating individual preferences in one way or the other, but through the co-operative search of the most convincing position governed by the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (Habermas,

4 Introduction 1996, p. 306). It conceives of politics as a communicative process that reaches beyond brick and mortar institutions and their formal procedures of decisionmaking by connecting them to the informal public sphere, sustained by civil society and ‘challengers’ (Kriesi, 2004) quite generally, comprised of all those actors without formal and routine access to political decision-making bodies. On this view, political institutions are embedded in networks of communicative flows, and their decisions can only claim legitimacy to the extent that they maintain the connection and remain responsive to the impulses from the informal sphere. Clearly, this is not the case in the process that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, nor were those critical of the result compelled by the reasons given for the secrecy of the negotiations. As the deliberative perspective extends the theoretical focus of the political process to encompass the whole public sphere, those actors who have an intermediary position and connect the ‘weak publics’ of civil society (see below) to the strong ones of the political institutions – the media – become particularly important. In fact, Habermas speaks of ‘a public sphere dominated by the mass media’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 379) and identifies a new sort of power with them, the power of the media to select and process information and thus to set the political agenda – both on the demand side of the audience as well as the supply side of all those who seek to have their voices heard (Habermas, 1996, p. 377). Modern, post-traditional societies are increasingly integrated and shaped by mass communication and competing terms such ‘mediation’, ‘mediatisation’, ‘mediasation’ and ‘medialisation’ have all tried to capture the extent to which our lives are permeated and interconnected by old and new forms of media (see Livingstone, 2009 for a critical assessment of the different concepts). Mass media play a pivotal role in these processes, for rather than being replaced by new technologies and concepts of interactive communication, they are at the very heart of those transformations that are leading toward digitally expanded public spheres (Bohman, 2004) and more complex ‘hybrid media systems’ (Chadwick, 2013). Despite accompanying changes in gatekeeping roles, which journalists now partly share with bloggers and other online actors, they still dominate the public sphere, not so much because they exclusively decide what comes on the political agenda as to what stays on it (Jarren, 2008). Put differently, while the role of who generates the impulses for public discussion certainly has been enlarged, and the mass media may no longer be alone in setting the timing, they do still set the pace of much of political communication. The critical potential of public discourse to take up and articulate different positions, particularly those that are usually marginalised, to integrate the argumentative strands between civil society and the political centre and to hold those in power accountable thus crucially depends on the role the mass media play in this process. Yet, Habermas makes the point that: [e]ven if we know something about the internal operation and impact of the mass media, as well as about the distribution of roles among the

Introduction

5

public and various actors, and even if we can make some reasonable conjectures about who has privileged access to the media and who has a share in media power, it is by no means clear how the mass media intervene in the diffuse circuits of communication in the political public sphere. (Habermas, 1996, p. 377) This is where the present study ties in, as it assesses from a deliberative perspective the role the media play in establishing the political public sphere. Deliberative theory, particularly in the Habermasian version, spells out in great detail the conditions of an ideal deliberative process, which we can use to develop an analytical instrument that allows us to analyse the political discourses around specific issues as they are refracted through the lens of the media. We thus follow the insight that ‘[t]he “quality” of public opinion, insofar as it is measured by the procedural properties of its process of generation, is an empirical variable. From a normative perspective, this provides a basis for measuring the legitimacy of the influence that public opinion has on the political system’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 362). Such a task, however, is faced with the fact that for some time, the complexity of the theoretical framework has impeded a straightforward application of deliberative models in real-world contexts: Delli Carpini et al. state, for instance, that ‘[u]fortunately, empirical research on deliberative democracy has lagged behind theory’ (Delli Carpini et al., 2004, p. 316), and one year later, Ryfe still assessed that ‘[t]he literature on deliberative practice is still in its infancy, and its answers to these questions are by no means definitive’ (Ryfe, 2005, p. 50). A further three years later, however, Thompson concluded that political scientists had realised that deliberative democracy had advanced to the most active area of political theory, the result being ‘a profusion of empirical studies, now more numerous than the normative works that prompted them’ (Thompson, 2008, p. 498). While this is a welcome development of the field, those approaches that explicitly endorse a deliberative view are, on the one hand, based in political science and focus on the formal part of the public sphere, i.e. parliaments or more restricted venues such as committees (Bächtiger et al., 2010; Steiner et al., 2004), and, on the other hand, explicitly non-public settings such as focus groups (Caluwaerts & Ugarriza, 2012; Fishkin & Luskin, 2005; Jaramillo & Steiner, 2014). Steiner et al. (2004) are acutely aware of the analytical constraint posed by their institutional focus when they state that ‘it will also be necessary to investigate debates in the wider public sphere, which is so important for deliberative theorists’ (Steiner et al., 2004, p. 6). Communication scholars, on the other hand, have largely concentrated on the deliberative potential of the internet (Albrecht, 2006; Kies, 2010; Weger Jr & Aakhus, 2003; see also White, 1997 for an early approach) and left the role of the mass media and its agenda-setting role in political discourse (Cobb et al., 1976; Habermas, 2008; Kriesi, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) as an area that awaits more intense scrutiny. Furthermore, those

6 Introduction studies that have explicitly addressed the question of deliberative quality in mass media discourses have sometimes done so from a framing perspective (Ferree et al., 2002; McAdam, 1996; Simon & Xenos, 2000), and while they have generated important insights, their results can only be connected indirectly to deliberative theory, as framing approaches do not capture the essence of the deliberative process. Much of the work so far has consisted of single case studies (Parkinson, 2006; Pilon, 2009), and when research has taken on a comparative perspective, it has done so mainly by contrasting different venues (Halpern & Gibbs, 2013; Hart, 2000; Kies, 2010), news stories and issues (Costain & Fraizer, 2000; Page, 1996) or different countries (e.g. Ferree et al., 2002). However, so far, we lack a systematic assessment of the most basic category in the political processes from a deliberative perspective, namely, the public sphere type; therefore, we have no knowledge of how different forms of public spheres affect the role of the media and the deliberative quality of their discourses. This is what this study attempts to do. As we have seen in the introductory example, the public sphere structured by the Anglo-Irish Agreement is one that is initiated by the political centre, which seeks to confine most of the deliberative process to itself. Only in the last stage of the political process is the result of the deliberations between Britain and the Republic of Ireland related to the larger public – prompting the mentioned protests. This corresponds to one typical public sphere structure, which is anchored in the political–administrative centre, and where the informal part of it is either merely informed through the media of the results of the deliberations, as in the present case, or political actors strategically try to mobilise parts of civil society – and the media – to gain the upper hand in the debate over a policy issue. It is intuitively clear that despite its prevalence, this is not the type of public sphere favoured by deliberative theorists. As we will see, the only real deliberative alternative to these two variations of centre-initiated public spheres comes from that type that describes the reverse flow of communication: here, issues, grievances, demands and criticism are first uttered in civil society and then via the media find their way into the political centre, which responds to the deliberative stimulus in the form of policy proposals. The unanswered question so far is how the media tie into these public spheres that they co-constitute; and, more precisely, whether there is a difference in terms of the deliberative quality between those media discourses that are part of the first, centre-initiated type and those where the public sphere originates in the periphery of civil society. If, as the example and deliberative theory suggest, the structure of the public sphere is so centrally important for the political process and the legitimacy it generates, then investigating the role of the media and the discursive quality of the discourses it co-creates becomes a central task of empirical communication research. We will examine the role of the media in specific policy issues and public sphere types by developing a content analytical approach – the Discourse

Introduction

7

Quality Dimensions – that captures the different deliberative dimensions of the political process, thereby drawing on the approach of Steiner et al. (2004), who have developed a similar approach for parliamentary settings. This will be our main vehicle for the analysis, and it lets us systematically compare the discursive properties of the two public sphere types as they are reflected in and processed through the media’s coverage. In contrast to Steiner et al. (2004), however, the content analytical instrument developed for our purposes allows us to go one step further and map the space established by the discursive relationships between the actors. The social networks that we thus generate allow us to complement the prevailing aggregating view of much deliberative research with a more inductively generated perspective that highlights the central element of the political process – the discursive relationship between the actors. These discursive spaces, or rather the social networks on which they are based, can then be submitted to further analyses to assess their properties. We thus capture deliberation in a public sphere dominated by the mass media from two different sides, relating, on the one hand, to the quantitative occurrence and distribution of deliberative elements in the speech acts of those actors that participate in a political debate. On the other hand, we examine the relationships between the actors that are generated by these speech acts more closely, map the deliberative space they constitute and analyse the topology of the space, in order to arrive at a better understanding of how their communication structures the public sphere. Of the plethora of social network analysis measures, we will employ those that are most important from a deliberative viewpoint and allow us to depict the degree of ‘discursive hierarchy’ and ‘discursive density’ in the different public sphere types. Whereas the notion of hierarchy assesses how balanced the public sphere in question is, the concept of density refers to the cohesion of the discursive space established through the deliberative interaction between the participants. Informative and essential as the top-view of cumulative approaches are for our basic understanding of the deliberative properties of the two public sphere types, it is particularly the social network approach that allows us to lay bare the more intricate dynamics between the actors that shape the political discourse. As we will see, it is precisely these analyses that will lead to at times counterintuitive results and the central insight that contrary to their obvious theoretical deficits, in the empirical world, public sphere types initiated by the political–administrative centre do not display the same kind of shortcomings on every dimension of deliberation. In fact, in several respects, they are superior to political processes rooted in civil society. These inconsistencies will then lead us to a viewpoint that cuts across the public sphere types and examines those discursive constellations that drive the discourse quality in one as well as in the other type. These deliberative coalitions form around a common illocution and have a common addressee, and it is ultimately these that have the most substantial impact on the level of deliberation. Against those who charge deliberative models as being premised on

8 Introduction some idea of discursive harmony in order to work, we can show that the opposite is the case – it is the degree of contentiousness of an issue that has the greatest positive effect on the discursive quality of the public sphere. This, then, also shows the role and potential of deliberation in processing and resolving political conflicts. These findings have important implications for deliberative theory, not only because they challenge some of its more tacit core assumptions, but also because they require us to partly revise and refine the normative basis without giving up its radical democratic core and ending up neither advocating a minimalist, Schumpeterian democratic theory, nor elevating disagreement and to a deliberative virtue non plus ultra. Given that the comparative dimension in this study is the relation between public sphere types and the media, we restrict our investigation to the analysis of debates around policy issues in one country, the UK. The design of its political institutions means that the UK is rather unresponsive to deliberative impulses, in comparison to other countries such as Switzerland, with its strong and direct democratic elements. It therefore presents a true real-world test of the degree to which the communicative rationality that ‘is inscribed in the linguistic telos of mutual understanding’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 4) finds its way into the media’s coverage of political debates that originate at opposing ends of the public sphere. To arrive at a deeper understanding of the structures and dynamics at play in these mass mediated discourses, we will analyse a broad theoretical sample of newspapers that reflects the mainstream space of public opinion and then pool the results of several case studies to arrive at representative results for each public sphere type, which we can then compare. The overall goal of this study is to integrate a theoretically informed account of deliberative democracy with an empirical analysis of the role of the media in the public sphere. In line with Dennis Thompson, we are generally interested in ‘trying to discover the conditions in which deliberative democracy does and does not work well’ (Thompson, 2008, p. 500). We proceed in several steps to analyse these conditions in more detail. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical background. Given that our study positions the mass media as comprised of the most important intermediary actors that dominate and structure the public sphere, we will closely follow the deliberative approach of Jürgen Habermas. His work presents not only an elaborate account of deliberative democracy that develops in great detail the formal properties of the deliberative procedure and thus serves as the theoretical basis for the empirical analysis. In contrast to many other approaches, it also conceives of deliberation as communicative flows on the macro level of society, which together constitute the political public sphere. In other words, while many of the different deliberative theories tell us in great detail how the interaction between individuals (inside and outside institutions) should be structured, they generally have little to say about how the political process as a whole should take place. As we will see, it is precisely Habermas’ renewed interest in theorising the public sphere 30 years after

Introduction

9

the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1989) that gives the theoretical model its critical edge and allows us to develop a normative framework against which mass media discourses can be evaluated. This will serve as the theoretical background from which we will derive a set of hypotheses that will guide the empirical analysis and centre on the differences between the two public sphere types as well as the role of the actor coalitions, whose interactions constitute them. Before we turn to the analysis proper, we will translate the complex theoretical model into an empirical instrument that allows us to reconstruct the deliberative quality of media discourses (chapter 3). Taking into account the approaches of Ferree et al. (2002) as well as Dahlberg (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2001d), but mainly following Steiner et al.’s (2004) work on the analysis of parliamentary debates, we compile a content analytical index that captures the single deliberative dimensions and thus allows us to assess the discursive quality of different debates and the public sphere types in which they are embedded. In contrast to the analysis of institutional settings, however, the analysis of the informal public sphere requires additional deliberative dimensions that assess the inclusiveness of the discourse. More than formal deliberations, the analysis of the media’s coverage also requires that we conceive of discourses not only as the sum of individual utterances, but also as the communicative networks that constitute the public sphere. Only this allows us to uncover the discursive dynamics that lead to differences in the deliberative quality of the public sphere types. Combining the content analytical data with the tools of social network analysis, we can model political debates as discursive fields that are established by the deliberative relationships between the actors. These deliberative networks can then be analysed with regard to their structural properties, and we will mainly concentrate on the hierarchy and the density of the networks as the two central aspects of deliberative processes. We then present the sampling strategy in more detail, focussing in particular on the properties of the political institutions of the UK and its media system. Lastly, we develop an approach for identifying political debates that correspond to the two basic public sphere types and can be located in a theoretical sample of newspapers that cover the mainstream space of public opinion. Chapters 4 and 5 carry out the actual analysis, and the first of these chapters is organised according to the single deliberative dimensions. This allows us to test each of them in detail in terms of the overall level of deliberative quality and with regard to the structure of the discursive field the actors establish in challenger- and centre-rooted public sphere types. Against much of the theoretical premises and the intuitive understanding of democratic discourse, it is not always the case that those public spheres anchored in civil society fare better – quite the contrary. On a number of dimensions, it is the more truncated, distorted and power-ridden discourses, where the political centre holds a hegemonic position, that achieve a higher deliberative quality. This is also evident in the analysis of the discursive

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networks, which yield ambivalent results regarding the cohesiveness and the balance of the different public spheres. One of the central consequences of the analyses of this first empirical part in Chapter 4 is that the sometimes counterintuitive and contradictory results can be explained by specific actor coalitions that drive and structure the debates. This assumption is tested in the second part of the analysis. Challenging some of the objections against deliberative approaches, which hold that it is an approach implicitly based on a harmonious concept of the lifeworld, the study finds that it is precisely the degree of conflict that most profoundly – and positively – affects the deliberative quality of political discourse.

Note 1 The British Government saw the joint Conference as a possibility to make greater advances in the fight against terrorism since the Troubles began in the 1960s, as many Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists operated from the Republic of Ireland. This overlapped with FitzGerald’s concern that the IRA and Sinn Féin, as its political wing, was apt to destabilise Ireland’s political system and increase the amount of politically motivated violence. The other reason behind the signing of the Agreement was to push the unionists into a devolved power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, as the Conference’s consultative role extended only ‘insofar as those matters are not the responsibility of a devolved administration in Northern Ireland’ (Grenville & Wasserstein, 2013, p. 481) as an important passage of the treaty states. For Ireland, the Agreement and the Conference as an institution, despite its limited political power, served to represent the interests of the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland (Bardon, 1992; O’Leary & McGarry, 2016).

References Albrecht, S. (2006). Whose voice is heard in online deliberation?: A study of participation and representation in political debates on the internet. Information, Community and Society, 9(1), 62–82. Bächtiger, A., Pedrini, S., & Ryser, M. (2010). Prozessanalyse politischer Entscheidungen: Deliberative Standards, Diskurstypen und Sequenzialisierung. In J. Behnke, J. Bräuninger, & S. Shikano (Eds.), Jahrbuch für Handlungs-und Entscheidungstheorie (pp. 193–226). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bardon, J. (1992). A history of Ulster. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions. Bohman, J. (2004). Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational democracy. The Sociological Review, 52(s1), 131–155. Caluwaerts, D., & Ugarriza, J. E. (2012). Favorable conditions to epistemic validity in deliberative experiments: A methodological assessment. Journal of Public Deliberation, 8(1), 1–20. Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cobb, R., Ross, J.-K., & Ross, M. H. (1976). Agenda building as a comparative political process. American Political Science Review, 70(1), 126–138. Cohen, J. (1989). Deliberative democracy and democratic legitimacy. In A. Hamlin & P. Pettit (Eds.), The Good Polity (pp. 17–34). New York: Blackwell.

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Costain, A., & Fraizer, H. (2000). Media portrayal of ‘Second Wave’ feminist groups. In S. Chambers & A. Costain (Eds.), Deliberation, democracy, and the media (pp. 155–174). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dahlberg, L. (2001a). Computer‐mediated communication and the public sphere: A critical analysis. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 7(1). doi:10.1111/ j.1083-6101.2001.tb00137.x Dahlberg, L. (2001b). Democracy via cyberspace. Mapping the rhetorics and practices of three prominent camps. New Media & Society, 3(2), 157–177. Dahlberg, L. (2001c). Extending the public sphere through cyberspace: The case of Minnesota E-Democracy. First monday, 6(3). doi:10.5210/fm.v6i3.838 Dahlberg, L. (2001d). The Internet and democratic discourse: Exploring the prospects of online deliberative forums extending the public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 4(4), 615–633. Delli Carpini, M. X. D., Cook, F. L., & Jacobs, L. R. (2004). Public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 7, 315–344. Dryzek, J. S. (2007). Theory, evidence, and the tasks of deliberation. In S. W. Rosenberg (Ed.), Deliberation, participation and democracy: Can the people govern? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 237–250. Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: Democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishkin, J. S., & Luskin, R. C. (2005). Experimenting with a democratic ideal: Deliberative polling and public opinion. Acta Politica, 40(3), 284–298. Grenville, J., & Wasserstein, B. (2013). The major international treaties of the twentieth century: A history and guide with texts. London: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2008). Medien, Märkte und Konsumenten–Die seriöse Presse als Rückgrat der politischen Öffentlichkeit. In J. Habermas, Ach, Europa (pp. 131–137). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Halpern, D., & Gibbs, J. (2013). Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1159–1168. Hart, R. (2000). The unheralded functions of campaign news. In S. Chambers & A. Costain (Eds.), Deliberation, democracy, and the media (pp. 85–105). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jaramillo, M. C., & Steiner, J. (2014). Deliberative transformative moments: A new concept as amendment to the Discourse Quality Index. Journal of Public Deliberation, 10(2), 1–22. Jarren, O. (2008). Massenmedien als Intermediäre. Zur anhaltenden Relevanz der Massenmedien für die öffentliche Kommunikation. M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 56(3–4), 329–346. Kies, R. (2010). Promises and limits of web-deliberation. New York: Springer. Kriesi, H. (2004). Strategic political communication. Mobilizing public opinion in ‘audience democracies’. In F. Esser & B. Pfetsch (Eds.), Comparing political communication: Theories, cases, and challenges (pp. 184–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Livingstone, S. (2009). On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address 2008. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 1–18. McAdam, D. (1996). Movement strategy and dramaturgic framing in democratic states: The case of the American Civil Rights movement. Research on Democracy and Society, 3, 155–176. McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. O’Leary, B., & McGarry, J. (2016). The politics of antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Page, B. I. (1996). Who deliberates?: Mass media in modern democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parkinson, J. (2006). Rickety bridges: Using the media in deliberative democracy. British Journal of Political Science, 36(1), 175–183. Pilon, D. (2009). Investigating media as a deliberative space: Newspaper opinions about voting systems in the 2007 Ontario provincial referendum. Canadian Political Science Review, 3(3), 1–23. Ryfe, D. M. (2005). Does deliberative democracy work? Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 8, 49–71. Simon, A., & Xenos, M. (2000). Media framing and effective public deliberation. Political Communication, 17(4), 363–376. Steiner, J. (2012). The foundations of deliberative democracy: Empirical research and normative implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, J., Bächtiger, A., Spörndli, M., & Steenbergen, M. R. (2004). Deliberative politics in action: Analyzing parliamentary discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, D. F. (2008). Deliberative democratic theory and empirical political science. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 11, 497–520. Tonge, J., Braniff, M., Hennessey, T., McAuley, J. W., & Whiting, S. (2014). The Democratic Unionist Party: From protest to power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weger Jr, H., & Aakhus, M. (2003). Arguing in Internet chat rooms: Argumentative adaptations to chat room design and some consequences for public deliberation at a distance. Argumentation and Advocacy, 40(1), 23–38. White, C. S. (1997). Citizen participation and the Internet: Prospects for civic deliberation in the information age. The Social Studies, 88(1), 23–28.

2

Democracy, discourse and the public sphere: the deliberative approach

Our research requires a normative account of democracy that puts an emphasis on the notion of the public sphere and the discourse by which it is constituted. The most promising theoretical models in this area are represented by the different deliberative approaches to democracy, as they make the public use of reason not only a visible element but the central dimension of the political process. Deliberative democracy is a fast growing field of philosophical inquiry – and increasingly also empirical research – to the extent that already in 2000 Dryzek wrote of a ‘deliberative turn’ in political theory, which broadly follows the linguistic turn of philosophy, and which foregrounds the discursive nature of politics. Regarded as one of the most promising approaches in democratic theory, Dryzek states that ‘[t]he essence of democracy itself is now widely taken to be deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even self-government’ (Dryzek, 2000, p. 1). In the following sections we will present in more detail one of the most influential accounts of deliberative democracy, Habermas’ (1996) discourse theoretical approach as presented in Between Facts and Norms, the close reading of which will serve as a guideline for our empirical model. One of the main advantages of the Habermasian approach in contrast to others is the incorporation of the macro level of society: it conceives of politics as a communicative process which establishes a public sphere connecting civil society and the political institutional apparatus. Compared to other influential accounts (e.g. Gutmann & Thompson, 1996) and contra much of the critique Habermas’ approach has received, at least the more recent conception of the public sphere (Habermas, 1996, 2006) is not based on the ideal of face-toface interaction (cf. Kellner, 2000; Schudson, 1997; J. B. Thompson, 1995), but models it as an abstract network resulting from the anarchic and asymmetric flows of communication in society around an issue. This conception allows us to locate the role of the media more clearly and offers distinct normative criteria to assess the deliberative quality of their coverage, which can then be translated into an analytical instrument. In order to proceed systematically, we will first introduce a general notion of deliberative democracy, before presenting the central tenets of the

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Habermasian account. We will then confront this model with the most prominent criticism it has received, which in turn will lead to explicating its central component, the public sphere, in more detail as set out in Between Facts and Norms. Indeed, as we will see, it is the very concept of the public sphere that gives the deliberative model its radical democratic edge and makes it pertinent for critical empirical inquiry. We will end the chapter by deriving a set of hypotheses from the theoretical premises that will guide the empirical analysis.

2.1 Deliberative democracy: a general definition Deliberative democracy is in very general terms a discursive, proceduralist approach for the resolution of democratic conflict and political decisionmaking. We can locate it further, on the one hand, by delimiting it against the main alternative, i.e. aggregative forms of decision-making. As Gutmann & Thompson (2004) as well as Young (2000) show, aggregative models of democracy take preferences as givens, consequently they view decisions as the sum of individual predispositions, without considering the interaction that takes place between participants in the political process, and they lack any normative criteria to evaluate them as they are anchored in rational choice theory. On the other hand, Habermas (1994) situates deliberative democracy as an own model between liberalism and republicanism. While the three models share common assumptions, i.e. the autonomy of individuals, a political community constituted by citizens and a public sphere anchored in civil society that connects it to the state, each of them has developed into a distinct theoretical account which gives more emphasis to one of these basic components. Glossing over some of the more detailed nuances, the main differences are that the liberal model emphasises the negative rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state, whereas the republican/communitarian one is, insofar as it is inspired by Rousseau, based on the idea of a selfgoverning political community, constituted by moral subjects who take the place of the bureaucratic state. The most important characteristic of the deliberative model is the critical role of the public sphere, rooted in a vibrant civil society as the discursive locus of democracy’s emancipatory potential, which is brought to bear on the political-administrative centre (Habermas, 1994). In a more systematic fashion and in slight variation from Freeman (2000), we can identify 10 elements that are shared by the different deliberative approaches and that distinguish them from other models: (1) citizens and their representatives do not only vote, more important than this they deliberate with one another, (2) these deliberations inform their judgments (3) about decisions which are in the public interest, i.e. they increase the common good. The participants of deliberative processes (4) perceive themselves and one another as free and equals, and (5) they take part in the political process against the background of basic constitutional rights.

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Moreover, (6) citizens’ preferences, i.e. their conceptions of the common good, might be at odds with those of others, they non-determined prior to deliberation and (7) independent of one another and the political purposes. The forming of preferences through deliberation (8) occurs through the exchange of public reasons in contrast to private ones, (9) the public reasons being those which are couched in terms of the common good, and which (10) can be identified irrespective of any concrete political issue as relating to the freedom, the equality and the independence of citizens. This is rather detailed and in some respects maybe even a somewhat restrictive list, but it serves to elucidate the different components of deliberative democracy and how they relate to one another. This provisional definition also contains different implicit arguments for a deliberative conception of democracy: deliberation forms and changes preferences and makes them more transparent. It includes different perspectives and leads to the participants’ adopting the other’s point of view, it is thus particularly inclusive of minorities and their perspectives, decreases self-interest and increases the use of public-spirited arguments, which on the whole leads to more legitimate decisions and makes them more acceptable even to those who endorse differing views. This takes place against the constitutional backdrop of free and equal citizens. Apart from these common core assumptions, the different approaches vary considerably with regard to the area in the political process on which they focus and how they conceptualise the deliberative procedure in detail. Given the research interest of our study, in the following we concentrate on the deliberative approach expounded by Habermas.

2.2 Morality, legitimacy and democracy: the Habermasian perspective The advantage of choosing a Habermasian perspective is threefold: first, Habermas clearly understands his conception as a contribution to the discourse theory of democracy, which reconstructs the basic communicative structures that constitute the political processes as democratic and deliberative. Second, his deliberative model therefore not only ties in with his earlier work on communicative action and discourse ethics, but also with his account of the structural transformation of the public sphere (Habermas, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c, 1990a, 1991). Third, Habermas provides an elaborate model of the political public sphere which ultimately gives the theory its critical edge and connects the deliberative moments residing in the communication of society and the political-administrative centre. Between Facts and Norms marks Habermas’ ‘political turn’ and thus the transition away from a discourse theory of morality as formulated in his contributions to discourse ethics, which in turn had followed his normative grounding of language and a formal pragmatic theory of meaning (Finlayson, 2005). Habermas’ conception of deliberative democracy can generally be read

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as the answer to the question of how a radical-democratic notion of political legitimacy can be accommodated in the modern nation-state. In line with other deliberative theorists, he conceives legitimacy as the outcome of a deliberative process. If legitimacy and deliberation are thus tied together, then ‘the discursive level of public debates constitutes the most important variable’ to assess the degree to which the outcome of a political process is legitimated (Habermas, 1996, p. 304). The deliberative procedure through which we adjudicate policy proposals and legally binding norms thus becomes the cornerstone in Habermas’ theoretical architecture, and he finds a promising proposal for how we can define its different dimensions in Cohen’s work on deliberative democracy (Cohen, 1989). On Habermas’ (1996, pp. 305–306) reading, Cohen outlines the deliberative procedure as: 1 2 3

4

5

6

7

an argumentative exchange of reasons and information, which is inclusive and public and where all those affected by the decision have equal chances to participate, which is free of external constraints, i.e. the participants are autonomous and only bound by the presuppositions of communicative rationality, which is equally free from internal constraints to the extent that every participant has the same chance of contributing to the debate by raising topics, suggesting or criticising proposals, etc. The yes/no positions of the participants are thus only governed by the unforced force of the better argument, which aims at a consensus that is rationally motivated, though given the pressure of time it may be concluded through the majority rule. In this case the results are still connected to the reasoning processes and may be revised if the minority succeeds in convincing the majority of its position, which touches on all matters that can be regulated in the equal interest of all, including private topics and in particular questions of the distributions of resources that affect the actual participation, and which allows participants to interpret their wants, needs and preference changes and extends to pre-political matters and attitudes.

Of course, Habermas is well aware that a deliberative procedure thus defined constitutes an ideal that cannot be realised in the ‘real world’. He argues, however, that it is a counterfactual ideal which the participants anticipate and which they can therefore invoke if the reality of the political process departs too much from it. Utopian as it may be, as a regulative ideal it has a real world effect and through this effect constitutes the communicative core structure of the political process – and by extension the public sphere.1 The deliberative procedure thus spells out in more detail the discourse principle (D) that Habermas had formulated as part of his cognitivist ethics. In that part of his work he gave Kant’s Categorical Imperative an

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intersubjective reading and stipulated: ‘Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse’ (Habermas, 1990a, p. 66). In the political context of law-making, D is transformed into a principle of democracy: ‘The discourse principle is intended to assume the shape of a principle of democracy only by way of legal institutionalization. The principle of democracy is what then confers legitimating force on the legislative process’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 121). Important for us is that D enshrines two distinct dimensions – a democratic one and an argumentative one. The democratic one is spelled out in the first part and specifies that all those possibly affected must have the opportunity to participate. The argumentative one is given by the participants engaging in a practical discourse structured according to the deliberative principles stated above, so that at the end the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 306) prevails. As we will see, these two sides – access and argumentation – are in tension with one another and they will play an important part in the empirical analysis of the public sphere types. Despite the similarities with Cohen, Habermas’ account differs in two crucial respects. First, and contra Cohen – and Dewey – he restricts the scope of deliberation to the political realm. Habermas argues convincingly that, on the one hand, democratic procedures depend on contexts in which they are embedded and which they cannot generate and regulate themselves, on the other such functional systems as the economy are not governed by discourses aimed at reaching a common understanding, but by the participants’ strategic actions oriented towards success.2 For these reasons deliberative politics is unable to become an all-pervasive structure that encompasses social complexity in its totality (Habermas, 1996, p. 305). Second, Cohen’s conception lacks important internal normative differentiations, which Habermas provides by basing his account more strongly on his discourse ethical model. In line with his previous work he maintains the distinction between three basic normative types of discourses, i.e. the pragmatic, the ethical and the moral one. The crucial development that we see in Habermas’ political turn is that he now sees these types of discourses as related to one another in a hierarchical order so that we can climb to a higher level whenever we fail to reach agreement on the current one. The pragmatic level is the most basic one and here we mostly deal with means-ends relations, but now in the context of political problems, for example, whether shops should stay open until midnight. Failing to reach an agreement on this level means that we can either leave our disagreements unresolved or we can move to the next level of discourse, the ethical-political one. Disagreement about opening hours of shops might be tied to different conceptions of what the good society should look like, how it should treat the workforce and what citizens in their roles as customers can expect. In short, the ethical level of the individual’s good life as conceived in discourse ethics now is translated into the question of a society’s identity and what the good society

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is. If we again fail to reach understanding on this level, we can still move to the level of moral discourse, where ‘we examine how we can regulate our common life in the equal interest of all. A norm is just only if all can will that it be obeyed by each in comparable situations’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 161). In our example, the question of opening hours of shops would now be discussed from the perspective of rightness, for example, whether all shops or only some should have longer opening hours, whether the effects for employees are justifiable, whether the demand side should always be able to dictate economic changes, who should have a say in taking the decision, etc. As we will see, these distinctions are important when we compile the sample of the debates that are representative of the two public sphere types as they define different kinds of issues and different levels of normative abstraction. But Habermas’ account does not stop with the reconstruction of the deliberative procedure, for in itself it says nothing about how the communicative processes of society as a whole are structured. In other words, models of deliberative democracy not only have to find an answer to the question of how the interaction in non-institutional and institutional settings ought to be organised, they also have to present a notion of democratic deliberation as a political process which shows how the single deliberative arenas are linked with one another.3 Habermas complements the deliberative model with a perspective of the political process which connects the loosely organised periphery of civil society with the politically administrative centre. The central component of this process is Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, which we will examine in more detail below. Before we come to this, however, we first have to address some of the criticism with which the Habermasian and other deliberative models of democracy have been confronted. This in turn directly leads to a concept of politics as a communicative public process. 2.2.1 Challenges and criticism of deliberative democracy Despite the ‘deliberative turn’ in political theory, the deliberative paradigm has not gone unchallenged. In this section we will review some of the most prominent criticism. Nearly all of the objections take issue with some form of restriction which the deliberative account presupposes, promotes or which it unwittingly harbours. Critique of deliberative theory has been voiced from different quarters of social and political theory, including rational and social choice, diversity and agonistic theories of democracy and postmodern or post structuralist challenges in general. Together, they raise important points, which have helped to clarify some of the central assumptions and concepts and to further develop deliberative theory.4 In the following we will first discuss what could be termed ‘general challenges’ and then move on to more specific concerns voiced by agonistic models and difference democrats, rational and social choice, before coming to the perhaps most provocative

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challenge of Habermas’ account by other deliberative democrats, who argue that the conception he presents has lost its critical edge. The ideal vs real challenge Probably the main criticism that can be levelled against deliberative democracy, above all in the variants spelled out by Habermas and Cohen, is that it simply presents an unrealistic account of the democratic process: the deliberative procedure might not overburden the individual morally as for instance Rousseau does (Manin, 1987), but it quite clearly overburdens the political process. By shifting the weight of idealisations, so to speak, the basic problem that as idealisations they are unrealistic is not solved: no exchange of reasons, be it behind closed doors, let alone in the anarchic structures of public communication, can ever live up to the deliberative template. In such general terms the objection is less of a critique than a misunderstanding. Deliberative democracy is a normative theory and therefore by its very nature has never attempted to provide a realist account of the political process. As Thompson (2008, p. 499) puts it: ‘Theory challenges political reality. It is not supposed to accept as given the reality that political science purports to describe and explain. It is intended to be critical, not acquiescent’. It is thus precisely the counterfactual idealisations that provide the yardstick with which we can measure and critically assess the reality of the political process. In fact, Bohman’s (2000) proposal of a theory of systematically distorted communication makes exactly use of this aspect, namely that we can identify the problematic aspects of the political process by using the idealised dimensions of deliberative democracy as a critical measure. A similar criticism, but pointing in a different direction, attacks deliberative democracy as being premised on the ideal of a harmonious lifeworld, which misses the point for although in Habermas’ conception the lifeworld is integrated through communicative action, this does not imply that it is a space free of conflict (cf. Henrich, 1999). First, as regards the communicative structure of the lifeworld, Habermas clarifies that ‘society presents itself as a symbolically structured lifeworld that reproduces itself through communicative action. Naturally, it does not follow from this that strategic interactions could not emerge in the lifeworld. But such interactions now have a different significance than they do in Hobbes or in game theory: they are no longer conceived as the mechanism for generating an instrumental order’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 524, fn. 18). Second, already in 1983 Habermas made a strong case for civil disobedience as the ‘litmus test for the democratic constitutional state’, which clearly belies the seeming harmony implied by his social and political philosophy (Habermas, 1983; in the English translation Habermas, 1985a; see also Habermas, 1996, pp. 382–384). Lastly, as Markell argues, on Habermas’ ‘account of discursive democracy, a legitimate democratic system is not only compatible with agonistic action but actually requires it’ (Markell, 1997, p. 391, emphasis in the original). Indeed, if deliberation is

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taken to be a mode of conflict resolution with other means than violence, then it logically presupposes the existence of some form of conflict prior to the actors’ deliberation. The challenge posed by agonistic and difference models A more radical form of this type of criticism takes issue with the outcome of the deliberative procedure, i.e. the rationally motivated consensus. Chantal Mouffe is a representative of this strand when she states that ‘the impediments to the Habermasian ideal speech situation are not empirical but ontological and the rational consensus that he presents as a regulative idea is in fact a conceptual impossibility. Indeed it would require the availability of a consensus without exclusion which is precisely what the agonistic approach reveals to be impossible’ (Mouffe, 2007, pp. 3–4). Elsewhere, Laclau & Mouffe argue that the very notion of antagonism forecloses consensus and ‘a fully inclusive “we”’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. xvii), and Mouffe makes the point very clear when stating that ‘[t]o negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and aim at a universal rational consensus – that is the real threat to democracy. Indeed, this can lead to violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to “rationality”, as is often the case in liberal thinking’ (Mouffe, 1996, p. 248). Mouffe’s three major criticisms of deliberative approaches to democracy are that they fail to grasp the conflictual nature of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’, that they are ‘trying to fix once and for all the meaning and hierarchy of the central liberal-democratic values’ (Mouffe, 2000, p. 93) and that they exclude passions by prioritising logical-rational argumentation. The charge that deliberative theory – or liberalism for that matter – is blind to conflict is rather hard to follow, given that deliberative approaches are conceived as models of conflict resolution as we have already remarked above. They thereby presuppose conflict, without it there would be no need for deliberation; we switch to practical discourse when we question or contest validity claims: ‘[s]ome basic disagreement is necessary to create the problem that deliberative democracy is intended to solve’ as Thompson (2008, p. 502) puts it.5 The only statement deliberative democrats make in this respect is that deliberative accounts are able to process conflict in a better way than the existing alternatives. Moreover, they do not require actors to deliberate all the time: given the dual character of law and of the actor’s attitudes, deliberative theory leaves room for bargaining between actors oriented towards success or when they fail to reach agreement. The charge against consensus, which deliberative models posit in different conceptual distinctions, is even less plausible.6 For one thing, consensus is part of the idealisations of the deliberative model and thus allows us to assess and compare real world political processes, and to do so, moreover, to reveal the effects of hidden power structures. Surprisingly, perhaps, Mouffe herself relies on consensus as a decision procedure, although she refers to it

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as a ‘conflictual consensus’, which highlights the fact that it is only to be seen as temporary, as particularly disagreements about basic principles such as freedom, equality and tolerance might continue (Mouffe, 2000). This characterisation hardly differs from most notions of consensus deliberative theory offers, including those of Gutmann & Thompson as well as Habermas, who is very clear that every decision taken is only provisional, as in post-traditional societies there are no longer ultimate reasons.7 The third objection concerns a seeming paradox of the deliberative model: although it aims at including all those affected by norms of actions, the rationalistic nature of deliberation privileges merely a select few, a deliberative elite versed in the art of argumentation as difference democrats fear (Young, 1996). In addition to this, deliberation’s rationalism is said to oppress the role of passions, which according to Mouffe are necessary to sustain democracy. This criticism ties in with concerns diversity theory has voiced about the cultural contingency of what counts as reasons (Williams, 2000). If we adopt a Habermasian perspective we can see that the charge of excessive rationalism – and Mouffe is by far not the only one to level it against the deliberative programme – is mostly based on a misreading of what communicative rationality means. To be sure, as Thompson (2008, p. 502) points out, not every act of communication or not every raising of a validity claim, to use Habermas’ terminology, is to be qualified as deliberation: everyday conversations and political discussions are not deliberation oriented towards decision.8 But within the conceptual frame of what counts as deliberation, participants are free to use all kinds of speech acts and raise constative, regulative and expressive validity claims.9 The boundaries of communicative rationality consists only where validity claims are so idiosyncratic that the hearer fails to reconstruct under what conditions a speech act could be made acceptable – and hence understandable. While Habermas does not rule out tout court the innovative character of such ‘private evaluations’, he emphasises that as a rule ‘idiosyncratic expressions follow rigid patterns; their semantic context is not set free by the power of poetic speech or creative construction and thus has a merely privatistic character’ (Habermas, 1984a, p. 17). It is certainly true that the realm of the expressive and the aesthetic is underdeveloped in Habermas’ theory compared to the other dimensions, yet at the same time he is very explicit about the status of passions and emotions when he states that ‘[f]eelings seem to have a similar function for the moral justification of action as sense perceptions have for the theoretical justification of facts’ (Habermas, 1990a, p. 50).10 Michael Neblo makes the additional point that ‘for Habermas, the opposite of reason, in his technical sense, is not emotion, but rather unlegitimated power’ (Neblo, 2007, p. 531). We can say that deliberative models give not the same explicit emphasis to emotions11 as they do to practical reason (in a narrow sense), but that is not Mouffe’s charge.12 Similarly, other genres of communication such as narratives, testimonies, etc. are not excluded, but ‘argument always has to be central to deliberative democracy. The other forms can be present, and there are good

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reasons to welcome them, but their status is a bit different because they do not have to be present’ as Dryzek (2000, p. 71, emphasis in the original) points out. The challenge by rational and social choice theory Rational choice theory’s basic objection to deliberative democracy is that it ignores or marginalises the fact that political action is above all strategic, i.e. individuals seek to maximise their predetermined preferences (Austen-Smith & Feddersen, 2006).13 In contrast to deliberative democracy’s emphasis of the communicative dimension with its goal of reaching a mutually shared understanding, rational choice seems to grasp the true nature of the political – pushing through one’s interests in a contest for power – while it unmasks the deliberative element as serving merely as a cover for the legitimation of what are essentially self-interested actions. Yet, however accurately this view seems to depict our daily experience with political processes, rational choice’s conception of the individual as an egoistic pay-off maximiser rests on a questionable basic assumption about human nature. For in order to be consistent, the theory has to presuppose that people’s preferences are somehow predetermined and invariant and thus do not change in the course of social or political interaction. This is a rather strong behaviourist position which seems hardly plausible in itself, and nor does it appear to be an accurate description of social and political reality. Deliberative democracy, in contrast, not only offers an explanation for the genesis of preferences and their internal structure, but more importantly also uncovers those elements of the interaction – i.e. the institutional design – that might permit preference transformation (Goodin, 2000; Gutmann & Thompson, 1996; Habermas, 1996).14 Social choice theory’s criticism of deliberative democracy in turn has, among other things, focused exactly on the transformative character of the deliberative procedure. Social choice theory (Arrow, 2012) does not question so much the relevance of deliberative practices, but rather points to the fact that deliberation – if broadly institutionalised – can have counterproductive effects with regard to its aims. For rather than reaching a unanimous consensus, debate and discussion might actually uncover further differences between the participants or lead to awkward preference cycles so that finding agreement on purely deliberative grounds becomes impossible (Hardin, 1990; Riker, 1982). Yet, as Dryzek (2000) clearly points out, deliberative democracy seems to work in the opposite direction and thus reduces multiple peaked preference orderings by uncovering underlying dimensions. Of course, deliberation can just as well increase issue dimensions and options, but it need not lead to complicating the political process, nor is such an aspect constitutive of the deliberative idea. What is more, we have to see that in the case where issue dimensions increase during a discussion, this is not a result artificially induced by the deliberative process. Rather, deliberation can help to uncover and articulate lines of conflict and disagreement – and

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in its ideal state it can then make them amenable to a discourse which leads to a consensual solution. Furthermore, more recent efforts have attempted to integrate the seemingly antagonistic schools of deliberative democracy and social choice theory in a common framework (Dryzek & List, 2003). A second point raised by social choice theory concerns mainly those deliberative theorists and empirical researchers working in the area of (institutional) decision-making, and although it is therefore of no immediate interest to our study, we will address it for the sake of completeness. As Arrow (2012) shows, it is impossible to devise a voting system or a collective choice mechanism that is not prone to fall into dictatorship or to be manipulated by some actors. This is a point also shared by rational choice theorists, mainly Austen-Smith (1992), who argues that talk is cheap as it involves no costs for the manipulating actor. Deliberative theory is rather unperturbed by the former claim, as it is not clear how discussions among free and equals along the lines of deliberative principles could lead to dictatorship, given that the procedure works to exclude internal and external constraints (see above). The latter statement, however, more clearly seems to reflect the political reality of day-to-day politics. Yet, we have to see that deliberative democratic processes in the real world do not neutralise strategic action right away, rather the claim is more modest and consists in making it in the long run more difficult for purely strategic actors to be successful. Deliberative democracy places discursive checks on the actors insofar as they can neither convincingly represent contradicting positions at the same time (e.g. politicians who simultaneously advocate the welfare state and its abolition in order to gain votes from opposing camps), nor positions that directly contradict their actions (e.g. politicians who advocate pro-business policies and protest with environmentalists against oil companies), nor justify positions and actions with reasons that were tested and found to be wanting in comparable contexts (e.g. politicians who advocate welfare cuts by arguing that it reduces the state’s deficit and boosts the economy, although this has been shown not to work). All this only works in the long run and involves many different actors that exchange reasons and probe positions, but this is precisely the nature of the political process. To portray it, as Austen-Smith and others do, as a one-shot affair grossly misrepresents its basic characteristics. The radical challenge This challenge applies exclusively to Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms and is mostly voiced by disenchanted fellow deliberative democrats. The main issue here is whether his account of democracy compared to his previous work still retains a radical-democratic element. Prominent voices such as those of James Bohman (1994) and William Scheuerman (1999) think not; they contend that Habermas’ theory has lost its critical edge and taken a turn towards the conservative side of liberalism. The main thrust of their

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scepticism is directed against the radical element in Habermas’ account, i.e. the role of the informal public sphere, whose conceptual space is too narrow to be able to play a decisive, emancipatory role in a political process that is dominated by the administrative system. Moreover, on the level of the theoretical architecture they think that Habermas gives too much weight to systems theory. We will try to dispel Bohman’s and Scheuerman’s criticism by recovering the radical core in Habermas’ approach, which will lead us to the central role of the public sphere in his model of deliberative democracy.15 Based on the diagnosis of Robert Dahl (1989), Habermas concedes that modern societies are too complex to be regulated discursively in all their aspects, deliberative politics would be overburdened cognitively as citizens lack the necessary operative knowledge (Steuerungswissen).16 Habermas is also aware that the political system and the legislative process, despite relying on public opinion, is not controlled directly by communicative power: ‘Discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration but can only influence it’ (Habermas, 1992b, p. 452). The resulting relative autonomy of the administrative system is something that Bohman and Scheuerman view critically. Yet as Grodnick (2005, p. 396) points out: ‘[w]e should not make too much of this administrative autonomy, and yet this is precisely what Scheuerman and Bohman do. They do not clearly distinguish the technical autonomy of administrative systems from their lack of independence in all other areas. In other words, Habermas concedes only one point: technical operations of administrative organizations are beyond the immediate control of the public sphere, but in all other capacities they are subordinate bodies’. Indeed, Habermas is very clear about the relationship between law, legitimacy and communicative power: In the system of public administration, there is concentrated a power that must always regenerate itself anew out of communicative power. Thus the law is not only constitutive for the power code that steers administrative processes. It represents at the same time the medium for transforming communicative power into administrative power. The idea of the constitutional state can therefore be expounded with the aid of principles according to which legitimate law is generated from communicative power and the latter in turn is converted into administrative power via legitimately enacted law. (Habermas, 1996, p. 169) Communicative power, in turn, is generated from public opinion and hence the public sphere. The degree to which Habermas’ account can accommodate a radical notion of democracy thus hinges on his conception of the latter. Habermas proposes a two-track model of the public sphere which connects a ‘weak’, informal public sphere to a ‘strong’, formal one: the informal public sphere is based in the associational networks of civil society where social problems are identified, articulated and from where the

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discursively formed opinions slowly move upwards until they reach the legislative-administrative complex, i.e. the strong public (see below for a more detailed account). If the informal public is to connect to the formal one, society must be organised in a way so as to foster the communicative freedom citizens, the anarchic structure of the informal public sphere and its revolutionary nature (Grodnick, 2005, p. 401) in terms of the communicative power it must be able to unleash, as well as the responsiveness of the formal political institutions. It is thus the informal public sphere that is decisive for the generation of democratic legitimacy and which carries the promise of social emancipation: In the proceduralist paradigm, the public sphere is not conceived simply as the back room of the parliamentary complex, but as the impulsegenerating periphery that surrounds the political center: in cultivating normative reasons, it affects all parts of the political system without intending to conquer it. Passing through the channels of general elections and various forms of participation, public opinions are converted into a communicative power that authorizes the legislature and legitimates regulatory agencies, while a publicly mobilized critique of judicial decisions imposes more-intense justificatory obligations on a judiciary engaged in further developing the law. (Habermas, 1996, p. 442, emphasis in the original) Contrary to the charge of conservatism, Habermas’ approach to deliberative democracy thus reveals to be very much in line with his unfinished project of modernity and he locates the emancipatory moment clearly within the political process. It is precisely ‘the subjectless forms of communication that regulate the flow of discursive opinion- and will-formation in such a way that their fallible results enjoy the presumption of being reasonable’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 301), where radical democracy and political legitimacy are intertwined and which conceives of the political public sphere as a communicative process. We present this central concept of the deliberative approach in more detail in the next section, focussing thereby in particular on the role of the media.

2.3 The deliberative public sphere Habermas’ first, interdisciplinary examination of the development of the public sphere in Western democracies, which culminated in the The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1989) was equally influential for the ‘second generation’ of the Frankfurt School as it was for Habermas’ own progress as a critical thinker, and it touched upon many topics to which he would later return. At the same time, the book proved to be highly controversial and met with ample criticism from all quarters, particularly after it was published in English almost 30 years after its initial publication in German.

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In Structural Transformation, Habermas argues that the unconstrained discussions between bourgeois in the coffee houses, salons and clubs of the eighteenth century is the historical locus where the utopian ideal of a public sphere based in civil society is articulated for the first time. It challenges the power of the state by transmitting its needs, on the one hand, and holding it accountable, on the other hand, thus transforming the nature of political power by submitting it to the principle of publicity; in other words, it rationalises political power through the compelling insight (zwingende Einsicht) of the public use reason and thus through the very idea of Enlightenment itself. Of course, the historical reality is quite a different one, and measured by its own standards the bourgeois public sphere is a contradiction in terms in so far as is undermines its own principles of free and equal access and inclusion and critical-rational examination of the common good. This is the context in which Habermas’ makes his main argument, holding that despite its many shortcomings in practice, the utopian thrust of the idea of the public sphere remains untouched. In fact, however transitory, partial and scattered the public sphere took on real forms in the eighteenth century, much of the social and political development since then can be read in terms of a struggle to realise the underlying idea. Against this emancipatory dynamic, however, Habermas equally depicts the further development of the public sphere as increasingly re-feudalised by an interventionist state, on the one hand, and by commercial interests – nota bene including those of the media – and public relations, on the other hand. These factors together with the rise of a consumer culture form a syndrome which leads to the irreversible erosion of the public sphere. As succinct, profound and compelling as Habermas’ reconstructive diagnosis was for some, others perceived it as incomplete, distorted and defective. Liberals, historians and feminists argued that Habermas’ depiction of the eighteenth-century public sphere was an inaccurate and artificial amalgam concocted from different sources of philosophy, social history and political theory, which never existed as such (Jäger, 1973); that despite its liberalegalitarian basis the public sphere was in fact constituted by power structures that excluded the uneducated, the poor and women (Eley, 1992; Fraser, 1990; Ryan, 1992); and that his diagnosis of decline reveals a hidden elitism as Habermas ignores the challenges and extension of the bourgeois public sphere through proletarian alternatives, on the one hand, and the mass media, on the other hand (Negt & Kluge, 1972). Nancy Fraser (1990), herself a critical theorist, adds to the list three additional problematic assumptions. She takes particular issue with the notion of a single, overarching public sphere, the restriction of discourses to debating the common good and the clear separation between civil society and the state. The system theoretical charge in turn faults Habermas for his naïve faith in a collective public opinion that has become impossible in the highly complex and differentiated societies of late modernity (Luhmann, 1970a). Public debate can only identify issues, which must then be processed by specialised

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organisations, as the co-operative public search for the common good would necessarily overburden the public sphere. In the final analysis this means that the public sphere loses its rational-critical role. Given the damning nature of some of the verdicts, how has Habermas responded to the challenges posed by his critics? Partly, they have been answered by the development of Habermas’ theory in the decades that lie between the publication of Structural Transformation in German (1962) and in English (1989) as Fraser (1990) notes. This is particularly the case for the dimension of inclusiveness, i.e. the absence of external and internal constraints, as well as for Habermas’ broadened understanding about the topics of political debates, which need not merely revolve around (a preconceived notion of) the common good. Similarly, Habermas’ engagement with systems theory, above all in the versions of Parsons (1949, 1951) and later Luhmann (1968, 1970b) has led him to a more complex perspective of society as comprising a lifeworld and a system component which are connected to each other (Habermas & Luhmann, 1971). Building on Parsons’ approach, Habermas argues that the bureaucratic administration and the economy are steered by the non-linguistic media of power and money, and the task of critical theory is to identify the pathologies that both generate by colonising the lifeworld, as he explains in the Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984a, 1984b). Related to this, although of less importance in our context, in his reading of Piaget’s (1999) cognitive developmental psychology and above all Kohlberg’s (1981) stages of moral development, he adopts the perspective that social change is not only externally induced through system dynamics, and that the associated learning processes do not only take place in objectivetechnical terms, but significantly also in the normative dimension (Habermas, 1976). The discourse ethical approach (Habermas, 1990a, 1991) finally has allowed him to spell out more clearly the internal complexity and the preconditions of practical discourse as we have seen above. Pulling together these different theoretical strands, how does Habermas depict the public sphere within his theory of deliberative democracy? In line with the development of Habermas’ programme of modernity as an unfinished project, where the normative structure of language and its inherent telos of reaching understanding becomes more and more central, he shapes out more clearly the procedural nature of the political process. The dimension of law gains importance as it is that medium which communicates with all other subsystems of the late modern, complex society – even those that are steered by non-linguistic media. If this is the case, then the crucial question is how law’s authority is legitimated, and it is here that the public sphere comes into play. While on an abstract level Habermas depicts the process still as a connection between lifeworld and system, it is now clearly less monolithic and unitary, and in line with Fraser’s criticism the sharp separation of civil society and the state is weakened: there is no direct causal link between the two, although the two domains are still characterised by specific functions and communicative modes and logics.

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But Habermas’ account does not stop here, for this basic model still says nothing about the direction that the relationship between civil society and the state takes. Adopting Cobb et al.’s (1976) agenda-building typology, Habermas distinguishes three basic forms the political process can take: the ‘inside access’ model defines a political process where the initiative comes from the political centre and the debate remains very much contained within the institutional confines, while the public is excluded from participation and might merely be informed about the results. The ‘mobilisation’ model takes the same point of departure, but here the proponents and/or opponents of the issue seek support for the position outside the political centre and thus mobilise the public sphere, either to put an issue on the formal agenda or to implement a political programme. Only the third instance is desirable from the point of view of deliberative theory as in the ‘outside initiative’ model the initiative lies with civil society, which transmits its issues to the political centre, where they are then formally processed through the pressure generated by public opinion. This general conception of the political process presents a considerable difference to the public sphere depicted in Structural Transformation and it also shows Luhmann’s influence in that the possibility of civil society gaining influence through public opinion has become more modest.17 In line with this view, Habermas conceives of an ordinary and an extraordinary mode of problem-solving and a corresponding circulation of political power. To avoid overburdening citizens with ‘operational knowledge’ means that for the most part political problems are articulated and solved by the centre in what – following Peters (1993) – can be referred to as a ‘routine mode’: the election campaigns conducted by parties, the administration’s preparing of laws to be passed by parliament as well as the judgments delivered by courts all follow established patterns. It is only in cases of conflict that these semiclosed routines become open and the political system switches to an ‘extraordinary mode’ of problem-solving. It is here that civil society and the pressure of public opinion it co-generates through the public sphere have a chance to make themselves felt and can initiate a political process of which they are ultimately the addressees. Habermas is aware that even on this reading he places a considerable normative burden on civil society. Following the work of Cohen & Arato (1994) as well as Fraser’s suggestion, he no longer conceives of civil society as based on private individuals but as what could be best described as associational networks of organisations which promote the generation of an informal public opinion: [t]he expectations are directed at the capacity to perceive, interpret, and present society-wide problems in a way that is both attentioncatching and innovative. The periphery can satisfy these strong expectations only insofar as the networks of noninstitutionalized public communication make possible more or less spontaneous processes of

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opinion-formation. Resonant and autonomous public spheres of this sort must in turn be anchored in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns of political culture and socialization; in a word, they depend on a rationalized lifeworld that meets them halfway. (Habermas, 1996, p. 358) The public sphere is neither an instance of social order, nor a framework of norms with specialised roles and competences, nor can it be conceived as a system as it is characterised primarily by permeable boundaries. At best, it can be described as ‘a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 360, emphasis in the original). The more communication becomes detached and independent from concrete and episodic instances of the public spaces in which it appears, the more the abstract nature of the public sphere comes to the fore, which connects scattered readers, listeners or viewers mainly through their interaction with the media. At the same time, the informal public sphere of the weak public is unburdened from having to take decisions; it merely articulates preferences, opinions and beliefs, which are filtered into affirmative and negative contributions. The important point here is how Habermas defines ‘public opinion’, a term which he had surprisingly left somewhat weakly denoted in Structural Transformation. In deliberative terms, public opinion refers to both ‘the controversial way it comes about and the amount of approval that “carries” it’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 362).18 On this reading, public opinion has two components: a quantitative one, which is given by the rate of approval, and a qualitative one, given by the discourse quality on which the opinion is based; Habermas, though, is quick to emphasise that public opinion ‘is not representative in the statistical sense. It is not an aggregate of individually gathered, privately expressed opinions held by isolated persons. Hence it must not be confused with survey results’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 362). More important than the mere quantitative aspect is the requirement that the discursive process has been exhaustive. Habermas makes the point very clear when he states that ‘the success of public communication is not intrinsically measured by the requirement of inclusion either but by the formal criteria governing how a qualified public opinion comes about. The structures of a power-ridden, oppressed public sphere exclude fruitful and clarifying discussions. The “quality” of public opinion, insofar as it is measured by the procedural properties of its process of generation, is an empirical variable. From a normative perspective, this provides a basis for measuring the legitimacy of the influence that public opinion has on the political system’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 362). This is, in a nutshell, what the present study attempts to do within the limited boundaries of its setting.

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There is no simple, causal relationship between public opinion, on the one hand, and political power, on the other hand. Public opinion can only generate influence, which in turn becomes relevant insofar as it has an effect on the convictions and the actions of authorised members of the political system, i.e. the strong public, such as MPs, members of committees, civil servants, etc. Influence is thus the critical communicative component for which the different actors compete and their success ultimately depends on their ability to convince the hearers, i.e. the audience. Status, reputation and social influence certainly play a role and public opinions can be manipulated to a certain extent, but Habermas is adamant that they cannot be ‘publicly bought nor publicly blackmailed’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 364). Furthermore, Habermas now defines the distinction between the realms of the public and the private differently and more abstractly: it is no longer marked by specific topics or relationships, but by different conditions of communication, i.e. the private sphere is not to be seen as a hermetically sealed space, but connected to the public through the flow of topics between the two domains. And the contemporary public sphere is not anchored in the private sphere of the bourgeoisie, but in a civil society that explicitly excludes the realm of the economy, which was the very basis of the public sphere in Habermas’ original study. He now defines civil society as being ‘composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations, and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private life spheres, distill and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 367). The public sphere then can only come into existence if it is connected to the lifeworld contexts of those affected by norms of action as the lifeworld has ‘the appropriate antennae [for social problems], for in its horizon are intermeshed the private life histories of the “clients” of functional systems that might be failing in their delivery of services’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 365).19 At the same time, Habermas is aware that civil society can only provide the basis or the starting point of a public sphere conceived as a process, and it is not even its most obvious element, he contends, although it is the indispensable communicative resource of political legitimacy. Habermas’ main point therefore consists in showing that his conception of civil society and the public sphere are not merely normatively desirable, but that they are empirically relevant. Equipped now with a more complex theoretical framework, he thus returns to answer the question he had posed himself in Structural Transformation more than 30 years earlier, namely whether it is possible in our contemporary society for ‘the public […] to set in motion a critical process of public communication through the very organizations that mediatize it’ (Habermas, 1989, p. 232). As a communicative process, the public sphere retains its status as an intermediary structure located between, on the one hand, the political system and, on the other hand, the lifeworld as well as other functionally specialised systems. As a structure, Habermas states, it:

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constitutes a highly complex network that branches out into a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional, local, and subcultural arenas. Functional specifications, thematic foci, policy fields, and so forth, provide the points of reference for a substantive differentiation of public spheres that are, however, still accessible to laypersons (for example, popular science and literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist and “alternative” publics, publics concerned with health-care issues, social welfare, or environmental policy). Moreover, the public sphere is differentiated into levels according to the density of communication, organizational complexity, and range – from the episodic publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through the occasional or “arranged” publics of particular presentations and events, such as theater performances, rock concerts, party assemblies, or church congresses; up to the abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographic areas, or even around the globe, and brought together only through the mass media. (Habermas, 1996, pp. 373–374) The mass media connect and structure issue specific discourses that are scattered in different smaller and larger public spheres, which remain porous for each other and which ‘ground a potential for self-transformation’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 374, emphasis in the original). An autonomous public sphere is thus characterised by undistorted communication processes that are rooted in, or initiated by, civil society and retain a connection to the lifeworld. The central role of the media in modern societies means that a new form of power takes shape: the power of the media is given by their function in reducing social complexity and the accompanying necessity to select issues, actors and arguments. The communicative influence in the public sphere hence, in the first instance, depends upon passing the media’s selection mechanisms. As a consequence of this, elite actors commanding larger resources and anticipating the media’s communicative logic through professionalised communicative contributions, have an advantage over loosely organised, weakly financed organisations with little prestige and operating at the margins of civil society. Despite these asymmetries, Habermas maintains that the autonomous public sphere is not a mere utopia. The professional code of journalists, their ethical self-conception as well as the legal context in which they are embedded ‘express a simple idea: the mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatary of an enlightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they at once presuppose, demand, and reinforce; like the judiciary, they ought to preserve their independence from political and social pressure; they ought to be receptive to the public’s concerns and proposals, take up these issues and contributions impartially, augment criticisms, and confront the political process with articulate demands for legitimation’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 378). It is important to note that this represents not so much a substantive code of conduct of

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the journalistic profession, to which one can adhere or reject, as it simply spells out the basic insights of deliberative theory in the context of the media and the role of journalists. Journalists occupy a complex dual position, where they act as both discourse facilitators and participants, i.e. they not only organise the dominant part of the public sphere by integrating different actors and their positions, they also take part in it through their own contributions and thus also act as discursive representatives of actors and/or positions. Although it is an empirical question to determine to what extent structures of power and strategic action shape the public space, the plurality of the media system which at least to some extent contributes to a certain degree of responsiveness, a plurality of positions as well as the dual role of journalists means that there are chances for a deliberative public sphere to come into being under certain conditions. Habermas takes the realist view that the courant normal of politics corresponds mostly to a public sphere of the ‘inside access’ or the ‘mobilisation’ type which equally describe a public sphere at rest. Yet, in a situation of crisis, actors from civil society can play a more active role and may, indeed, have a significant effect on the political process as the larger issues such as the debates about the risks of nuclear energy or genetic engineering, the continuing impoverishment of the Third World, etc. show (Habermas, 1996, p. 381). A public sphere constituted through the initiative of civil society ‘activates an otherwise latent dependency built into the internal structure of every public sphere, a dependency also present in the normative self-understanding of the mass media: the players in the arena owe their influence to the approval of those in the gallery’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 382). A further effect of this is that the public sphere displays a dual discursive structure in the sense that, on the one hand, it constitutes itself around social problems in the form of specific issues as their focal points and, on the other hand, it also always has itself as a permanent (sub-)topic: ‘with each important contribution, public discourse must keep alive both the meaning of an undistorted political public sphere as such and the very goal of democratic will-formation. The public sphere thereby continually thematizes itself as it operates, for the existential presuppositions of a nonorganizable practice can be secured only by this practice itself’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 486). The deliberative public sphere thus conceived describes a process dominated by the mass media, which connect civil society to the political centre and thereby transform communicative power into political influence. In a more recent article, Habermas (2008) depicts this process as illustrated in Figure 2.1. He is aware that deliberation ‘is a demanding form of communication’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 413), although he maintains that the burden is lessened as deliberation is at the same time a discursive practice that is embedded in the ‘daily routines of asking for and giving reasons. […] An implicit reference to rational discourse – or the competition for better reasons – is built into communicative action as an omnipresent alternative to routine behaviour’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 413, emphasis in the original). Still, the general increase

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Modes of communication

Arenas of political communication

Institutionalised discourses and negotiations

Political system Government, administration, parliament, judiciary, etc. Institutions of the state

Mass communication in scattered public spheres supported by the media

Published

Audience Communication among addressees

Media system

opinion

Politicians Lobbyists Civil society actors

Political public sphere

Opinion poll results

Arranged and informal relationships, social networks Civil society and social movements

Figure 2.1 Arenas of political communication Note: Adapted from Habermas (2008, p. 165), author’s translation.

in political communication in Western societies has not automatically led to an equal increase in deliberation – quite to the contrary: Habermas cites the lack of face-to-face interaction as well as the lack of reciprocity between speakers and hearers as defining features of the political process. Against this sombre view, Habermas makes the case that mass mediated political communication does not have to correspond to the deliberative ideal in the same way that we would expect political institutions to conform to it. Deliberation in the public sphere is also relieved of the burden to have to reach a consensus – or any other form of decision. Generally, the functions of the informal public sphere consist in mobilising and pooling relevant issues, providing relevant information and interpretations, processing contributions argumentatively and filtering them into a spectrum of pro and contra positions, contributing to the formation of considered opinions, which in turn provide the agenda for political institutions and are connected to the outcome of formally correct decision procedures. It is evident that Habermas’ notion of the public sphere has changed considerably compared to the initial formulation, and as it has increased in its complexity, he has been able to overcome most of the obstacles raised by the various critics. It occupies a central role not only in Habermas’ own, but in any deliberative approach to democracy, and it is indeed precisely the notion of the public sphere that differentiates the Habermasian account from those of other fellow deliberative democrats. As the public sphere gives the model of deliberative democracy its radical edge, it is precisely this aspect that our study seeks to investigate empirically. In the following section we will formulate a set of hypotheses that focus on the most important theoretical aspects and will guide the analyses in the empirical part.

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2.4 Hypotheses Given the exploratory nature of the present study, the hypotheses are of a more general kind and serve as the broad guiding lines of the analysis, rather than representing detailed assumptions about single, specific aspects of the public sphere. From the perspective of our study, we are particularly interested in the role of the media, as they are the dominant actors in structuring public discourse. Together with Habermas and following Cobb et al. (1976), we can distinguish two basic public sphere types, a deliberative and a nondeliberative one. The deliberative public sphere is initiated by members and organisations from civil society, who articulate grievances, make demands, utter criticism of the status quo and, in their struggle for (discursive) recognition (Honneth, 1996), aim at getting the political-administrative system to leave its routine mode and respond to their impulses by introducing new legislation. The political process sketched in this way corresponds to an inclusive public sphere, where different perspectives are presented, affirmative and negative reasons exchanged and where we can – in the long run – expect the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ to prevail. In contrast to this stand the two other public sphere types, both of which have their starting point in the political-administrative centre and which for reasons of analytical simplification we will treat on a par. Their common characteristic is that they involve civil society only to a marginal degree – if at all – and the involvement is often strategic rather than truly deliberative. Public spheres of this type are either initiated for the simple reason to inform the public about a decision that was taken, without any deliberative intention that would go beyond the communication of the current state of affairs, or political actors seek to mobilise public opinion to extract support for their own ends and gain the upper hand in a debate with other representatives of the centre. In both cases, the public sphere as a discursive space is rather restricted in terms of the participating actors as well as the spectrum of justifications. The basic opposition thus runs between, on the one hand, autonomous public spheres, anchored in civil society that generate a broad, inclusive discursive space and correspondingly high levels of deliberation and, on the other hand, instances of more or less power-ridden political processes, initiated by – and sometimes limited to – actors from the political-administrative centre and characterised by a narrow use of public reason. These two public sphere types can be further specified according to the normative dimension of the debate, i.e. whether it occurs on a pragmatic, ethical-political or on a moral level. Moreover, political discourses can be broadly categorised according to the cleavage they address. According to Lipset and Rokkan, social conflict becomes politically salient and articulates a cleavage when it follows a clear line of division such as the socio-economic status or demographic factors, when it is clear for individuals on which side they are situated and when this division becomes resonant with the political parties, which

Democracy, discourse and the public sphere 20

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then articulate competing positions. We can reduce their cleavage typology to two generic types, the material divide, on the one hand, and the cultural one, on the other hand, which lie at the heart of most political conflicts (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). Although the public sphere type, normative level and cleavage structure together open up numerous possible combinations, we can identify two typical issue configurations: material debates that address pragmatic aspects and are initiated by challengers, i.e. those actors without a formal access to political decision-making institutions (Kriesi, 2004) represent one kind. From this, we can distinguish cultural issues that are discussed on an ethicalpolitical level and primarily promoted by the actors from the politicaladministrative complex. This categorisation necessarily excludes equally interesting and important public sphere types, but the focus on two of the most prominent ones allows us to highlight any empirical differences between them more clearly. As a first step in the analysis we therefore contrast challenger and centre public sphere types with respect to the level of their discursive quality. In Chapter 3 we will develop a content analytical instrument that allows us to capture more clearly the different dimensions of deliberation that we have spelled out in the theoretical account. Based on this background, we generally assume that challenger public spheres display a higher discursive quality on all deliberative dimensions as opposed to centre public spheres. Hypotheses 1 and 2 below will guide the analyses of the first empirical part (Chapter 4), which examines the discursive space created by the public spheres, and will be further specified into different sub-hypotheses when investigating the single deliberative dimensions. The second empirical part (Chapter 5), in turn, will test the third hypothesis. As the discursive spaces of public spheres are constituted by the actors that become part of it and their contributions, they can be depicted as social networks shaped by the participants’ deliberative orientations towards each other. These deliberative networks should encompass more actors from different parts of society in the case of challenger-initiated public spheres and their discursive interaction patterns should be distributed more evenly than in centre ones. Hypothesis 1 assumes that both the actor distribution and their interaction is more balanced in public spheres initiated by civil society than in those rooted in the political centre. Moreover, given that the deliberative quality should be higher in autonomous, challenger public spheres we expect this to be mirrored in the intensity of the interaction between the participants. Due to its general structure, in challenger public spheres the core of highly involved actors should be larger, more diverse and the relationships between the participants should show a greater cohesion than in centre public spheres. The latter, in turn, should display a lower deliberative quality, represented by a more restricted actor structure and consequently a less concentrated debate. Hypothesis 2 postulates that challenger public spheres display an active core that is both broader than in centre public spheres in terms of the

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number and diversity of actor groups and that their interaction is more intense. The third hypothesis builds on the results of the perspective offered by the first two hypotheses, but shifts it from the distinction between types of discursive space to specific actor constellations and their effect on the deliberative quality. As we will see, what underlies both public sphere types is the way that actors relate to each other and how they together relate to common third parties. The notion of the deliberative coalition is in this respect fundamental to the political process and cuts across public sphere types, and we will therefore examine its general impact on the discursive quality without distinguishing between challenger- and centre-initiated discourses. Adapting the work of Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith (1993), we define a deliberative coalition in our context as consisting of actors that hold the same position vis-à-vis common addressees and coordinate their activities by monitoring and engaging in the debate. These coalitions comprise actors from different categories and form around a common discursive position vis-à-vis a common addressee. For our purposes we can distinguish three basic communicative modes that define the most important coalition types from the perspective of deliberative theory: the support of common addressees, the demands made on them and the criticisms with which they are faced. As the goal and telos of deliberation is to reach a consensus among the participants in a debate, we expect the coalitions that are closer to this ideal in their communicative mode to generate the highest deliberative quality. In contrast to this, criticism embodies the exact opposite and coalitions based on it should therefore only moderately affect the levels of discourse. Demands, finally, are situated between the two other types, also in terms of their position in the political process: logically, they follow the criticism of the status quo while at the same time they precede any agreement reached between the actors. Consequently, demand coalitions should have an intermediate effect on the deliberative quality of debates. Hypothesis 3 expects deliberative coalitions based on support to affect discourses more strongly than those that are based on demands and criticism. In Chapter 3 we review the existing literature on measuring deliberation and develop a content analytical instrument that allows us to capture the different dimensions of discursive quality. It also presents how we assess the deliberative quality in relation to the different hypotheses and then introduces the case selection as well as the sampling strategy.

Notes 1 A further consequence of this is that conflict resolution is not only based on deliberation: ‘Oppositions between interests require a rational balancing of competing value orientations and interest positions. Here the totality of social or subcultural groups that are directly involved constitute the reference system for

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2 3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10

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negotiating compromises. Insofar as these compromises come about under fair bargaining conditions, they must be acceptable in principle to all parties, even if on the basis of respectively different reasons’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 108). If relations of social power cannot be neutralised, the participants can switch to a bargaining mode, which takes place under fair conditions and results in a negotiated agreement. Fair bargaining does not contradict the deliberative ideal, according to Habermas it presupposes it (Habermas, 1996, p. 167). It is equally important to see, however, that because of the nature of compromise, it cannot replace moral discourse, and hence political will-formation cannot be reduced to compromise alone (Habermas, 1996, p. 167). Money is the non-linguistic ‘steering medium’ of the modern economy, whereas administrative power is that of the administration (Habermas, 1984a, 1984b, 1996). Here Habermas’ approach goes beyond most other approaches which develop the deliberative model exclusively as an institutional practice. The linking of deliberative arenas partly corresponds to what Dryzek calls ‘discursive designs’ (Dryzek, 1987, 1994). For the following, see also Rosenfeld & Arato (1998) as well as Deflem (1996). In fact, at least as far Habermas is concerned, he seems to share common concerns with Mouffe, for he states that ‘the constitutional state has a twofold task: it must not only evenly divide and distribute political power but also strip such power of its violent substance by rationalizing it. The legal rationalization of force must not be conceived as taming a quasi-natural domination whose violent core is and always remains uncontrollably contingent’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 188). This passage echoes very strongly Mouffe’s attempt to ‘domesticate’ antagonism by transforming it into agonism. Habermas also states: ‘If we find ourselves confronted with questions of conflict resolution or concerning the choice of collective goals and we want to avoid the alternative of violent clashes, then we must engage in a practice of reaching understanding, whose procedures and communicative presuppositions are not at our disposition’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 310, emphasis in the original). In elucidating the role of aesthetics in Habermas’ project, David Ingram (1991), by referring to Martin Seel (1985), makes the point that ‘reconciliation’, one of the central terms that runs through the work of the different generations of the Frankfurt School, ‘need not imply elimination of conflict and utopian closure’, but that aesthetic experience ‘seeks freedom for renewable experience’ (Ingram, 1991, p. 103, emphasis in the original). The more basic problem with Mouffe’s strategy is that either we can charge deliberative democracy with excluding conflict from its theoretical architecture, or we can criticise that it relies on consensus as its decision mode. Both criticisms together, however, reveal a certain amount of argumentative inconsistency as consensus presupposes a status quo ex ante characterised by disagreement and hence by conflict. Similarly, what Habermas, relying on Klaus Günther (1988), refers to as discourses of application resembles very much what Mouffe has in mind when she says that the conflictual consensus needs to be interpreted according to the basic ethical-political principles. Habermas’ concept of the public sphere presents a more inclusive notion as the flows of communication of informal venues such as bars, pubs, concerts, etc. all are parts of the larger discursive network that underpins the political process. ‘[I]diosyncratic expressions follow rigid patterns; their semantic context is not set free by the power of poetic speech or creative construction and thus has a merely privatistic character’ (Habermas, 1984a, p. 17). As David Ingram writes: ‘It is hard to imagine anyone associated with the Frankfurt School whose work, in manner of form as well as content, is so far

38

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12

13

14

15 16 17 18

19

Democracy, discourse and the public sphere removed from the aesthetic as that of Jürgen Habermas’ (Ingram, 1991, p. 67). Still, Ingram (1991) argues that for Habermas, just as for his more literary inclined predecessors Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Löwenthal, the aesthetic dimension represents ‘the utopian anticipation of an emancipated and reconciled form of life’ (Ingram, 1991, p. 67). For the role of the aesthetic in Habermas, see above all his essays on modern and postmodern architecture (Habermas, 1985b), on Walter Benjamin (Habermas, 1979), more generally The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984a, 1984b) as well as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas, 1990b), David Ingram’s (1991) article ‘Habermas on aesthetics and rationality’, Pieter Duvenage’s (2003) Habermas and Aesthetics, Martin Seel’s (1985) Die Kunst der Entzweiung: Zum Begriff der Ästhetischen Rationalität, as well as Albrecht Wellmer’s (1985) excellent work in interpreting Adorno from a Habermasian perspective. The more fundamental challenge for political philosophy quite generally seems to consist in conceiving passion not simply as a permissible category of politics, but to integrate it in a model that connects a theoretical account of the genesis of passions with the political process. Here, Habermas relies, on the one hand, on a lifeworld that meets the political process halfway, and, on the other hand, on a motivational account as developed by Honneth (1996) in his theory of recognition. Furthermore, one of Mouffe’s primary interlocutors here would be Hannah Arendt who, critiquing Rousseau, thought that it was dangerous to build a political order on compassion as it effaces plurality, breeds political violence as experienced by the revolutionary terror in France and can properly lead to a perpetuation of violence in the form of a reign of terror (Arendt, 1990). The egoist dimension underlying rational choice should, however, not be read as forbidding altruistic orientations altogether. It simply postulates that as individuals we try to realise our preferences in the best possible way, but it does not prescribe the content of these preferences. If altruistic goals happen to be part of a person’s set of preferences, then increasing that altruistic moment is entirely in line with the basic tenets of rational choice. This is not to say that preference transformation is an unavoidable or necessary effect of deliberation; if we find out in discussion that the reasons we have for our position are, indeed, better than those our opposites offer, we will hardly be compelled to change our view. But deliberation in this case still has the effect of producing ‘enlightened preferences’: our position has been scrutinised and tested against other views in an argumentative exchange so that it is more robust now, and we might even have arrived at new reasons in support of our view. For the following, see Stephen Grodnick’s (2005) excellent article. In fact, for Dahl, citizens’ access to operational knowledge is one of the most pressing problems of modern democracies as it is the precondition for opinion formation. At the same time, Habermas’ tone has become more optimistic in contrast to the analytical narratives of decline, erosion and colonisation on which Structural Transformation as well as the Theory of Communicative Action end. While William Rehg’s translation foregrounds the confrontational aspect of public opinion formation, in the German original, Habermas more neutrally refers to ‘die Art ihres Zustandekommens’ (Habermas, 1992a, p. 438), i.e. ‘the way it [public opinion] comes about’. Based on Cohen & Arato’s (1994) work, he lists the following four defining criteria which distinguish civil society from both the state and the economy, as well as other functional subsystems: plurality (informal institutions such as families, groups, associations, etc.), publicity (cultural and communicative institutions), privacy (in terms of the development of identity and morality) and legality

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(which guarantees the independence of civil society from other societal domains) (Habermas, 1996). 20 Cleavage theory in Lipset & Rokkan’s (1967) version was formulated to explain the genesis of the party system in modern nation states. It therefore necessarily ignores the later development that is partly characterised by parties in some systems moving closer to the median voter, which leads to the blurring of the distinctions. Indeed, the success of New Labour is partly explained by the party’s adopting positions that were formerly regarded as cornerstones of Conservative politics.

References Arendt, H. (1990). On revolution. London: Penguin. Arrow, K. J. (2012). Social choice and individual values. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Austen-Smith, D. (1992). Strategic models of talk in political decision-making. International Political Science Review, 13(1), 45–58. Austen-Smith, D., & Feddersen, T. J. (2006). Deliberation, preference uncertainty, and voting rules. American Political Science Review, 100(2), 209–217. Bohman, J. (1994). Complexity, pluralism, and the constitutional state: On Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung. Law & Society Review, 28(4), 897–930. Bohman, J. (2000). ‘When water chokes’: Ideology, communication, and practical rationality. Constellations, 7(3), 382–392. Cobb, R., Ross, J.-K., & Ross, M. H. (1976). Agenda building as a comparative political process. American Political Science Review, 70(1), 126–138. Cohen, J. (1989). Deliberative democracy and democratic legitimacy. In A. Hamlin & P. Pettit (Eds.), The good polity (pp. 17–34). New York: Blackwell. Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1994). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deflem, M. (1996). Habermas, modernity and law. London: Sage. Dryzek, J. S. (1987). Discursive designs: critical theory and political institutions. American Journal of Political Science, 31(3), 656–679. Dryzek, J. S. (1994). Discursive democracy: Politics, policy, and political science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dryzek, J. S. (2000). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. S., & List, C. (2003). Social choice theory and deliberative democracy: A reconciliation. British Journal of Political Science, 33(1), 1–28. Duvenage, P. (2003). Habermas and aesthetics: The limits of communicative reason. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Eley, G. (1992). Nations, publics, and political cultures: Placing Habermas in the nineteenth century. In C. J. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 289–339). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Finlayson, J. G. (2005). Habermas: A very short introduction (Vol. 125). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56–80. Freeman, S. (2000). Deliberative democracy: A sympathetic comment. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(4), 371–418.

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Goodin, R. E. (2000). Democratic deliberation within. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(1), 81–109. Grodnick, S. (2005). Rediscovering radical democracy in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms. Constellations, 12(3), 392–408. Günther, K. (1988). Der Sinn für Angemessenheit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (1996). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (2004). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1976). Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1979). Consciousness-raising or redemptive criticism: The contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin. New German Critique, (17), 30–59. Habermas, J. (1983). Ziviler Ungehorsam–Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat. Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat, 29–53. Habermas, J. (1984a). The theory of communicative action, Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984b). The Theory of communicative action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984c). Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1985a). Civil disobedience: Litmus test for the democratic constitutional state. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 30, 95–116. Habermas, J. (1985b). Modern and postmodern architecture. In J. Forester (Ed.), Critical theory and public life (pp. 317–329). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1990a). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Habermas, J. (1990b). The philosophical discourse of modernity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1991). Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1992a). Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1992b). Further reflections on the public sphere. In C. J. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 421–461). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1994). Three normative models of democracy. Constellations, 1(1), 1–10. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2006). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research 1. Communication Theory, 16(4), 411–426. Habermas, J. (2008). Ach, Europa. Kleine Politische Schriften XI. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J., & Luhmann, N. (1971). Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Hardin, R. (1990). Public choice versus democracy. Nomos, 32, 184–203.

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Henrich, D. (1999). What is metaphysics – what is modernity? Twelve theses against Jürgen Habermas. In P. Dewes (Ed.), Habermas: A critical reader (pp. 291–319). Oxford: Blackwell. Honneth, A. (1996). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ingram, D. (1991). Habermas on aesthetics and rationality: Completing the project of enlightenment. New German Critique, (53), 67–103. Jäger, W. (1973). Öffentlichkeit und Parlamentarismus: eine Kritik an Jürgen Habermas. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Kellner, D. (2000). Habermas, the public sphere, and democracy: A critical intervention. In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (pp. 259–288). Chicago: Open Court. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kriesi, H. (2004). Strategic political communication. Mobilizing public opinion in ‘audience democracies’. In F. Esser & B. Pfetsch (Eds.), Comparing political communication: Theories, cases, and challenges (pp. 184–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Party systems and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives. New York: Free Press. Luhmann, N. (1968). Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität. Tübingen: Mohr. Luhmann, N. (1970a). Öffentliche Meinung. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 11(1), 2–28. Luhmann, N. (1970b). Soziologische Aufklärung 1: Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Manin, B. (1987). On legitimacy and political deliberation. Political Theory, 15(3), 338–368. Markell, P. (1997). Contesting consensus: Rereading Habermas on the public sphere. Constellations, 3(3), 377–400. Mouffe, C. (1996). Democracy, power, and the ‘political’. In S. Benhabib (Ed.), Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the political (pp. 245–256). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2007). Artistic activism and agonistic spaces. Art & Research, 1(2), 1–5. Neblo, M. A. (2007). Family disputes: Diversity in defining and measuring deliberation. Swiss Political Science Review, 13(4), 527–557. Negt, O., & Kluge, A. (1972). Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Parsons, T. (1949). The structure of social action (Vol. 491). New York: Free Press. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York: Free Press. Peters, B. (1993). Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Piaget, J. (1999). The stages of the intellectual development of the child. In A. Slater & D. Muir (Eds.), The Blackwell reader in developmental psychology (pp. 35–42). Oxford: Blackwell. Riker, W. H. (1982). Liberalism against populism: A confrontation between the theory of democracy and the theory of social choice. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Rosenfeld, M., & Arato, A. (1998). Habermas on law and democracy: Critical exchanges. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Ryan, M. (1992). Gender and public access: Women’s politics in nineteenth-century America. In C. J. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 259–288). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Sabatier, P. A., & Jenkins-Smith, H. (1993). Policy change and learning: An advocacy coalition framework. Boulder, CO: Westview. Scheuerman, W. E. (1999). Between radicalism and resignation: Democratic theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms. In P. Dewes (Ed.), Habermas: A critical reader (pp. 153–177). London: Blackwell. Schudson, M. (1997). Why conversation is not the soul of democracy. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 14(4), 297–309. Seel, M. (1985). Die Kunst der Entzweiung. Zum Begriff der ästhetischen Rationalität. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkampf. Thompson, D. F. (2008). Deliberative democratic theory and empirical political science. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 11, 497–520. Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Wellmer, A. (1985). Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Williams, M. (2000). The uneasy alliance of group representation and deliberative democracy. In W. Kymlicka & W. Norman (Eds.), Citizenship in diverse societies (pp. 124–154). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (1996). Communication and the other: Beyond deliberative democracy. In S. Benhabib (Ed.), Democracy and difference – Contesting the boundaries of the political (pp. 120–135). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I. M. (2000). Democracy and inclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3

Methods and measures of deliberation

From a deliberative point of view, any analysis of political discourse is ultimately tied to ‘the question of whether, and to what extent, a public sphere dominated by mass media provides a realistic chance for the members of civil society, in their competition with the political and economic invaders’ power, to bring about changes in the spectrum of values, topics, and reasons channelled by external influences, to open it up in an innovative way, and to screen it critically’ (Habermas, 1992, p. 455). While our study cannot provide answers to all of these questions, we will examine some of the most central factors that shape the deliberative quality of political discourse by comparing, on the one hand, the two most prevalent public sphere types, and by assessing, on the other hand, the effect of different deliberative coalitions. As the deliberative approach connects communication to legitimation, ‘the discursive level of public debates constitutes the most important variable’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 304). Accordingly, in this chapter we establish a research design that translates the theoretical background into empirical indicators, explicates how we can measure the quality of political discourses and defines an empirical setting, where these concepts can be applied. The chapter is divided into three main parts. We will first review the existing literature on empirical approaches to deliberation in general and develop a content analytical instrument on the basis of a close reading of three of the most promising approaches, while staying close to the theoretical model. This will result in a set of indicators that taken together as an index map the different dimensions of deliberative quality. In a second step, we will then explain how we can apply measures of social network analysis to assess the discourse quality of public spheres and use regression models to determine the effect of the most important actor coalitions that constitute them. Lastly, we will present in detail the case selection (political debates) and the sampling strategy (newspapers) employed.

3.1 From the ideal to the real: the measurement of discourse quality This section presents the methodological approach in more detail and discusses its central component, the Discourse Quality Dimensions. In the following,

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we will first summarise the existing empirical research that has examined discourses in traditional media as well as the internet. We will then focus in more detail on three approaches employed in different domains from which the present study draws most of its inspiration: with Ferree et al.’s (2002) diachronic analysis of the abortion discourse in the US and Germany, the present study shares the media as the research object, while the work of Steiner et al. (2004) as well as that of Dahlberg (2001c, 2001d) proves essential for developing the single dimensions of our analytical instrument. This discussion will provide the basis for our own measure, whose single dimensions we present and discuss in detail. 3.1.1 Empirical approaches to deliberation Numerous studies have appeared in recent years in the fields of political psychology, political science and communication studies, which show that empirical research has caught up with the theoretical development of deliberative democracy (see Steiner, 2012, for an overview of the recent literature; Thompson, 2008). While political scientists have been perhaps particularly productive, often working at the intersection of their discipline with social and political psychology, communication scholars have also contributed their share to extending the deliberative approach to the study of media discourses. Ferree et al. (2002), Gerhards (1997) and Gerhards et al. (1998) – whose methodological approach we will discuss below in more detail – for instance, examine the abortion discourses in German and US newspapers between the 1970s and the 1990s. It represents one of the few studies that takes a comparative perspective in a twofold sense by assessing the changes in discourses diachronically over time and synchronically between two countries. What is of interest in our context is their evaluation of the public sphere against four different models of democracy, their main result being that they find only little support for the discursive model of the public sphere, which they base on the writings of Habermas as well as Gutmann & Thompson. Although they do not go as far as building an explicit index that measures the discursive quality of the debate, they do specify a set of criteria that capture some of the central dimensions of the different models. And on these criteria the discourses in both countries are better explained by the other models, particularly the liberal one (Gerhards, 1997). The study of Costain & Fraizer (2000) to some extent extends the view offered by Ferree et al. (2002) as they investigate the media’s portrayal of secondwave feminist groups between 1980 and 1996 and illuminate the contexts in which they become the topic of coverage. They show that while civil rights were a dominant topic in the 1980s, this gave way to abortion in the 1990s as the most frequent and controversial issue reported in relation to feminist groups. Maia’s (2009) analysis starts from an assumption similar to our own, namely that newspapers are a forum for civic debate in which reasons are

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exchanged, structured by the selection and production mechanisms of the media. Building on the work of Bennett et al. (2004), Maia identifies four deliberative criteria: accessibility and characterisation of participants, the use of arguments, reciprocity and responsiveness and the reflexivity and reversibility of opinions. Analysing the discourse around a referendum for banning the sale of firearms in Brazil in two newspapers, she shows that instrumental politics goes together ‘with critical argument exchanges in a public debate situation. The aim of political discussion in the referendum was to choose among propositions of norms. Regardless of their particular interests and communicative strategies, representatives of each front – and many people in favor and against the ban – acted as if they accepted the obligation of justifying their views’ (Maia, 2009, p. 330). Page’s (1996) study Who Deliberates? concentrates, as the title suggests, on the aspect of inclusiveness in mediated deliberation. Conducting three case studies he concludes that of those actors involved in the events covered by the media, the voices of only a few are reported, who mainly belong to an elite of established actors such as public officials or experts. A second source of distortion in public debates arises from the editorial lines taken by the different media such as the New York Times, which are not only apparent in the op-ed pages and guest columns, but also extend to the news stories themselves. Page concludes from his evidence that ‘certain media outlets […] actively shape political discourse to their own purposes’ (Page, 1996, p. 116, emphasis in the original).1 Moreover and because of this, the mainstream media – just as their official experts – are sometimes out of touch with citizens or quite generally with those who are affected by the consequences of events. News journalism as analysed by Page might be intellectually stimulating, but it ignores the values and concerns of those whose lives it purports to inform. Page also documents that in such cases, although very rarely, citizens may respond to the distorted coverage, bypass the mainstream media and voice their concerns through alternative communication channels such as talk radio programmes or the internet. Despite the largely negative results, Page finds that under conditions of media competition and diversity, and so ‘long as useful information is available and is publicized by at least some highly visible cue-givers and opinion leaders, ordinary citizens have the skills and the motivation to sort through contending views and pick (or reshape) those that make sense and are helpful’ (Page, 1996, p. 123). Peters et al. (2007) examine the discourse about medical applications of genetic engineering in German broadsheets and find that most of the coverage consists of genuine journalistic contributions, whereas only 10 per cent are taken from news agencies. While the debate is dominated by experts and political actors and displays a considerable degree of transnationality, representatives of civil society are only rarely part of it. Journalists actively participate in the debate and rather than commenting on the issue from a specific position, they display a highly differentiated stance and accommodate the broadest range of views and arguments of all actors. This last

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result in particular suggests that journalists take their role as mandataries of an enlightened public seriously and contribute substantially to societal learning processes. Rohlinger (2007) presents an analysis of the American media’s coverage of the abortion issue in a longitudinal study covering 20 years between 1980 and 2000. Focussing on the dimensions of inclusivity, civility and dialogue, she combines the deliberative perspective with Bourdieu’s field theory and is thus able to reveal that political outlets such as The Nation or The National Review generally better embody the discursive ideal than mainstream publications such as The New York Times or the CBS Evening News, although there are important limitations. Political outlets, because they cover issues from a specific angle, do not face the same requirements as mainstream media, which are more impartial and adhere to giving both sides of a story a voice, and this can lead to the silencing of actors and aspects. Conversely, mainstream media tend to reinforce the conflict between actors, rather than emphasising those parts, where there is agreement between the opposing camps. Focussing more specifically on the role of journalists in the political process, Ettema (2007) argues that they should not merely present the arguments for and against specific positions on an issue. Rather, as reason-giving institutions, they should more aggressively probe the justifications offered and participate more strongly as advocates of the citizenry, demanding accountability of public institutions. He finds specifically that journalism, facing the dual task of being a platform and a participant, lacks the responsiveness to give those a voice that are otherwise marginalised, instead speaking on their behalf. At the same time, there is evidence that journalism at critical times provides the public not only with information and in-depth coverage, it also actively intervenes in debates by holding institutions to account. More recently, the research interest of communication scholars has shifted towards the internet to examine how far it can live up to the normative expectations of a communicative space free of power that connects equals. Kies’ (2010) in-depth analysis of the communicative interaction in the online forum of the Radicali Italiani, an Italian left-libertarian party, shows that the digital platform ‘is, in many respects, exemplary insofar as it is highly frequented, it is characterized by a dynamic and qualitative debate, and it fulfils several functions that are extremely useful for the party members’ (Kies, 2010, p. 141). Despite these positive assessments, when it comes to the deliberativeness of the forum, the picture changes somewhat: the inclusiveness is only limited and reflects an ‘institutional type of plurality’ defined by a dominance of educated male supporters of the party with a strong interest in politics, who moreover display a certain degree of rudeness in their exchanges. The second case Kies examines is an electoral experiment, so to speak, in the Issy-les-Moulineaux district council elections in 2005 as they were held exclusively online – including the election campaign. Although Kies is able to draw some positive conclusions from the analysis, the main result seems to be that of the 1,440 registered voters, only 3 per

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cent became involved in the experiment – which clearly dampens some of the hopes associated with the digital extension of democracy. Contrasting these findings, in his analysis of the Minnesota E-Democracy project Dahlberg (2001c) concludes that it ‘has been able to overcome many of the shortcomings of other cyber-forums and develop a space for online public discourse that in many ways approximates the public sphere conception. It has maximized its autonomy from state and corporate interests, stimulated reflexivity, fostered respectful listening and participant commitment to the ongoing dialogue, achieved open and honest exchange, and provided equal opportunity for all voices to be heard’ (Dahlberg, 2001c). Maynor (2009), in turn, examines the rising blogosphere in the US against the ideals posited by deliberative democracy and finds that although blogging has the ability to extend the repertoire of political practices of citizens, it is presently still conceived too narrowly and thus restricts its effectiveness to constitute a digital deliberative forum.2 Halpern & Gibbs (2013) examine whether social media platforms managed by the White House, Facebook and YouTube, further deliberation between citizens. Their analysis of over 7,000 messages reveals that discussions on Facebook are more balanced and the civility among participants is higher than in the more anonymous YouTube channel, which is marked by a greater deindividuation. Overall, discussions are conducted with a high amount of civility, which contrasts with earlier studies’ findings that online discussions were riddled by flaming (e.g. Davis, 1999), and particularly Facebook interactions can reach a wider audience beyond the specific site, where the discussion takes place. At the same time, discussions tend to be somewhat superficial as arguments are rarely elaborated in more complex ways. The main function then seems to be that social media can lower the threshold for political participation. Discussing ‘user-generated democracy’, Loader & Mercea (2011) make the point that despite the theoretical openness of the internet and the unrestricted flows of communication it affords, its democratic potential is severely undermined by the inherent asymmetries, where a few nodes such as Google or Facebook command most of the attention, while the long tails of online activity receive little attention. These power structures are further exacerbated by the ranking of information through algorithms, which may restrict rather than promote political discourse (Sunstein, 2009). They locate the potential of social media in its disruptive capacity: mainstream media increasingly rely on blogs and user-generated content, investigative platforms such as Wikileaks become powerful political actors and users of social media platforms such as Twitter sometimes succeed in challenging mainstream media interpretations (Ampofo et al., 2011), thus enlarging the debate and subverting assumed notions of role and status. On the whole, the literature on the status and quality of deliberation in traditional and online media paints a complex and ambivalent picture: on the one hand, certain circumstance seem to be favourable to deliberation,

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which in turn yields positive effects in terms of legitimacy of political decisions, knowledge, societal learning processes, etc. On the other hand, however, the public sphere and the media that constitute it are subject to power ridden distortions, which they themselves tend to reproduce. This is no less so for the internet, which seems to live up to its deliberative potential only in some instances while undermining it in others. Moreover, assessing the role of deliberation in (mass) media settings is not helped by the fact that those studies that make explicit use of deliberative theory sometimes do so very sketchily, ignoring or glossing over important distinctions and definitions (cf. Costain & Fraizer, 2000; Hart, 2000; Iyengar, 2000; McAdam, 2000; Page, 1996). As Chambers points out, ‘[t]he language and concepts of deliberative democratic theory have filtered into many discourses and debates. But not all appeals to or endorsements of deliberation can be considered deliberative democratic theory’ (Chambers, 2003, p. 308). While we might favour one over the other account of deliberative theory depending on our research interest, adhering rather closely to its concepts promises a more systematic and deeper understanding of how democratic discourses are processed in a public sphere dominated by the media. To this end we will now turn to examine in more detail three of the most promising3 approaches to measure the discursive quality of political communication: Ferree et al.’s (2002) longitudinal study of the media’s coverage of the abortion issue in the US and Germany, Dahlberg’s (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2001d) close reading of Habermas in his analysis of the deliberative potential of the internet and Steiner et al.’s (2004) cross-country comparison of parliamentary debates. 3.1.2 Measuring the quality of political discourse: three approaches This section discusses three empirical approaches that are based on a close reading of the deliberative account of democracy and whose methodological translations of the theoretical premises therefore serve as guiding lines for the present study. We will first present the approach taken by Ferree et al. (2002), Gerhards et al. (1998) as well as Gerhards (1997), not only because they test how far different theoretical models of democracy correspond to the empirical reality, but also because they share with the present study the media’s coverage as the object of their research. Dahlberg’s (2001c, 2001d) work, although it concerns mainly the internet, is important as he distinguishes very clearly the different analytical dimensions that we need to capture if we want to explore the deliberative potential of political debates in the informal public sphere. Lastly, the works of Steiner et al. (2004), Steenbergen et al. (2003), Bächtiger (2005) and Spörndli (2004) present a sophisticated and by now established4 adaptation of the theoretical notion of deliberative quality as a content analytical measure; their idea of a Discourse Quality Index (DQI) is the main source of inspiration for this study. We will discuss each of the approaches in the following sections. The focus will

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be above all on the methodological decisions that translate the theoretical construct into an empirical measure. The actual results of the studies will only be included where they help to clarify a methodological point. The mass media and deliberation in a diachronic perspective The works of Ferree et al. (2002), Gerhards et al. (1998) as well as Gerhards (1997) are the outcome of a larger project that investigates the development of abortion discourse in the US and Germany between 1970 and 1994. They choose to analyse the media coverage surrounding the abortion issue because it is a larger debate spanning several decades in both countries and because it includes many voices from civil society. What is important from the perspective of the present study is that part of their analysis in which they assess which model of democracy corresponds most closely to the empirical data. They distinguish four different strands of normative political theory: (1) representative liberal models of theorists such as John Stuart Mill (1979), Edmund Burke (1890), but also Joseph Schumpter (1942) and Anthony Downs (1957), (2) participatory liberal theory, which has its roots in Rousseau’s idea of direct participation and includes scholars such as Hirst (2013), Barber (2003) and Michels (1915), but also Jane Mansbridge (1983), (3) discursive theory, by which they essentially mean the deliberative approach as developed by Cohen (1989), Habermas (1996) and Gutmann & Thompson (1996), although they also include communitarians such as Amitai Etzioni (1998), and, lastly, (4) constructionist theory, inspired by Michel Foucault and comprising the work of theorists such as Nancy Fraser (1989), Seyla Benhabib (1996) and Iris Marion Young (1990). Without questioning their categorisation, which is at times rather surprising, there are two major problems with their approach. First, although they test normative theories, Ferree et al. unwittingly end up treating them as descriptive accounts, which is evidenced by the fact that they conclude their test by discussing which of the theoretical models fits the data best.5 To draw such conclusions seems rather implausible, given that the deeper meaning of normative models consists in providing an idealised account of an ‘ought’ state of society, which we can use to analyse to what extent the ‘is’ of the status quo differs from it. In other words, if reality falls short of matching normative theory, this is not a problem of theory, but one of reality: ‘The objection prompted […] that deliberative theory is not realistic […] has never impressed normative theorists. They believe that it misses the point. Theory challenges political reality. It is not supposed to accept as given the reality that political science purports to describe and explain. It is intended to be critical, not acquiescent’, as Thompson (2008, p. 499) puts it. Second, Gerhards (1997), but to a certain extent also Gerhards et al. (1998) and Ferree et al. (2002), characterises the different normative models in such a way that the discursive model results in being the most demanding one in terms of its normative criteria. It is therefore not surprising to find that the

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other models correspond more closely to reality, a point echoed by Peters (2007, pp. 189–190). For the purposes of the present study, we are particularly interested in their analysis of the discursive model, which we will therefore examine more closely. The discursive model is defined by Ferree et al. through a set of criteria which they operationalise as empirical variables: inclusion, mutual respect, civility, dialogue and closure, by which they mean that debates are not terminated by decisions, but through the consensus the participants have reached. Whereas the criterion of inclusion is rather straightforward, civility and mutual respect warrant further examination. The main reason why Ferree et al. (2002) – and also Steiner et al. (2004) as we will see – introduce civility as an analytical category in connection with the deliberative model is that they not only rely on Habermas’ version, but also draw on the work of Gutmann & Thompson (1996, 2004), who develop the notion of ‘mutual respect’ as a central category of their approach. The problem here is that although Habermas’ concept certainly does not prohibit the participants of a discourse to maintain a certain level of mutual respect and civility, the norm as such plays no prominent role in his model. In fact, his work on civil disobedience as the ‘litmus test’ for democracy rather points in the direction of what we might refer to as ‘robust’ democracy, where norms of civility and respect might sometimes (have to) be temporarily suspended (Habermas, 1985).6 Dialogue, the next variable, ‘measures the presence of speakers with opposing views in the same article’ in Ferree et al.’s analytical instrument, and they note that ‘[t]his is, at best, a measure of potential dialogue, and the extent to which it is realized depends on whether in such a forum speakers are actually any more likely to engage with each other’s arguments’ (Ferree et al., 2002, p. 240). Additionally, a more direct measure examines the extent to which positions are refuted: ‘The rebuttals variable defines the utterances as dialogic when they refer to and argue against ideas they oppose’ (Ferree et al., 2002, p. 241), for example, ‘the foetus is not a human person’ would represent such a rebuttal. This measure seems to miss the idea of deliberation as it is not immediately clear how far the rebuttal of positions is an indicator for the quality of dialogue. Rather, rebuttals appear to be a proxy for the level of contentiousness of the debate, which is certainly an interesting aspect, but captures a different dimension of what the authors sought to assess. By ‘closure’, the last variable, Ferree et al. generally refer to a decrease in the intensity of the debate. The general idea behind this category is that while liberal theories, above all what they refer to as the ‘representative’ strand of liberal theory, expect the public exchange of arguments to diminish or even to end, once the political centre has taken a decision, discursive theories take the view that conflict should be resolved by deliberation, and therefore ideally lead to a consensus between the participating actors. In the absence of a separate indicator for agreement, Ferree et al.

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measure the range of frames and their change over time. Deliberative agreement should then be reflected in a convergence of frames so that in the end all participants agree on one frame. They find that overall in both the US and Germany the number of frames diminishes, although the development in each of the countries is different. Although the results undisputedly show a clear transformation in the deliberative structure of the debates, there remain a couple of unresolved issues with the measure. The first point is that rather than assessing the deliberative quality itself, Ferree et al. measure a formal outcome of it. Actors can be respectful, oriented towards dialogue, etc., but we cannot expect them to be themselves consensual – consensus is the product of the interaction, not what takes place in every contribution to the debate. Second, most theories of deliberative democracy agree – and this includes Habermas – that in the face of time constraints decisions by authoritative political institutions are necessary (see above), and Ferree et al. in this respect make the deliberative account more demanding than it really is. Because of these two points, the degree of frame convergence reveals nothing about the quality of the debate that led up to the decision. But, most of all, the participants of a discourse can come to an agreement for more than one reason, which in turn might be embedded in more than one frame. Frame convergence thus appears neither as a reliable indicator for the degree of agreement in a debate, nor for its discursive quality. Gerhards’ (1997) study compensates for this methodological shortcoming as he explicitly presents a measure to assess the rationality of discourses, which he borrows from Döbert (1996), who in turn derives it from his reading of Piaget (1975) and Habermas. Döbert defines four levels of rationality, which he characterises as follows: on the first level, the actor does not consider alternative perspectives but argues from a normative point of view he or she considers as authoritative. On level two, this strict view is somewhat lessened as depending on the context exceptions are allowed, whereas on level three, the actor perceives the existence of different, conflicting views and communicates them and resolves the resulting dilemma by putting them into a hierarchy. Lastly, the fourth level is characterised by the actor’s internalisation of the plurality of views, which are no longer ranked in a hierarchical order but integrated through compromise. Applying this scale to the German abortion discourse Gerhards finds that the majority of it (57.8 per cent) corresponds to the lowest level of rationality, i.e. level one, 13 per cent to level two, and 29.2 per cent to level three, whereas utterances (‘idea elements’, see Gerhards, 1997) corresponding to level four do not occur. While Gerhards focuses on the fact that the lowest level of rationality is the one which is most pronounced in the debate, he fails to see that the distribution on the scale is rather unusual, particularly the dip on level two and the increase on level three are noteworthy. If the scale is really hierarchical, we would expect a continuous decrease from level one to level four. The difficulty here is not Gerhards’ application of the scale to the data or his interpretation of the findings, rather it lies with the scale

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itself. The problem is that Döbert’s measure includes two different perspectives: level one and level three are characterised by what we could term – very roughly – an objectifying view, whereas on level two and four the actor takes on a performative attitude. Given that the performative perspective is more demanding than the objectifying one, we see a dip on level two – and unsurprisingly find no occurrences on level four. More basically, however, it is questionable whether a rationality scale that is based on developmental perspectives should be applied to the aggregate level of the data. Here again, it might have been more plausible to examine whether there are any changes in the debate over time, the hypothesis then being that as the debate progresses, the rationality of the actors increases through the learning processes induced by their participation in the debate. Despite these reservations, the work of Ferree et al. (2002), Gerhards et al. (1998) as well as Gerhards (1997) remains an impressive and early attempt to operationalise the complex theoretical framework of deliberative democracy. Their work is particularly valuable as they rely mainly on Habermas as their theoretical background, although we have seen it does not occupy the same central role as in the present study. We will therefore move to the work of Lincoln Dahlberg, who explicitly endorses a Habermasian perspective in his analysis of the deliberative character of the internet. Deliberation online: the discursive quality of the internet Whereas the work of Ferree et al. is important as far as our general research interest is concerned and because it clearly shows the difficulties of translating the theoretical premises into a feasible empirical instrument, Lincoln Dahlberg’s work is mainly inspiring as it presents a rigorous application of the Habermasian model in the context of online communication. Although Dahlberg’s interest is different from the one of the present project, the general thrust of his research and the methodology he has developed point in the same direction. In different publications, Dahlberg (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2001d; Dahlberg & Siapera, 2007) has examined how far online communication networks conform to the Habermasian ideal of deliberation and how they can be improved to better fulfil the expectation of an unbounded digital agora. In the next couple of paragraphs we will mainly focus on the analytical categories Dahlberg has developed and discuss them in the context of the present study. The major drawback of Dahlberg’s work for the aims of the present project can be stated before embarking on a more detailed discussion of the analytical approach he presents. It consists primarily in the fact that he examines online discourses by means of what we could call a qualitative survey, combined with a qualitative analysis of instances of online communication. Much of Dahlberg’s analysis explicates the communicative practices, rules and regulations of online fora and assesses them with regard to their contribution in fostering deliberation. This is a perfectly sensible approach for

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the analysis of such a potentially anarchic communicative space as the internet, not least because it takes into account the actual content as well as those contextual factors that have an effect on the content. Yet it is doubtful whether we could simply transfer Dahlberg’s method to our study, since our research interest and hypotheses call for a different approach. This qualification notwithstanding, the analytical categories Dahlberg develops show a very close reading of Habermas’ work on communicative action, discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, and can therefore also inform the approach taken by the present study. Altogether, Dahlberg defines six categories, which constitute the deliberative procedure (Dahlberg, 2001d, pp. 622–623): 1

2

3

4

5

6

Exchange and critique of reasoned moral-practical validity claims. By this, Dahlberg refers to Habermas’ requirement that deliberation extend (primarily) to normative validity claims and that the participants give reasons for their positions when they engage each other in critique. We can add to this list other illocutions such as demands or the support of another actor’s position. Reflexivity. If we engage in a debate we must also be prepared to examine and scrutinise critically our immediate and wider social and cultural contexts. Reflexivity refers to these primarily internal cognitive processes. Ideal role taking. This is a category that goes back to Mead’s (1967) analysis of the generalised other and the concrete other and even further back to Kant’s (1987) ‘enlarged mentality’ found in his Critique of Judgment, on which also Hannah Arendt (1992) places much weight in her sketching of the contours of a Kantian political philosophy, and which describes essentially the faculty to think from the other’s point of view – even if the other person is unknown to us. Goodin (2000) additionally makes the point that the other does not necessarily have to be a concrete or real person, it can equally be a character of fiction. Sincerity. Habermas refers to it mostly as truthfulness: participants in a discourse should only say what they hold to be right or true, and they should be honest about their motifs, desires, interests, etc. Discursive inclusion and equality. This requirement is not unique to deliberative theories and postulates that all those affected by a norm should have the opportunity to take part in the debate, to paraphrase Habermas’ discourse principle (D). Additionally, the deliberative procedure is free from what Habermas, following Cohen (1989), refers to as internal constraints, i.e. participants have an equal discursive standing in that everyone is entitled to make contributions, using all kinds of speech acts at their disposal, raise different topics, etc. Autonomy from state and economic power. In a certain way this requirement is the outcome if we adhere to the other five criteria: if deliberative processes revolve around matters of the common good, if all can participate and make their voices heard, extending the debate to all matters

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Methods and measures of deliberation they deem important by using all illocutions at their disposition, and if debates ideally go on indefinitely until we reach a consensus, then these debates would automatically also be characterised by being free from the distorting influences of administrative and economic power, the two non-linguistic ‘steering media’ Habermas (1984a, 1984b) identifies as constitutive of modern societies.

From the perspective of the present study, the major shortcoming of Dahlberg’s approach is that he assesses the deliberativeness of online fora by characterising the context in which they are embedded, rather than their communicative content. Here, the route taken by Ferree et al. seems more promising as they are aware that the analysis of public discourse needs both a qualitative as well as a quantitative dimension that examines the content of utterances and articles. In a certain respect, the work of Steiner et al. can be located between these alternatives, although they tend more towards the quantitative side. What is particularly important in their approach is that they spell out in explicit terms the single dimensions of deliberation as an empirical measure. Deliberation in the political system: the Discourse Quality Index Steiner et al.’s (2004) starting point for the development of their analytical instrument is the observation that in empirical research on deliberation what ‘is still lacking are quantitative investigations with reliability tests’ (Steiner et al., 2004, p. 53, emphasis in the original). They stipulate four criteria their measure has to fulfil in order to bridge the gap between normative theory and empirical practice: it should be grounded in theory, be applicable to observable phenomena as well as to different contexts and it should be reliable. Steiner et al. (2004) as well as Bächtiger (2005) and Spörndli (2004) take Habermas’ work as their theoretical background from which they develop their empirical measure. In line with Habermas’ model, they understand deliberation as encompassing both the political-administrative centre as well as the broader public sphere, but they limit their investigation to the institutional dimension of the process, more precisely to parliamentary debates. This has of course consequences for the empirical measure they develop as the ‘strong public’ in Fraser’s and Habermas’ sense is structured differently and has to fulfil different functions than the informal public sphere grounded in the ‘weak public’. They derive five different dimensions, which can be grouped together to form a content analytical index, the DQI. The first of these dimensions, participation, echoes the requirements that a deliberative informal public sphere has to fulfil, but is interpreted in the context of parliamentary debates as the possibility of a speaker to participate in the debate without being interrupted. The second dimension is given by the level of justification, which basically measures the amount of complete reasons that are given in

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support of a position. The content of justifications in turn refers to the interests advocated by speakers and distinguishes neutral statements from group interests, appeals to the common good as well as appeals to the common good that are framed in terms of Rawls’ difference principle (Rawls, 2009). By constructive politics, the fourth indicator, they understand what we could refer to as the degree to which as speaker shows a performative or an objectifying attitude: ‘positional politics’ means that the speaker simply asserts his or her position, with an ‘alternative proposal’ the speaker in turn makes a proposal which, however, is not relevant for the current debate, whereas the ‘mediating proposal’ is a speaker’s constructive effort that remains within the context of the current debate. The fifth criterion is represented by respect, which is divided into three sub-dimensions. While the other dimensions of the index can be either adapted straightforwardly for our own purposes or they can be dropped because they apply specifically to parliamentary settings, the question is whether respect really captures an important aspect of the deliberative model. At least as far as Cohen and in particular Habermas are concerned, to whom Steiner et al. often refer, the deliberative procedure contains no explicit dimension of civility. The norm as such plays no central role in Habermas’ model and its application in Steiner et al.’s model as well as in the analysis by Ferree et al. is mainly due to the fact that on this point they draw on the work by Gutmann & Thompson (see above). As we have seen, Habermas is less rigid when it comes to norms of civility than other scholars, particularly with regard to their observance in the informal public sphere. Furthermore, on methodological grounds the measure is problematic because it is conceived entirely from the speaker’s point of view. Yet, if we take the intersubjective dimension of deliberation seriously, then respect or disrespect is not only to be seen in the content of an utterance, but in the way those addressed respond to it – or not. That is to say, it is one thing if a speaker makes disparaging remarks about certain groups, it is quite another to see how these groups or their representatives react to it. Respect conceived in this way is an interactional category, it is co-constructed by speakers and addressees, and ignoring this runs the risk of reducing the external validity of the category.7 Nevertheless, the great benefit of Steiner et al.’s work is that they derive measurable categories from deliberative theory, which can be put to use in quantitative content analyses. For the purposes of the present study we will build on the logic of their approach by developing specific deliberative dimensions that can be applied to the analysis of political discourses in the media. 3.1.3 Building discourse quality dimensions for the media Before we come to the quantitative content analytical instrument proper, we first need to know on what level of discourse we will base our analyses.

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Wessler (2008) for instance distinguishes between ideas, utterances, the article, the page and the whole edition of a newspaper. In the context of our own research interest about the discursive quality of mass mediated public sphere, following the approach taken by Steiner et al. (2004) and in line with deliberative theory, we define the speech act as the basic coding unit. After all, what we want to examine are the argumentative exchanges between the participants of a debate, and here the speech act is the basic unit of communication. At the same time, we can aggregate different speech acts to the level of the article, depending on the analytical interest and direction. Because we are dealing with political debates, we restrict the analysis to speech acts that articulate a position vis-à-vis other actors in the context of the issue under debate.8 From a theoretical point of view, we can define four generic discursive relationships established through validity claims that articulate demands, criticism, support as well as mere statements. Very basically, demands express a wish to change the status quo and thus lie at the core of the political process, criticism in turn articulates a disapproval of the current state of affairs, whereas support indicates agreement with other actors and statements convey a state of affairs, without taking a specific illocutionary position. Important for our understanding is that these four dimensions are defined in broad terms because of the public sphere’s dual structure: it processes debates about specific issues on the one hand, but also always has itself – i.e. the discursive structure of the debate – as a topic. Demands can therefore extend to any aspect of the political process and range from very concrete proposals about pieces of legislation that should be passed to more abstract requests about the way the debate should be conducted. Similarly, criticism, support and statements can refer to any normative aspect of the political process, although most often they will of course relate to concrete proposals. The theoretical point of departure for our instrument is Cohen (1989) and Habermas’ (1996) definition of the deliberative procedure (see also Dahlberg, 2001d), whose dimensions we can characterise in the following compact form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

rationality of discourse, inclusiveness of actors, external autonomy of actors, internal autonomy: equality of actors, actors aim at reaching consensus, discourses touch on all topics that can be regulated in the equal interest of all, inclusiveness of perspectives and beliefs.

Below, we develop the categories of our analytical construct from those dimensions of the theoretical concept that are relevant for the purposes of our study.9 The overall aim is that our instrument should not only be valid

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in the sense of presenting an adequate translation of the theoretical premises, but it should also produce reliable measures. We will therefore keep the definitions of the single dimensions and the logics behind them as simple as possible.10 In doing this, we must be aware of two important differences between parliamentary debates and media discourses: although institutional deliberations take place under constraints of time, speakers still can fully develop their perspective on an issue and are only rarely prevented from presenting their argument through interruptions. Media discourses display a more scattered character in this respect: neither can speakers be certain to be included in the coverage in the first place, nor do they know which part of their argument will be taken up. Furthermore, because journalism weaves pro and contra stances, viewpoints and arguments into an overall narrative, the unity of the contributions of single speakers will often be broken up into several utterances and dispersed over one or several articles. An actor advocating a certain position might be quoted at the beginning and then again at the end of an article, with objecting statements from dissenting actors in between. While this reflects the media’s function to present, integrate and weigh different political perspectives against one another, it makes the analysis invariably more difficult. We will therefore have to relax some of the criteria as often fully fledged, complex argumentative structures become truncated sound bites. With this in mind, the discursive quality of the media is captured by the following categories. Rationality and reflexivity of speakers The first criterion corresponds to what Dahlberg (2001d, p. 623) refers to as the ‘[e]xchange and critique of reasoned moral-practical validity claims’ and what Steiner et al. (2004) call the ‘level of justification for demands’. Rationality is the most basic dimension of the deliberative procedure and simply means that the participants of a discourse are expected to give reasons for the positions they advocate in their contributions. Simplifying the theoretical account, we can cautiously also treat it as the level of the participants’ reflexivity in terms of its public manifestation. Although reflexivity is largely an internal process (Dahlberg, 2001a) and refers to ‘the critical examination of one’s values, assumptions, and interests in the light of all other relevant claims and reasons’ (Dahlberg, 2004, p. 7), the justifications that speakers give for their position can be seen as the public trace of these cognitive operations, their discursive condensation so to speak. There is significant degree of overlap between the concept of reflexivity and with what Goodin (2000) has called ‘deliberation within’, although the latter presents a more encompassing notion of reflexivity. To be sure, public utterances should not be equated with internal thought processes, but much of the deliberative enterprise hinges on at least a tacit connection between the two, so that although we have not direct access to the actors’ true levels of reflexivity, we can take their public manifestation as indirect representations thereof.

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Conceived this way and similar to Steiner et al. (2004), we simply measure the number of reasons given by an actor in his or her utterance. Yet, because articles in newspapers often leave little room for the presentation of a whole argument, our standards will necessarily be lower than those of Steiner et al. (2004), i.e. we will not require the presence of complete justifications. Additionally, our scale will be restricted to measure three levels: 1 2 3

No justification. One justification. Two or more justifications.

Reciprocity There is another dimension present in this first standard of deliberation, for Habermas also states that deliberations take place ‘through the regulated exchange of information and reasons among parties who introduce and critically test proposals’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 305). The regulated exchange here refers to a further basic aspect, which gives political debates its dialogic character, namely reciprocity. It means that discourses are not merely an exercise in a plurality of monologues, but that we expect participants to engage one another; the considered opinion then arises out of these discursive interactions. While a speaker can refer more or less superficially to another actor’s utterance, we will simply distinguish whether the speaker shows a basic reciprocal orientation or not. It is thus a binary distinction with the following levels: 1 2

No reciprocity. Reference to the utterance of another actor either without addressing its content, by addressing it only in general terms, or by addressing specific points.

Inclusiveness of the coverage (actors) Inclusiveness covers what Dahlberg (2001c) defines as ‘discursive inclusion and equality’ and it is conceptually similar to what Steiner et al. (2004) term ‘participation’. While in the setting of parliamentary debates participation refers to the degree to which actors can make their contributions without being interrupted, we are obviously confronted with a different situation when we analyse debates conducted in the media. Here, participation as inclusion refers to the possibility of access to make contributions in the first place, i.e. passing the threshold of the media’s selection mechanism to become an active participant in the debate. The last condition is important, for as we will see it is one thing to be discursively present in the media, it is at times quite another whether that presence is only passive in terms of being the object of the debate, or whether it extends to the role of actors as speakers.

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To assess the degree of inclusiveness thus defined, we need to categorise the actors. While there are many different ways to build a typology, we will take as a starting point those criteria Habermas develops in Between Facts and Norms: the most basic distinction is that between system and lifeworld, which means that on the one hand we can identify lone civil society actors as well as actor groups anchored in civil society as separate categories, whereas the system can be basically subdivided into the economy, on the one hand, and the political-administrative with its different institutions, on the other hand.11 Habermas further defines the media as an own actor class: their complex role as both discourse participants and discourse facilitators/platforms sets them apart from the other actors. In the context of the present study, it makes sense to additionally subdivide some of these categories to add more variation and complexity to the actor structure.12 We can thus distinguish 13 actor categories in total: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Government/administration. House of Commons, parliamentary party and MPs. House of Lords and its members. Political parties in general, members, etc. Judiciary, judges, barristers, etc. Economic actors (corporations, business associations, etc.). Financial sector. Experts and universities. Think tanks. Civil society actors (individuals, NGOs, etc.). Trade unions. The UK (as a whole country).13 Media and journalists.

External autonomy of actors External autonomy means that ‘[t]he participants are sovereign insofar as they are bound only by the presuppositions of communication and rules of argumentation’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 305). This is an indicator that, if given a broad interpretation, presupposes in-depth knowledge about the backgrounds of the actors, their diverse affiliations and the connections between them, which clearly goes beyond the information that we have at disposition for our analysis. On a simplified reading, however, the main point of interest is not the individual context of the actors, but whether this leads to any differences in their presence in the debate. This is already captured by the degree of inclusiveness, and because the indicators thus become identical, we will not code or interpret the actors’ autonomy separately, but restrict ourselves to the concept of inclusiveness.

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Internal autonomy: equality of actors and role change Internal autonomy refers to the equality of the actors within the debate. As Habermas puts it: ‘Each has an equal opportunity to be heard, to introduce topics, to make contributions, to suggest and criticize proposals’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 305). For our purposes, we can translate equality to mean that participants are free to choose their communicative roles, and the most basic distinction here is that between speaker and addressee. In other words, in a discourse free from internal constraints actors must be able to shift between their roles as addressees and speakers. We thus interpret equality as role change and will examine, on the one hand, quite generally the relationship between speakers and hearers, and, on the other hand, assess to what extent the inclusiveness of the speakers matches that of the hearers. The latter view allows us to uncover two discursive distortions: either the inclusiveness of the addressees is greater than that of the speakers, which means that not all of those addressed have a voice in the debate; only a few actors pass the threshold of the media’s selection mechanism and become participants in the debate. Alternatively, the inclusiveness of the speakers is greater than that of the addressees, which means that only a few actors are held responsible or deemed relevant. We can see that it is particularly the first case that is critical from the point of view of deliberative theory as it points to a problem of access that might not be uncovered by simply examining the inclusiveness of the speakers alone. Actors aim at reaching consensus Generally, consensus is not a criterion that applies to media debates, given that the task of the informal public sphere consists mainly in identifying and articulating social problems. We would overburden its discursive capacities if we required it to converge on a specific position defined by mutual agreement between the actors.14 Rather, the task of the informal public sphere is to produce considered opinions, although this is the outcome of the whole discursive process, rather than an aspect of a single speech act. It is furthermore a substantive aspect of deliberation that cannot be grasped directly in purely formal terms. From the viewpoint of the present study, the degree to which a public debate has been able to generate considered public opinions is synonymous with its deliberative quality as a whole. We thus exclude this aspect as a separate dimension from our analytical catalogue. Inclusiveness of perspectives and beliefs ‘[T]he interpretation of needs and wants and the change of prepolitical attitudes and preferences’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 306) is the penultimate dimension of our index and is interpreted in our context to refer to what we could call the range of perspectives. Accordingly, a discourse free from

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coercion is characterised by a permeability that guarantees not only the unhindered access of actors to the debate – i.e. the media – but also means that the different views, beliefs and preferences can be articulated without restriction. As perspectives we define the content of the justifications given by speakers and we measure these perspectives by using a category scheme that comprises eight different categories and represents a simplified version of the catalogue developed by Kuhlmann (1999). The general logic behind these categories is that they cover formal dimensions, which are thus less affected by the content of the different debates, than if we focused on more detailed, substantive aspects of the issues. The eight justificatory dimensions are as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Action (political, economic). Consequences (negative). Consequences (positive). Interests (general, common good). Interests (specific, group). Values (basic). Norms (judicial). Facts (including opinions, beliefs).

Discourses touch on all topics that can be regulated in the equal interest of all The possibility to make all matters that can be regulated in the equal interest of all a topic is a dimension that we will exclude from our instrument of analysis. The reason in this case is that the requirement that ‘[p]olitical deliberations extend to any matter that can be regulated in the equal interest of all’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 306) is located at the level of the topic of the debate itself and is thus not a property of a speech act. While the topic of the debate is an important aspect of the sampling process, it is not a part of the content analytical instrument. Furthermore, even if we were to define topic on a more detailed level, i.e. as the content of a speech act, this would require a different form of analysis. It would be an input-output analysis that matches the actors and their topics in the media coverage (output) with their extramedia activity in terms of press releases, official statements, blog posts, etc. (input). This goes clearly beyond the research interest of the present study. This being said, what we can assess is the content of the actors’ justifications in the media coverage and examine whether there are any differences between the public sphere types and this is precisely what the perspectives dimension above does. On the whole, our analytical construct contains five dimensions: rationality/ reflexivity, reciprocity, inclusiveness of the actors, role change between speakers and hearers and the range of justifications (perspectives). Whereas reflexivity, reciprocity and perspectives capture the discursive-rational dimension of deliberation, inclusiveness and role change refer more to its democratic dimension. They reflect the theoretical tension formulated in D that all those affected (democratic dimension) could take

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part in rational discourses (discursive dimension) and it will be an empirical question whether this is mirrored in the practice of public debate. Before we conclude this section we need to verify whether our instrument proves to be reliable in terms of inter-coder agreement. The inter-coder reliability test consisted in the coding of a random sample of 50 speech acts drawn from six different debates and assigned to 10 different coders, who had been trained in the coding procedure. After initial modifications, in particular with regard to the definitions, and further simplifications in the specifications of the categories, the inter-coder reliability test yielded results between 0.63 and 0.84 in terms of the ratio of coder agreement as illustrated in Table 3.1. We can see that generally the actor variables score higher which has mainly to do with the fact that they are easier to identify. The range of justifications in turn, although comprising only eight subcategories, is more difficult to categorise as the distinctions are more nuanced. An overall inter-coder reliability of about 0.74 can be considered as satisfactory. The bulk of the material was coded by one coder so that in addition to the intersubjective reliability an intra-coder test was performed with 50 speech acts at two points in time. For the analysis of the effect deliberative coalitions (see below) we additionally need to identify the different illocutions around which they are formed, i.e. support/agreement, demands and criticism. Here, too, the inter-coder reliability values are satisfactory. Before we move on to selecting the cases and sampling the media discourses, we will explain the statistical models and the analytical strategy to assess the discursive quality of the public sphere types and the effect of the different deliberative coalitions.

3.2 Assessing discourse quality: the social network paradigm and the power of coalitions Deliberative quality thus conceived can help us to illuminate the different dimensions of political discourse and arrive at a deeper understanding of Table 3.1 Inter-coder and intra-coder reliability Krippendorff’s Alpha Categories

Group

Single coder

Reflexivity

.724

.757

Reciprocity

.719

.736

Perspectives

.625

.657

Inclusiveness

.844

.865

Role change

.795

.861

Illocutions

.741

.787

Total

.741

.777

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how it is affected by the public sphere type. Yet, if we want to uncover the complexities of the deliberative process, our analysis needs to move beyond what is sometimes a summary view of deliberation (cf. Steiner et al., 2004), which tends to obscure the dynamics at play resulting from the discursive relationships between the actors. In the context of the present study we are not only interested whether different public sphere types are on the whole more or less deliberative, but importantly also in how far the communicative networks that are established through the actors’ deliberative orientations differ from one another. After all, it is their interactions that lead to the differences we might see on the aggregate. In other words, communicative power is not just a corollary of the total amount of deliberative speech acts, but equally a function of the discursive space shaped by the relationships of the participants. This view closely mirrors the theoretical account, which conceives of the public sphere as a network of communication structures that connects lone actors, organisations, social strata, events and institutions. Translating this concept empirically, the next section presents a social network analysis perspective, which allows us to model these relationships, the discursive spaces they constitute and assess their deliberative quality. Moreover, since discursive interactions do not occur at random but form patterns, the section after the next introduces the concept of ‘deliberative coalitions’ that develop around an issue and which play a crucial role in the quality of the political discourse. 3.2.1 The discursive space: social network analysis and deliberative quality The social network perspective presents a complementary, more inductive approach to measuring deliberative quality than the mere aggregation of deliberative speech acts, since it is better suited to capture the complex structure and dynamics of a public sphere. Starting from the deliberative relationships between the actors, it reconstructs the properties of the discursive networks they generate, which can then be further examined using the methods of social network analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 2009), a fast evolving methodological approach in the social sciences. Indeed, the network perspective has become so pervasive as an analytical concept that it has been moulded into an own paradigm to depict the structures and processes of contemporary societies in a globalised world by Manuel Castells (Castells, 2011). Social network analysis is generally based on the assumption ‘that much of culture and nature seems to be structured as networks – from brains (e.g., neural networks) and organisms (e.g., circulatory systems) to organisations (e.g., who reports to whom), economies (e.g., who sells to whom) and ecologies (e.g., who eats whom)’ (Borgatti et al., 2013, p. 1). It is easy to see that we can add to this list the political processes and the media’s coverage of them, which captures how actors in the public sphere relate to one another. From the vantage point of the present study, the network view of deliberative processes thus not only better represents analytically their

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structure and the dynamic they embody, it is also methodologically a more faithful translation of the theoretical account that conceives of the political process – particularly in the informal public sphere – as interrelated communication acts and channels. Analysing these networks then allows us to say something about the actors, how they relate to others and how as a consequence of this they enlarge or constrain the discursive space. And as it is the patterns of their interaction that constitute the public sphere, we can then compare the structural properties of the networks to assess their deliberative quality. But how can we be sure that these differences really reflect fundamental distinctions between public sphere types and are not simply caused by differences of the issues fields from which the debates are drawn or by the historical context in which they are set? This is an important point, and we will strengthen the robustness of the results by combining three different debates from each public sphere type and treat them as one single challenger and centre-driven discourse, respectively. Because the different debates are taken from different decades and deal with different issues, and since furthermore not all of them are ideal-typical representatives of the corresponding public sphere, this increases the validity of our analyses. If they do reveal dissimilarities between the public sphere types, then these are, indeed, indicative of basic differences in their discursive structure. From an analytical perspective, we are particularly interested in those properties that allow us to say something about the deliberativeness of the networks. While the proper measures will be introduced in more detail in the empirical chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), here we present the logic behind the two main dimensions. This concerns, on the one hand, the ‘breadth’ of the discourse, i.e. how many actors are involved in it and how they relate to one another. Quite generally, a discursive space in the way we have defined it is deliberative, if it allows for the equal participation of all actors, or put the other way round, if it displays only a few hierarchical structures. We will employ two measures to assess the equality of discursive relationships (hypothesis 1): the number of transitive triplets, on the one hand, and the hierarchy measure introduced by Krackhardt (1994) to examine informal organisations, on the other hand. Triadic relationships have been found to be the building blocks of social relationships (Wasserman & Faust, 2009, p. 19), and their transitivity expresses the idea that ‘a friend of a friend is a friend’. Hence, the more transitive triplets we find in the networks, the more balanced the interaction is. Yet, the discourse might still be shaped by some form of inequality that lies beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the single actors, and our second measure therefore looks at the network as a whole by employing Krackhardt’s (1994) concept of hierarchy in informal organisations, which measures the degree to which paths in the network are not reciprocated.15 On the other hand we are interested in those parts of the networks that are characterised by denser communication patterns between the actors,

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their core so to speak, and the periphery that surrounds it (hypothesis 2). Employing a core/periphery analysis of the networks, we will be able to reveal which actor groups and how many are part of the central structure of the public sphere and which ones are pushed to the margins. In addition to this, we can specifically measure the ‘discursive density’ in the core that is established by the participants’ interaction patterns. Taken together, the analysis of the balance and of the discursive density of its core allows us to go beyond a single measure to assess the deliberative quality of the public sphere and develop a more complex perspective. Indeed, we will see that the analytical approach often yields counterintuitive results and the discursive dynamics present in the two public sphere types at times defy any straightforward assessment. 3.2.2 Discourse quality and discourse coalitions One of the upshots from the social network perspective is that it is not single actors and their contributions, but the interaction between them that shapes the discursive space and, by extension, the public sphere. At the same time, these interaction patterns are shaped in specific ways, and what mainly drives the political process are those actor relationships that are generated by a common interest and thus form an alliance structure (Kriesi, 2004), an advocacy coalition (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993) or, in our case, what we can term as a ‘deliberative coalition’. From the point of view of deliberative theory, we are particularly interested in those actor constellations that combine around the same communicative mode vis-à-vis a common addressee. As we have seen, we can very generally distinguish between three of the most important illocution types, namely agreement/support from demands and criticism, and we will assess which of these coalitions exerts the greatest discursive power (hypothesis 3). To assess the strength of their effect on the deliberative quality of the political discourse we will use regression models where the deliberative coalitions are the independent variable and the single dimensions of discourse quality are the dependent variable. This allows us to gauge the direction of the effect, i.e. whether it affects the deliberative quality positively or negatively, the size of it and whether it is statistically significant. The details of the approach and the analytical strategy are presented in more detail in the empirical part (see Chapter 5). Having thus developed the analytical approach to measure the deliberative quality of political public spheres and the coalitions that sustain them, we can now move on to the research design, i.e. the case selection and the sampling of the media coverage.

3.3 Selecting the national context: the UK Despite the numerous developments it has undergone, the primary context in which deliberative theories have been developed and applied is the

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nation state, not least because here the expectations of actor roles, communicative structures and dynamics are more clearly defined than, say, on supra- or transnational levels. If we are thus interested in the possibility of ‘rational islands’ in the sea of everyday practice on a national level, in the degree to which civil society succeeds in becoming part of the political process, in the deliberative difference between challenger- and centre-initiated public spheres and the effect of deliberative coalitions, then choosing a rather closed, non-responsive political context makes sense. Examining political debates in countries such as Switzerland would make us prone to a confirmation bias about the deliberative quality of mass media discourses, as the arrangement of the political institutions explicitly encourage inclusion and deliberation. Switzerland’s political system is marked by an oversized cabinet; a multiparty system and a proportional election procedure; federalism; a bicameral legislature with a federal chamber as the upper house; a written constitution; neo-corporatist arrangements; direct democracy with a right to introduce new legislation and oppose passed legislation and strong political autonomy of the single municipalities (Lijphart, 2012). Finding evidence of deliberation and an actively included civil society in the political process in such a setting would hardly come as a surprise. Hence, a more realistic view might be given by an institutional setting that provides a real test for deliberation as it restricts its possibilities. The UK here is an ideal candidate as it represents the virtually opposite constellation (Steiner et al., 2004, p. 79). The UK is characterised by a two or two and a half party system; political power is ideally concentrated in one-party cabinets – coalition governments are the exception and viewed with suspicion – and it is wielded by a unitary and centralised government; MPs are elected through a majoritarian and highly disproportional system; interest group pluralism rather than neo-corporatist arrangements are the rule; parliament is formed by a bicameral legislature that is heavily imbalanced, as most of the power resides with the House of Commons, while peers in the House of Lords are not elected by popular vote, but appointed by the government or have received their membership through heritage; there is no written constitution with a privileged legal status and as a consequence there was no proper independent, impartial judicial review until the Supreme Court of the UK took up its work in 2009, after legislation to this effect was passed in 2005 (Judge, 2005); and, lastly, direct democratic elements in the legislative process are unknown (Kavanagh et al., 2006). Such a setting is less favourable to deliberation as presented by the theoretical ideal. The UK therefore represents a true test for the occurrence and the intensity of a deliberation as an argumentative practice to adjudicate the legitimacy of policy issues as well as the chances of civil society becoming a part of these societal communication processes. The general idea is that the specific arrangement of political institutions has consequences for how political discourse and by extension the public sphere is structured. And as today ‘[p]olitics is largely a mediated activity’ (Kavanagh et al., 2006, p. 499,

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emphasis in the original) and Habermas sees the media clearly as dominating the public sphere, the question then is how media discourses are affected by the different public sphere types and to what extent they promote or prevent deliberation and the inclusion of civil society. As a next step, we therefore outline the media system of the UK and explain the media types we have selected for the analysis.

3.4 Sampling the media coverage We can characterise different dimensions of the British media system according to Hallin & Mancini’s (2004) classification. The first and most readily recognisable trait is that Britain has one of the oldest and strongest newspaper cultures (Curran & Seaton, 2009; Habermas, 1989). It has also been a traditional stronghold of tabloid journalism; in fact, four of the top five titles in terms of their circulation are tabloids (The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star) and only one, The Daily Telegraph, is a broadsheet (PressGazette, 2015). Journalism is generally highly professional and factoriented, and the political parallelism between the press and the political system means that party political divisions are reproduced in the media’s coverage. The journalistic standards of the press are overseen since 1953 by a non-institutionalised self-regulatory body of the industry, first by the Press Council, and from the 1990s onwards by the Press Complaints Commission, whose work is continued as of September 2014 by the Independent Press Standards Organisation set up after the Leveson Inquiry (Jukes & Allan, 2015). Lastly, whereas the print sector is regulated by the market, the position of the British Broadcasting Corporation and its public service mandate evidences Britain’s commitment to the public broadcasting model of radio and television. As we investigate political discourses in a public sphere dominated by the media, the external pluralism of newspapers is particularly important as it mirrors to some extent the political spectrum (see Curran & Seaton, 2009; Griffiths, 1992; Seymour-Ure, 1996, which form the basis for the history and classification of the British press in the following paragraphs). Accordingly, we will draw a sample of newspapers that reflects the political space of opinions. Our sample will therefore consist of those major British national newspapers which together set the public agenda (Habermas, 2008; Jarren, 2008; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) and cover the mainstream of arguments and views on an issue: The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Sun. The Daily Telegraph (founded in 1855) is the only newspaper truly loyal to a political party and is closely affiliated to the Conservatives. The Guardian (founded in 1821) which moved from its Manchester base to London in 1964 in turn has a left of the centre readership with the highest percentage of readers voting for Labour. The Grand Old Lady of British journalism, The Times (founded in 1785), has a readership whose highest proportion

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tends to the conservative side.16 This is balanced, however, by an almost equally high percentage of readers who vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. On the whole then, The Times can be taken as an independent newspaper in terms of the spectrum of its readership, and not least because of its historically grown reputation as the paper of record. If we look for a British newspaper that is close to the Liberal Democrats we find The Independent – launched, however, only in 1986. Yet no other national British newspaper – except for The Guardian – displays a significant tendency towards the Liberal Democrats, or the Liberals before the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, during the period under consideration. This is not surprising as the Westminster model is ideally a two-party system, and although British politics does not entirely correspond to the institutional ideal, ever since the rise to power of the Labour Party in the 1920s the Liberals have occupied the third place – also in public discourse. Lastly, The Sun (launched in 1964) is included in the sample as a representative of the independent tabloid papers.17 It has steadily increased its circulation and has overtaken the declining Daily Mirror, which has moreover always strongly associated itself with the Labour Party. Selling over two million copies currently, The Sun is not only the largest selling tabloid in the UK, it is clearly Britain’s largest selling newspaper and has displayed shifting political allegiances throughout its history.18 The selected titles reflect what we could call the broad mainstream of public opinions and positions, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, they are also national papers and we thus also capture the magnitude of the debates we will analyse. The single articles of the newspapers form the sampling unit and were compiled using a keyword list that captures the nature of the different policy issues, which together represent the public sphere types that are our actual object of analysis. For those newspapers where no digital copy was available, the same list was used to sample the articles by hand from the British Library. Only those articles were retained in the sample whose main focus was the policy issue or an aspect of it.

3.5 Political debates and public sphere types From a deliberative point of view, political debates are argumentative exchanges of positions and justifications that lead to a considered public opinion, which is in turn tied to institutional processes and thus legitimates their political outcome. The deliberative model assumes that the rational kernel of public debates works as a corrective that guards the collective opinion making process against biases, fallacies and distortions. And it embodies a developmental perspective of collective learning in the sense that decisions taken after an exhaustive debate are better informed than those where public discussion is absent. Political debates can do so, however, only to the extent that the public sphere they constitute is accessible to all actors affected by the decisions, particularly those from the periphery

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of civil society, as they have the appropriate ‘antennae’ to detect and articulate social problems. As we are interested in how the mass media discourses we investigate relate to the two basic public sphere types, the policy debates should correspond to one or the other model, i.e. they should broadly fit into the category defined by pragmatic, material debates initiated by the periphery, or they should correspond to ethical-political debates that originate in the politicaladministrative centre. We have to be aware, however, that it is rarely possible to point to the absolute origin of an issue, although we can distinguish which side of the public sphere is in the driving seat and primarily owns (Petrocik, 1996) the issue in the period covered by the analysis. This will serve as our criterion of who initiates the debate, the centre or civil society, respectively. We will choose three debates for each type from three different policy areas and three different decades – the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s – so that the aggregated results are less influenced by the concrete subject under discussion or the political culture of a particular time, but reflect more the general discursive structure of the public sphere in question. Furthermore, while two of three debates for each type closely correspond to the theoretical classification presented further above, the third type in each case are debates that show some overlap into the other category. This should make the results of the analysis more robust as they are not simply the outcome of Weberian ideal types, but are based on a broader spectrum within each public sphere category. To be included in the analysis, the policy debates have to fulfil several criteria: first, they have to lead to a reaction in the formal public sphere, i.e. Parliament. This is important as particularly debates initiated by the periphery might peter out without ever reaching the institutional decision stage. Second and for a similar reason, we will examine the (temporary) end of the debates as the stage of the political process can have an effect on the discursive structure. The starting point of the data collection should therefore be within a distance of two to three months from the formal decision of the issue. As Chambers (1999) has shown in her study of discussion groups in Canada, the deliberative attitude of the participants clearly decreased the closer the process came to the decision stage. It seems therefore reasonable to assume that similar dynamics might be at work in the larger public sphere, and synchronising the sampling in this respect allows us to control for this factor. The downside of this approach is that we will be confronted with debates that are already saturated: most arguments will have been brought forth, and in debates initiated by the periphery, civil society actors might not be as present in the closing phase, which is naturally dominated by the political elite, than in its initial stages. Third, for pragmatic reasons we will only consider debates that stretch over a period of at least 50 consecutive days. This rather short span allows us to consider different kinds of debates and not just those on a moral level, which usually cover longer periods – decades in Ferree et al.’s (2002)

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analysis of abortion discourses. Some of the debates sampled are, as it were, middle-range policy issues, which are resolved after the debate has ended, whereas in other cases the sample represents a small sequence of larger discursive constellations, which continue over several years. Lastly, the last criterion specifies in more detail some of the other ones: to qualify for our sample, a political debate has not only to lead to a decision in the political centre, and it has not only to stretch over a period of at least 50 days, it also has to be present in each of the newspapers selected. The start and end points in each of them should not be further apart than 10 days. This ensures that the issue is discussed in society at large and not just in a specific group or stratum. With these considerations in mind we can now turn to sampling the actual debates. The six debates we present in more detail below correspond to the two public sphere types that we will examine more closely and most policy issues can be accommodated within them. From a theoretical perspective we are, on the one hand, interested in debates initiated by the periphery as these are the most promising in terms of their discursive quality. Because we need to be able to judge how deliberative these are we also need to examine as a point of reference debates initiated by the centre. This type is of additional interest as the centre-initiated public sphere is generally under-theorised in deliberative theory. Other than representing a deficient form that is constituted by truncated and distorted forms of deliberation we do not know how this public sphere type should perform. Shedding more light on its discursive structure by juxtaposing it with the periphery type, will allow us to gain detailed empirical and theoretical insights for both public sphere constellations. Based on our classification of debates according to public sphere type, normative level of the discourse and cleavage addressed by the issue, we arrive at the sample classification presented in Table 3.2. The following sections present each of the sampled debates in detail. 3.5.1 Unilateral disarmament (1960) In the eyes of many social movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the biggest military and political threat in the 1960s came from the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Founded in 1958, the Table 3.2 Debates sampled Debate types Decade

periphery/material/pragmatic

centre/cultural/ethical-political

1960s

Unilateral disarmament (1960)

Commonwealth immigration (1965)

1980s

Secondary picketing (1980)

Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985)

2000s

Fuel protest (2000)

Anti-terror legislation (2005)

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CND promoted an alternative to the perceived path of the continually greater possibility of mutual annihilation, which consisted in making disarmament not conditional on the actions of other states, but in disarming unilaterally. This view gained increasing support and spread slowly to more established actors. While the ruling Conservative Party tried to ignore the issue, the oppositional Labour Party had a more difficult position.19 Having just lost the general election in 1959, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell felt that he could not lead the party to power on a platform of unilateral disarmament as he would not gain support beyond the pacifist left.20 Yet, the decision on the Labour Party’s direction was not all his or that of the executive alone, as at the time the unions had considerable influence on the political agenda of the party, in particular at the annual conference, the party’s highest decisionmaking organ (Koelble, 1987).21 Gaitskell’s problem was that not only smaller but also many of the larger unions adopted a pro-disarmament stance at their conferences and their delegates voted accordingly at the Labour Party’s annual conference. As a consequence, Gaitskell and the right wing of Labour, which included most of the executive, was defeated, but as he interpreted the conference decision to give the Parliamentary Labour Party guidance rather than a concrete instruction, the official motion of the Opposition introduced in the Commons called for multilateral rather than unilateral disarmament. When classifying this debate as corresponding to the periphery/material/ pragmatic type, two aspects have to be taken into consideration. The issue has a strong ethical-political dimension, as it makes Britain and the way it should act its topic, but it ultimately foregrounds a means-ends relationship typical of the pragmatic level. It also revolves around a very material aspect, namely nuclear weapons. But we certainly have to keep in mind that contrary to the other material debates, the disarmament dispute is not a socio-economic issue and hence a rather untypical representative in our typology with strong overtones relating to questions of national identity. 3.5.2 Commonwealth immigration (1965) Although the British Empire found its greatest expansion in the First World War, its decline came soon afterwards and the interwar period can be seen as the first phase of the transition from Empire to Commonwealth. The process continued after the Second World War and former colonies became autonomous governments, which now were equal partners in the British Commonwealth of Nations (Kitchen, 1956). One of the effects of the former colonies’ new status was that their citizens could move to Britain without any restriction, after all they were all members of the same political alliance. Yet, as the influx of Commonwealth immigrants increased throughout the 1950s, so did the tensions between them and the population of their host country. In 1964, there were 800,000 immigrants in the UK, and although this figure amounted to only 1.5 per cent of the total

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British population, it became a political issue (Street, 2008). While the issue was also promoted by social movement organisations such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), it was nevertheless a debate where the government took most of the initiative.22 Moreover, material aspects such as the effect of immigration on the job market, etc. were in the background, whereas the cultural dimension of immigration moved to the centre (Hayter, 2001; Street, 2008). The increase in immigration primarily questioned Britain’s self-understanding as a nation and as part of the Commonwealth and we can thus classify this debate as centre/ cultural/ethical-political. 3.5.3 Secondary picketing (1980) Margaret Thatcher – and many of her contemporaries, and not only those on the right side of the political spectrum – perceived the strong position of the unions in industrial relations as the main obstacle to Britain’s economic success. One of the primary efforts upon Thatcher’s coming to power in 1979 therefore was to curb the power of the unions. While the most dramatic confrontation would only come in 1984/85 with the miners’ strike, resulting in the final defeat of the unions, the beginning of the decade already saw government activities apt to weaken their position (Hanson, 1991; Wilsher et al., 1985). The Employment Act 1980 contained in particular one direct attempt to curtail the unions’ power, namely to restrict severely the practice of secondary action, a practice by which unions took industrial action not only at the primary site of the trade dispute, but also at other, uninvolved, enterprises such as suppliers, contracting partners, etc. (Simpson, 1981). This triggered the resistance of the unions which campaigned against the government’s position on the issue, their opposition culminating in a one-day general strike called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), whose effect, however, was rather modest. This was not only because the Conservative Government held a comfortable majority in the House of Commons of 59 seats and was unimpressed by the unions’ arguments and the open confrontation. More than this, the ‘Day of Action’ itself was far from a success as it was ignored by many and thus only showed the waning political muscle of the unions (Fosh et al., 1993; Winchester, 1981). Before the real test four years later, the unions had already to accept a first defeat – and a symbolic one in terms of how their relationship with the Conservative Government was to develop. We will analyse this debate as a representative of the periphery/material/ pragmatic type, although we have to make a few cautionary remarks. Above all, we have to keep in mind that in its wider context the debate could very well be classified as centre-driven – although, of course, the government’s action could again be read as a response to the development of industrial relations in the 1970s, which were driven by the unions and its members. At the time of our analysis the debate in its immediate context is strongly in

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the hands of the unions, while it is equally clear that they respond to proposed legislation by the government and it is thus not a pure representative of the debate category, where it is classified. 3.5.4 The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) In its wider context, the Agreement was part of the British attempt to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland. More immediately, however, the initiative came from the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald, who, when he came back to office in 1983, was convinced that ‘I must give now priority to heading off the growth of support of the IRA [Irish Republican Army] in Northern Ireland by seeking a new understanding with the British government’ (FitzGerald, 1991, p. 462). In November 1983, he met Margaret Thatcher to discuss the alarming support for Sinn Féin in the past election in Northern Ireland, fearing that if the trend continued this would make constitutional politics impossible (Bardon, 1992, p. 752). Talks between the two heads of state were far from smooth, yet because the political situation in Northern Ireland had reached an impasse as a result of the deep divisions in its society, the governments were forced to act. While loyalists interpreted the official stance of the Conservative Government to signal that any formal influence of the Republic would be minimal, Thatcher and FitzGerald in near secrecy moved towards an agreement. It granted the Republic of Ireland a consultative status in the newly established Intergovernmental Conference, whose scope extended to political matters, security and legal issues as well as the promotion of crossborder co-operation (Bardon 1992). This took all parties, in particular, however, the loyalist camp by surprise: ‘[t]he Protestants of Northern Ireland were almost completely unprepared for the historic settlement, made without any consultation with them or their representatives’ as Bardon states (Bardon, 1992, p. 755). Although the Anglo-Irish Agreement guaranteed the status of Northern Ireland as part of the UK and explicitly stated that a change could only come about with the consent of the majority, the protest by the unionists was fierce and long-lasting. Because of this, the Agreement itself did not have the immediate positive effect both governments had hoped for, yet it fostered their co-operation and thereby laid the base for the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998, which was to become an important milestone in the peace process. Our analysis will cover the debate surrounding the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and we can see that in contrast to some of the other debates, this one very closely corresponds to our classification scheme: it is not only driven, but also initiated by the centre, it is not about material, but primarily about cultural aspects, and it clearly foregrounds the question of collective identity. The debate differs from the sampling standards of the others only insofar as it extends slightly beyond the decision stage. This is due to pragmatic reasons: because of the secrecy of the talks held between Westminster and Dublin,

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the debate in the media gains momentum only shortly before the formal decisions become public, so that we need to expand the content analysis beyond this stage. 3.5.5 Fuel protest (2000) Between May and September 2000 the net price of diesel paid by farmers increased from 14.9 pence to 23.9 pence (Doherty et al., 2003, p. 3). In the context of the still ongoing BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mostly referred to as ‘mad cow disease’) crisis and the fact that some farmers had not been able to operate their farms anywhere near profitability for several years, the announcement of a further price increase in fuel was the spark that ignited the protest (Hathaway, 2001). Adopting the fuel protest strategy that was being employed in France, British farmers and hauliers chose to blockade the gates of oil refineries and terminals. Although the protest was organised only locally, it quickly spread, and its effects came to be felt almost immediately in the rest of the UK, since the disruption of supply meant that the petrol pumps were quickly running dry: ‘The immediate impact of the protest was much deeper than the protesters or commentators anticipated. This was principally because they struck at a particularly vulnerable point of the economy, the oil distribution network, which had been organised along just-in-time delivery principles’ (Doherty et al., 2003, p. 4). The blockade took the government by surprise as it was ‘contagious’ in the sense that it ‘elicited significant increase in protest potential among non-protesters’ (Sanders et al., 2003, p. 696). It could also count on the solidarity of all those affected by the dry pumps as during the initial stages public support for the protesters stood at 78 per cent, which was unusual, given that the protest meant that motorists were suffering from fuel shortages. Yet, it was equally part of the dynamic that both the protest and its public support died away quickly. It certainly did so after the government announced in its pre-Budget report in November that it would introduce changes to cut the taxes on fuel, which were the biggest factor in the total price of unleaded petrol motorists had to pay (Rallings & Thrasher, 2007, p. 325). This was the third debate of the periphery/material/pragmatic type and it, too, just as the union rights issue in 1980, addresses primarily an economic issue. We have to keep in mind, however, that the initiative comes strictly speaking from economic actors (farmers and hauliers), who are then supported by larger parts of civil society. 3.5.6 Anti-terrorism legislation (2005) After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Labour Government passed legislation to counter the threat of international terrorism, authorising the executive to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely. Although the Joint

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Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) was critical of the Bill, remarking in particular that the measures ‘would not have received parliamentary support but for current concerns about terrorism and fear of attack’ (as cited in Hiebert, 2005, p. 677), it was only the Law Lords’ ruling in December of 2004 that changed the government’s approach. As the Law Lords had asserted that the measures were draconian and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and because the controversial clause on indefinite detention without trial was to be reviewed in March 2005, the Labour cabinet introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Bill to replace the existing law and to deal with the legal status of eight foreign detainees in Belmarsh prison. Under the new legislation, the Home Secretary was given the power to make ‘control orders’, i.e. he could put terrorist suspects under house arrest without involving the authority of a court, derogating thereby from the right to liberty granted by the ECHR (Hickman, 2005; Hiebert, 2005). This latter point turned out to be particularly controversial and ‘[t]he bill was subject to a political ping-pong match between the House of Commons and the House of Lords’ as Hiebert describes the subsequent legislation process, in which the Labour majority in the Commons was greatly reduced and the Lords provided a staunch opposition to the government’s plans. The House of Lords insisted above all on the introduction of a sunset clause so that the powers of the Home Secretary would not be in place indefinitely. This was in turn rejected by the House of Commons, although the two houses eventually agreed to pass the Bill under the provision that it would be reviewed after a year (Hiebert, 2005). Still, the legislation remained controversial, particularly as it touched upon established legal traditions of the British system of rights such as habeas corpus (Paye, 2005; Zedner, 2005). This is a debate that the government would like to keep in the political centre, although it spreads beyond the immediate institutional boundaries of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. As with the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Commonwealth immigration issue, this debate too foregrounds questions of collective identity as the proposed legislation challenges some of the legal and historical traditions constitutive of Britain’s self-conception. It thus touches upon cultural aspects and can be classified as an example of a centre/cultural/ethical-political debate.

3.6 Summary of research design Taken together, the sampled data for the six political debates in the four (five) newspapers yields a total of 3,009 speech acts and 592 articles, respectively. We can summarise our research design in Table 3.3. Chapters 4 and 5 present the results of our empirical investigations. Chapter 4 pits the two public sphere types against each other and assesses which one is more deliberative. It tests hypotheses 1 (deliberative balance)

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Table 3.3 Summary of research design Research interest

Deliberative quality of different public sphere types in media discourses

Theoretical distinction between public sphere types

– Periphery-initiated, material, pragmatic discourses – Centre-rooted, cultural, ethical-political discourses Debates on policy issues in newspapers 1960: Unilateral disarmament 1965: Commonwealth immigration 1980: Secondary picketing 1985: Anglo-Irish Agreement 2000: Fuel protest 2005: Anti-terrorism legislation Two to three months prior to a decision taken by the political centre 50 consecutive days for each debate Theoretical sample of four broadsheets and one tabloid: The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Sun Newspaper articles and letters to the editor whose main focus is on the debated issue; 592 articles in total (297 for challenger public spheres, 295 for centre-initiated ones) Speech act on an aspect of the issue that utters demands, criticism, support or is a simple statement; 3,009 speech acts in total. Content analytical dimensions: – Inclusiveness – Role change – Reciprocity – Reflexivity – Range of justifications Illocutions: – Statement – Demand – Criticism – Support

Research object Policy issues

Starting point of the analysis Duration of the analysis Media sample

Sampling unit

Coding unit

Content analysis

and 2 (discursive density and diversity) by putting to work the deliberative dimensions of the media. Examining each of the dimensions separately allows us to arrive at a deeper understanding of the complexity of political discourse and reveal the at times counterintuitive dynamics of deliberation in the public sphere. Building on these results, Chapter 5 then extends the focus to deliberative coalitions, which lie at the heart of the political process, and examines their relative strength in terms of their effect on its deliberative quality (hypothesis 3).

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Notes 1 Although, see Hart (2000) for a different account of media reporting. Based on the data of his study he concludes that ‘[t]he media are not as bad as some claim. I could detect no overarching favoritism here. Instead, the press adhere to news norms with considerable dedication’ (Hart, 2000, p. 103). 2 Habermas himself has recently taken a somewhat sceptical position about the democratic potential of the internet as part of the political public sphere: ‘The Internet has certainly reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However, computer-mediated communication in the web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a special context: It can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes that try to control and repress public opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 423). In short, according to this view, the internet’s contribution to democratic discourse is restricted to those cases where its contributions crystallise around public issues articulated through the quality press. 3 There are almost as many empirical approaches to measuring discourse quality as there are published articles, although they tend to converge on some of the main deliberative dimensions. Two important contributions that we will ignore in the more detailed discussion are the work of Kies (2010) and Janssen & Kies (2005) as well as the suggestion by Wessler (2008). The former uses a mixed methods approach that is only partly grounded in content analysis and where central dimensions of the empirical instrument are operationalised through interviews and surveys. The latter in turn centres the article rather than the single speech act and is therefore interested in the deliberative quality of the media’s coverage on an aggregate level, whereas the present study examines the public sphere established through it, i.e. the actors and the discursive relationships in which they engage. This is a different research interest that requires a different level and unit of analysis (see below). 4 See, e.g. Black et al. (2010), Caluwaerts & Deschouwer (2014), Caluwaerts & Ugarriza (2012) for experiments and group discussions using the Discourse Quality Index (DQI), Lord & Tamvaki (2013) for an application to the European Parliament, as well as Steffensmeier & Schenck-Hamlin (2008) for work on public deliberations that puts the approach to use. 5 This is even more pronounced in Gerhards (1997), who tests the liberal model against Habermas’ deliberative account. 6 To be sure, Gutmann and Thompson also set clear limits to application of their standards of deliberativeness, including mutual respect: ‘When a disagreement is not deliberative (for example, about a policy to legalize discrimination against blacks and women), citizens do not have any obligations of mutual respect towards their opponents. In deliberative disagreement (for example, about legalizing abortion), citizens should try to accommodate the moral convictions of their opponents to the greatest extent possible, without compromising their own moral convictions’ (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996, p. 3). Generally speaking, however, respect as a standard in public discussion is more of a property of agonistic models of democracy and not so central in deliberative models, at least not in the Habermasian account which forms the basis of this study. 7 This is one of the basic insights of those sociologists and sociolinguists working on the social categories of ‘face’ and politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1959; Watts, 2003). 8 For a more expansive definition, see e.g. the work of Kuhlmann (1999), who is interested in the analysis of the communicative rationality of the political process as a whole.

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9 The detailed codebook is in the appendix. 10 From a linguistic point of view, the main challenge is to balance the tension between a semantic and a pragmatic analysis: whereas a purely semantic approach would lead to high levels of reliability, we would probably encounter difficulties in defining on these grounds alone a speech act let alone an argumentative structure and thereby lose the connection to the external validity of our construct. Conversely, an approach which overemphasises the pragmatic dimension would achieve poor results in reliability tests, as here the intersubjective agreement would be rather low. 11 In his more recent publications, Habermas takes a different line, distinguishing lobbyists from advocates, i.e. discursive representatives in Dryzek and Niemeyer’s (2008) sense, experts, moral entrepreneurs and intellectuals as representatives of the elite in addition to journalists and politicians (Habermas, 2006, p. 416). 12 Note, however, that we will retain the basic classification between civil society, the media, the economy and the political elite when testing the effect of the deliberative coalitions (see Chapter 5 for a detailed explanation). 13 This is manly an addressee category. The UK as a speaker is only very rarely classified as a speaker, but it occurs in sweeping and very inclusive speech acts, e.g. when speakers demand the whole country to change, or when they bluntly condemn the whole of Britain for specific shortcomings. 14 Although cf. Ferree et al. (2002) for a different view on this. 15 The focus here is not on the direct relationships between two actors, but on the paths between any two actors. A path connects two actors in a network by a route where no node or arc (the directed connection between nodes) is passed more than once (Wasserman & Faust, 2009, pp. 105–109). This view thus extends the local perspective on triads to more complex configurations that stretch across the whole network. 16 Cf. the analysis by Ipsos MORI (2010) of the voting intention of newspaper readers in the general elections from 1992 to 2010. 17 The Sun was published for the first time in 1964 as a re-launch of the Daily Herald. From 1960 to 1964 the Daily Herald is thus included in the sample as the forerunner of The Sun. 18 Cf. the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures as reported in MediaWeek (2014). 19 The Conservatives, however, were forced to address the question of disarmament to some extent when it emerged in their White Paper on defence in 1960 that Britain’s independent deterrent, the Blue Streak programme, was vulnerable to first strike attacks, which made the possession of a nuclear deterrent a somewhat spurious strategic advantage (Epstein, 1966). 20 Labour had already gone some way towards trying to bridge the divide between its two wings by promoting together with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1959 the idea of the ‘non-nuclear club’, which would consist of all countries except for the US and the Soviet Union (Northedge, 1960). 21 Writing in 1987, Koelble states that the unions controlled 90% of the vote at the annual conference and we have to keep in mind that the unions were the biggest donors to the Labour Party (Koelble, 1987). 22 The Times in one of its opinion pieces also went as far as combining a suspicious stance towards social movement organisations with the fear of communism, warning that if a movement such as CARD ‘gains strength through a mistaken idea that the situation here can be treated in the same way as the American, there will be trouble. The danger is that, if such a movement is democratic, it will be unable to resist communist influence, even though people in it may be alive to the threat. […] it will be the target for a takeover by communist wolves in sheep’s clothing on the one hand; and for attack by Fascist sheep in wolves’ clothing on the other’ (The Times, 28.1.1965).

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Griffiths, D. (1992). The encyclopedia of the British press, 1422–1992. London: Macmillan. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (1996). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (2004). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1984a). The theory of communicative action, volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984b). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1985). Civil disobedience: Litmus test for the democratic constitutional state. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 30, 95–116. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1992). Further reflections on the public sphere. In C. J. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 421–461). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2006). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research 1. Communication Theory, 16(4), 411–426. Habermas, J. (2008). Medien, Märkte und Konsumenten–Die seriöse Presse als Rückgrat der politischen Öffentlichkeit. In J. Habermas, Ach, Europa (pp. 131–137). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Hallin, D. C., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halpern, D., & Gibbs, J. (2013). Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1159–1168. Hanson, C. (1991). Taming the trade unions: A guide to the Thatcher government’s employment reforms, 1980–90. London: Macmillan. Hart, R. (2000). The unheralded functions of campaign news. In S. Chambers & A. Costain (Eds.), Deliberation, democracy, and the media (pp. 85–105). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hathaway, P. (2001). The effect of the fuel ‘protest’ on road traffic. London: Transport Statistics Road Traffic Division 1. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Hayter, T. (2001). Open borders: The case against immigration controls. Capital & Class, 25(3), 149–156. Hickman, T. R. (2005). Between human rights and the rule of law: Indefinite detention and the derogation model of constitutionalism. The Modern Law Review, 68(4), 655–668. Hiebert, J. L. (2005). Parliamentary Review of Terrorism Measures. The Modern Law Review, 68(4), 676–680. Hirst, P. (2013). Associative democracy: New forms of economic and social governance. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Ipsos MORI (2010). Voting by newspaper readership 1992–2010 (24. 5. 2010). Retrieved from: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/voting-newspaperreadership-1992-2010?language_content_entity=en-uk (accessed 23. 3. 2011).

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4

The media and the deliberative quality of public spheres

This chapter examines the different deliberative dimensions of the two public sphere types side by side, to assess whether challenger-initiated discourses do indeed display a higher discursive quality than those that originate in the political centre. For all of the different deliberative dimensions analysed below, we generally assume that the distribution of the actors in terms of the speakers on the one hand, and with regard to the speaker-addressee relationships on the other, are more balanced in those public spheres that are initiated by civil society than in those originating in the political centre (Hypothesis 1 (H1)). In other words, those debates corresponding more to the ideal type should display a more egalitarian participation structure. The second hypothesis focuses more specifically on the discursive interaction of the participants in the debates and expects that they generate more even patterns in challenger public spheres than in centre-driven ones. In the former, these patterns should be marked by an active core that displays a greater diversity of actor groups than in the latter and their interaction should also be more intense (Hypothesis 2 (H2)). The chapter is structured according to the different deliberative dimensions and begins with those that represent the ‘democratic’ aspect of deliberation (inclusiveness and role change) and then moves on to the argumentative side (reciprocity, reflexivity and the range of perspectives). Except for the following section, which focuses on the inclusiveness of the debates, the analyses proceed in a similar way: they first present the basic descriptive view of the specific deliberative dimension for the two public sphere types, then proceed to test their respective internal interaction patterns before juxtaposing their network structures. They thus gradually move from an internal comparison within types of public spheres to an external contrast between them. The deliberative dimension of inclusiveness is a special case, and differs from the other dimensions insofar as it is primarily interested in assessing who has a voice in the different debates and how it is distributed between the actors. It therefore explicitly omits the category of the addressees and consequently also the social network perspective established by the relationships between speakers and addressees. These relationships are a central topic of the analysis of the other components of deliberative quality.

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4.1 Inclusiveness The inclusiveness of the political process is not only a cornerstone of deliberative theories, it is also a central element in all normative democratic theories, including both liberal and communitarian models. The liberal ‘marketplace of ideas’ is directly premised on equal access for all, whereas communitarian thinking advocates an encompassing notion of political participation to guard modern societies against fragmenting tendencies and to foster the sensus communis. In deliberative democracy, inclusiveness is an even more central concept, as all other dimensions of discursive quality are directly or indirectly influenced by it. This is obviously the case for the deliberative criterion of role change, as the other ‘democratic’ discourse variable, but conceptually it also extends to the argumentative side of the deliberative model: only an inclusive debate can guarantee that all arguments and viewpoints have been addressed exhaustively. Put the other way round: a debate with a maximum of reciprocity, the broadest range of perspectives and the highest levels of reflexivity would still be found wanting if it included only actors from the political centre. Such a scenario would correspond to a type of ‘representative publicity’, i.e. political power represented before an audience, rather than including that audience – and particularly civil society – in the political process. This is an important point, expressed in the simple notion lying at the heart of the deliberative idea of democracy, that we have to be able to see ourselves as both the authors and addressees of laws (Habermas, 1996; Kant, 1991; Rousseau, 1998). Indeed, as we will see in this chapter, as well as in the other chapters, it is precisely those instances where we find a substantial discrepancy between the presence of single actor groups in the public sphere, or their deliberative orientation towards each other, that have to be critically assessed. It is also evident that inclusiveness is a key dimension when investigating discourses in the media and the informal public sphere they help to constitute, as here the access to political debates is not regulated or guaranteed in any way, and gaining a voice often proves to be one of the first and major stumbling blocks for those commanding only limited social status, political power or financial resources. In a deliberative democracy the importance of political inclusiveness is inscribed in the central theorem that law must pass the test of practical discourse if it is to be legitimate, as enshrined in Habermas’ discourse principle (D) that ‘[j]ust those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 107). Correspondingly, our main question, investigated in this chapter and in Chapter 5, is how far ‘all [those] possibly affected’ become part of a public debate. More precisely, we are interested in whether there are any systematic differences in the participation structures between the two main public sphere types, whether challenger public spheres on the whole represent more participatory discourses, and more specifically whether members of civil society feature more prominently in them.

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To gain a better understanding of the degree to which the two public sphere types can be said to be more or less inclusive, this chapter approaches the question from different angles. We will first examine the general composition of the speakers in the single debates, before we move on to test more thoroughly the differences between challenger and centre public spheres. Here, we generally assume that outside initiative debates, by their very definition, should be more inclusive and balanced than those dominated by the centre (H1), but apart from this general difference in terms of the spectrum of actors that become part of the debate, there are more specific expectations with regard to the role that single actor groups play. Above all, we would expect civil society actors to be more present in periphery-driven public spheres than in centre-dominated ones (H1a). After all, challenger public spheres ideally come into existence through the very mobilisation of the ‘weak publics’. By contrast, in those debate types that are initiated by the centre a different pattern should emerge: not only would we expect the political elite to be more dominant, but precisely because of the centre’s hegemonic position, journalists as ‘mandataries of an enlightened public’ should occupy a more prominent role, compensating for the lack of challengers (H1b). 4.1.1 Who is the most balanced of them all? Before going into more detail about the differences between the public sphere types with regard to single actor classes, a general look at their overall distribution in the two debate types is in order, to obtain a first impression of their relative presence. Table 4.1 presents the actors’ presence as speakers in the debates, in percentages of the total speech acts in the two public sphere types. We will explore some of the more noticeable characteristics of the different actor groups to gain an initial understanding of the different political processes and their properties. The following sections will then compare the two public sphere types more systematically. The total figures show that although challengers – activists and individual members of civil society, social movements, experts and universities, NGOs and trade unions – are in the minority in both public sphere types, they are perhaps not as marginal as we might have expected, based on the theoretical account outlined above. On average, civil society actors make up more than 20 per cent of all the speakers in the media’s coverage. Taking into account that the data is taken from the (temporary) institutional end of political debates, where political actors can be assumed to dominate the discourse, the presence of challengers is all the more remarkable. In fact, the most dominant actor group in challenger public spheres are the unions, and while they are closely followed by the government, it seems to indicate a certain amount of openness on the part of the media’s selection mechanisms. That said, the second notable fact is the fluctuating presence of challengers between the debate types, which is rather substantial and something we will examine more closely below.

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Table 4.1 Actor type distribution by % in the public sphere types Public sphere type Actor groups

Challenger

Centre

Government/administration

18.6%

24.6%

House of Commons

12.2%

28.4%

House of Lords

3.2%

4.3%

Political parties

12.2%

11.8%

Judiciary

1.2%

1.1%

Civil society

8.9%

11.4%

Trade unions

21.7%

0.1%

Economic actors

7.8%

0.0%

Financial sector

0.1%

0.0%

Experts and universities

1.4%

1.1%

Think tanks

0.0%

1.4%

Journalists/media

12.2%

14.5%

Other

0.5%

1.3%

Total

100%

100%

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

Overall, the representation of challengers in outside initiative debates appears to be stronger than in those driven by the centre. The exception here is the Commonwealth immigration issue, a centre-driven debate, where the participation of civil society actors is slightly higher (23.8 per cent) than during the challenger-initiated fuel protest (23.1 per cent). A closer look at the data shows that the overwhelming majority of challenger contributions to the immigration debate come from single individuals (close to 60 per cent within the civil society category), which is in stark contrast to the fuel protest, where they account for only 33 per cent – even though they are equally affected by the rising petrol prices and the protest blockades. The variation might partly be explained by different journalistic practices, which in the case of the immigration debate gave a substantial number of private opinions a voice in the regular coverage – although rarely those of immigrants – partly because at the time Britain was lacking a broad civil rights movement comparable to that of the US. This space is taken up in the fuel protest by various organisations which actively try to shape the debate Commonwealth immigration apart, however, challengers generally seem to gain access to the political process and to the media mainly in those instances where they are well organised, for instance in the nuclear disarmament debate. Here, we find an advocacy coalition (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993) spanning scattered activists, social movement organisations such as the

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CND, some of the largest unions at the time and pacifist MPs, the latter mostly from the ranks of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. The fuel protest is structured in a similar way in this respect, although the opposing alliance structure is considerably weaker as an enduring coalition. By contrast, the strong voice of civil society actors during the secondary picketing dispute results almost exclusively from the presence of the unions as the most highly organised actors, and those traditionally commanding the most bargaining power. As this debate shows, however, the degree of organisation is neither a guarantee of favourable public opinion,1 nor does it automatically translate into political gains. The contrasting case to these rather diversified public spheres is certainly the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the near-silence of challenger voices. The 1985 debate is an almost ideal exemplar of a public sphere structured according to an inside access model: the political-administrative complex, including the political parties, occupies almost exclusively the discursive space, contributing close to 80 per cent of the utterances in the debate, whereas other actors hardly participate. Civil society contributions reach their lowest value (7.8 per cent) when economic actors are entirely absent; only the media’s presence is near its overall value. Across the sampled debates the political elite – the government and the administration, MPs and peers, the parliamentary parties, political parties in general, as well as the judiciary – in this case particularly comes close to overall control of the discourse, which becomes synonymous with a power-ridden public sphere. This is further corroborated by the fact that it is that debate which integrates the lowest range of actors overall and above all displays the lowest participation of non-institutional actors. The mere dominance of political actors, of course, should not be equated with discursive harmony within this group. Although we will address the reciprocal structures of the debates more fully in the next chapter, it is useful here to point out that while the political centre is almost hermetically closed to other actors, most of the speech acts (40 per cent) between political actors represent instances of criticism and disagreement, mainly between the Tory Government and the unionist parties of Northern Ireland. At the same time, it must be clear that, despite the ongoing controversies, the government largely controls the terms and the development of the debate. By contrast, the centre’s dominance is not as pronounced in the other debates, although its discursive presence strongly parallels the public sphere type distinction; it has its most influential status in the inside access and mobilisation models, whereas its status is challenged in outside initiative debates. Conversely, actors from the economy – corporations, trade associations, farmers and financial institutions – and, above all, civil society, display the opposite pattern: their presence is strongest in the latter type, and they contribute considerably fewer speech acts in the former. The economic actors seem to pose something of a puzzle. At a first glance it seems strange that economic actors should have such a low overall

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discursive presence as speakers. To be sure, in the fuel debate, where the oil companies drew much anger from the public because of the high petrol prices, they contribute almost 20 per cent of the utterances – although nearly half are from their most vociferous critics, farmers and hauliers. This is generally a rather untypical scenario, however, as corporate interests are by and large best served by avoiding or circumventing public discussion. The fuel debate shows that CEOs and the corporations they represent become participants in a debate they would have liked to avoid, very much against their own will – or to conduct behind the closed doors of Whitehall. This strategy is much more successfully employed in the debate on secondary picketing, and also because here the economy is not the primary target of the unions’ demands and criticism. Corporate interests are frequently at odds with those of the wider public, and economic actors therefore employ inside rather than outside lobbying efforts (Harris & Lock, 1996) to pursue their interests. They do not depend on the ‘oxygen of publicity’ (Thatcher, 1985) to the same extent that political actors and civil society challengers do. On the contrary, their success often hinges on their interests not becoming too visible to the public. Before we turn to examine the inclusiveness of the public sphere types more closely, a last remark must concern the discursive presence of the media. Whereas the actor distribution in all other categories fluctuates considerably across the debates, the media themselves appear to be relatively unaffected by these dynamics. This is mainly due to the structural aspects of newspaper journalism: as genuine participants in political debates, journalists – at least in today’s era of objectivity (for the UK and US contexts, see McNair, 2009; Schudson, 1981) – are largely restricted to voicing their opinions in commentary columns and leading articles. Together with news reports, background coverage, feature articles, interviews and so on, these styles and formats allow journalists to process political issues from different angles, thereby highlighting different aspects and deliberative elements. Because these formal building blocks are less susceptible to changes in time and between issues than the specific content they address, we consequently see less variation in the overall levels of journalist participation in the debates. The only exception to this trend is the anti-terror legislation debate, where the media accounted for close to 18 per cent of all speech acts. There are two reasons that help to explain their increase in activity. First, journalists roundly criticised the government for throwing hard-fought, historic civil liberties overboard, as the proposed legislation would have compromised basic legal principles such as habeas corpus, threatening to blur the distinction between the constitutional and an authoritarian state in the eyes of many. Second and perhaps more important, in this case the opposing advocacy coalition was particularly small, consisting, in terms of public resonance, of only one organised voice from civil society, the human rights NGO, Liberty. The Conservative opposition in Parliament in turn had little to criticise, given that the actual content of the Bill was a prototypically

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Conservative concern and thus put the Tories on the sidelines of the parliamentary debate.2 Tellingly, in this example of a centre public sphere, journalist criticisms of the government almost doubled those of Conservative MPs and additionally covered aspects of the issue not addressed by the parliamentary opposition. The only institutional challenges came from Liberal Democrat MPs and the dissenting Labour backbench. 4.1.2 Inclusion or exclusion? Discursive access to the public sphere So far, our analysis has pointed out in general terms some of the more striking differences in the presence of specific actor classes across the different debates, which might be indicative of differences in the overall inclusiveness of the public spheres. As an element of deliberative quality, a public sphere around an issue is inclusive if it integrates speakers from different backgrounds, and the more diverse these backgrounds are, the more inclusive the public sphere. As we have seen above, in this view some debates, such as the one on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, might have to be assessed more critically than those which incorporate voices across a range of social, economic and political sectors and do so more evenly. The important question is whether the differences between the debates we have started to explore follow a systematic pattern to the extent that those debates which conform more to the outside initiative model are more inclusive than those that have their origin in the political centre. According to our theory, challenger public spheres should on the whole be more inclusive than centre-initiated ones. In the following paragraphs we therefore analyse the two public sphere types more closely with regard to their inclusiveness, starting with a general comparison between them, and then proceeding to test more specific aspects. Discursive breadth: actor participation A first way to assess whether one public sphere type is more inclusive than the other is to compare the overall distribution of actors as presented in the table above. A brief glance at the data leads to the conclusion that challenger discourses are indeed more inclusive than centre-initiated debates, as a broader range of actors are engaged in them. Above all, the lack of economic and financial actors in the centre debates and the virtually non-existent participation of trade unions are the most obvious differences. Inside access discourses also appear to be more heavily skewed towards actors from the political centre, leaving little room for the participation of others. In other words, centre debates seem to be characterised by a higher amount of discursive concentration than those originating in civil society. Using a Chi-square test allows us to determine whether the differences between the two distributions are statistically significant, and complementing this analysis with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)3 tells us whether the actor concentration differs between the two public sphere types. The results

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Table 4.2 Chi-square test and HHI of actor distribution between public sphere types Challenger vs Centre public spheres

Value

X-squared

680.12

df p-value

11 < 2.2e-16

HHI Challenger public spheres

0.14

HHI Centre public spheres

0.19

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

in Table 4.2 confirm our initial impression that the two public sphere types are indeed systematically distinct from one another, and that centre public spheres display a higher degree of concentration in the sense that they are more strongly tilted towards the political elite. Against this finding, one could argue that the actor categorisation per se favours challenger public spheres and makes them appear more inclusive, as it provides several subcategories for economic actors, which are often not part of centre debates, and that it is these extra categories that ultimately cause the difference. The difference between the public sphere types persists, however, even if we reduce the actor categories to the basic classification of political elite, economy, media and civil society – and even if we exclude the economy altogether (results not reported here). Given the rather constant presence of journalists and the media in the debates, the difference between the two political discourse types therefore appears to be caused by how successfully civil society actors intervene in the public sphere. The variance in their distribution across the single debates seems to suggest as much, and we will test in the next section whether their unequal presence is related to the public sphere types. Challenger public spheres are also significantly more balanced in the sense that the despite the discrepancies between the single actor groups, their presence is on the whole more equally distributed than in discourses that originate in the political centre as the HHI shows, and which is also confirmed by an F-test that compares the variances of the two distributions and which is significant at the 0.05 level.4 In line with our hypothesis (H1), political processes that originate on the periphery of civil society are more integrative in that they mobilise a greater diversity of actors to take part in the debates, they incorporate more challengers, particularly those from civil society, and despite the obvious differences overall, they grant the different actor groups a more even access than discourses initiated by the centre. The role of challengers According to deliberative theory, we would expect a higher proportion of challengers in periphery debates, as they are by definition initiated by them,

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than in centre-driven debates, which are dominated by the political elite – and in extreme cases occur under the very exclusion of civil society. Looking at the challengers’ presence in the public sphere types in Table 4.2, there does indeed appear to be a systematic difference between them. We therefore conducted a Wilcoxon5 test to see if civil society actors contribute significantly more utterances in periphery-driven than in centre-dominated public spheres. As Table 4.3 shows, the difference is both substantial and significant. It is rather striking that even in the later stages of the political process examined in this study, where the political elite typically dominates the public discussion, periphery-initiated public spheres retain their inclusive character. Compared to this, centre public spheres are characterised by systematically distorted forms of participation, which put civil society actors at a substantial disadvantage. That said, we have to bear in mind that the period under consideration in each debate stretches only until the (first) institutional decision is reached, and therefore ignores the reactions that these decisions might cause in the various parts of society. In other words, the analytical endpoint of the single public spheres is rarely coterminous with the proper end of the debates, and civil society might enter the discussion at a later stage, particularly in centre-driven discourses. This was exemplarily the case during the Anglo-Irish Agreement debate, from which civil society was outright excluded but fought hard after the Agreement was signed to make its voice heard and force the debate into a new political cycle. We can thus say that on the one hand civil society actors quite generally have a greater presence in periphery-initiated discourses. On the other hand, however, they might be able to influence those debates where they have a more peripheral role, although mostly only after institutional decisions have been taken, and with the result of protracting the political process. The latter need not necessarily be seen as a shortcoming, as from a deliberative perspective it is the argumentative exchange of those affected that conveys legitimacy on the political decision. Thus, whereas in the debate about the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference the fierce opposition towards the Agreement, rooted in parts of civil society and fanned by the unionist parties, certainly prevented the issue from being resolved in the short term, the ongoing debate eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 as one of the central cornerstones of the Northern Ireland peace process. Taking these points together, we can say that in both public sphere types, challengers can influence the political process to some degree, although Table 4.3 Wilcoxon rank sum test of civil society W

p-value

3,500,631

< 2.2e-16

Note: Alternative = ‘greater’. Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

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The deliberative quality of public spheres

particularly in the latter case this largely depends on broad advocacy coalitions that reach beyond single actor groups and include political actors as allies. Conversely, civil society is significantly stronger in challenger debates and therefore has a greater chance of influencing the institutional process within the same policy cycle. The role of the media Closely connected to the role of civil society in public spheres is that of journalists and the media. From a deliberative viewpoint, journalists are seen as the mandataries of an enlightened public (Habermas, 1996, p. 378), yet what this exactly entails is open to different readings. In a narrow interpretation, the media figure as little more than relay stations between civil society and political institutions, and ‘ought to be receptive to the public’s concerns and proposals, take up these issues and contributions impartially, augment criticisms, and confront the political process with articulate demands for legitimation’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 378). Here, journalism’s task consists mainly of transmitting impulses from civil society actors and amplifying their challenges to the status quo; however, the same passage can be submitted to a more expansive interpretation, where the media take on a more active role, particularly in the absence of challenger input. In this view, journalists act as mandataries when they hold those in power to account on behalf of civil society, which is particularly important in those instances where civil society actors are excluded from the political debate (e.g. the Anglo-Irish Agreement) or where they lack the critical mass, the organisation and the necessary political alliances to voice their concerns (e.g. immigrants in the Commonwealth immigration debate), which occurs predominantly in centre-driven public spheres. If the media follow this second form of journalistic self-understanding, we should see an increase in their presence in centre-initiated debates as opposed to those anchored in the periphery. We can assess this assumption by using a Wilcoxon test to compare the media’s discursive participation in both public sphere types. Table 4.4 reports the results and shows that, contrary to our expectation, the media do not command a more active position in centre type public spheres. At the same time the p-value is not far from the 0.05 threshold and we can take this to indicate a tendency in the direction postulated by the hypothesis (H1b). We will come back to examine journalism’s role in the public sphere more closely in Chapter 5, particularly whether, as mandataries, the media integrate civil society views more actively when challengers are marginalised Table 4.4 Wilcoxon rank sum test of media presence W

p-value

3,046,641

0.08879

Note: Alternative = ‘greater’. Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

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through the political process. In the present context of the public sphere’s inclusiveness, we are left with the impression that while the media might not outright compensate for a lack of civil society involvement, they nevertheless seem to occupy a slightly more prominent position in those instances where challenger voices are pushed more towards the margins of the political process. 4.1.3 Inclusiveness as diversity So far, we have established that periphery- and centre-initiated public spheres differ in terms of their overall actor distribution and internal balance, on the one hand, and with regard to how prominently single actor groups take part in the political process, on the other hand. What we still lack is an assessment of whether periphery public spheres are on the whole more inclusive than centre public spheres, i.e. whether they integrate a greater diversity of actors. The results of the analyses so far overwhelmingly point in this direction, although some ambiguities remain, for instance with regard to the role of journalists, and we therefore need a more detailed approach to compare the two debate types. This is all the more warranted as the overall aggregate view of the two public sphere types tells us little about whether the inclusiveness we can read from their surface structure is a property that is found regularly throughout the different debates or whether it is present only during brief episodes. We therefore move the analysis from the level of the overall actor distribution, which provides a summary view of the presence of the single groups across the debates, to the more detailed level of the single article. Accordingly, the question we are now asking is whether, at this level of coverage, the different debates generally incorporate a greater diversity of actors in challenger public spheres than in those originating in the political centre. This allows us to compare both discourses in a more nuanced way to see whether one type is more inclusive than the other. The shift in analytical focus also more closely resembles the perspective of an interested audience – ultimately the addressee of Habermas’ journalistic mandataries – which follows the various issues through the media’s coverage. To assess whether the debates reflect systematic differences in terms of the actors’ inclusiveness throughout the media’s coverage, we performed a Wilcoxon test of the two public sphere types over all the articles. Table 4.5 Table 4.5 Wilcoxon rank sum test of overall inclusiveness W

p-value

All actors

47,305

0.01894

Without economic actors

42,866

0.8254

Note: Alternative = ‘greater’. Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

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The deliberative quality of public spheres

shows that civil society-initiated discourses are, indeed, significantly more inclusive than those that correspond to inside access models rooted in the centre, and the analysis thus broadly supports the view established so far. We would be jumping to conclusions, however, if we automatically assumed that the difference we see between the debate types is caused solely by the greater presence of civil society actors. True, from a theoretical perspective this is the main point that distinguishes the public sphere types, but our data offers an additional explanation. It is important to see that outside initiative debates not only represent a specific type of political public sphere according to the starting point of the political process, they also embody a specific issue type or cleavage, which is mainly a material one in the present study, and this in turn has consequences for the actors involved. By their very definition material debates at some stage involve the economy, whereas cultural debates do not necessarily do so, and it therefore might be the discursive contributions of economic actors rather than those from civil society which make outside initiative public sphere types more inclusive. In order to assess this, we excluded all economic actors from the analysis and tested the debates again for a difference between periphery and centre public spheres. Omitting the economic actors clearly should have a greater effect on challenger than centre public spheres, for although on the whole they play a rather peripheral role – recall that in total their discursive presence amounts to merely 4 per cent of all utterances – they are distributed rather unevenly between the two debate types: in fact, 81 per cent of all economic actors participate in periphery debates, whereas only 19 per cent are part of centre debates. Marginal as their presence may be in the debates in total, they might still be in a position to tip the statistical scales, as it were. We can see that re-running the Wilcoxon test without economic actors as part of the actor structure has the effect that the differences between the public sphere types disappear. In an article-by-article comparison, the greater degree of inclusiveness in challenger public spheres is not only caused by the greater presence of civil society actors per se, rather, an additional important point is that the problems they address, the criticism they articulate and the demands they make in material issues are partly directed towards the political elite, but they are also levelled, to a substantial degree, towards economic actors. This dovetails with our daily experiences as media consumers, which show that often civil society actors appear in the context of boycotts, strikes and other forms of protest directed against economic actors. Indeed, the media resonance of larger NGOs such as Greenpeace is defined by such events, which are designed to drag economic actors into the public limelight. Placed in the context of our analysis, the greater inclusiveness in challenger debates is not merely and directly the result of the presence of civil society actors alone, it is also an indirect product of their engagement, as their discursive contributions address a wider range of actors, notably economic ones, who in turn become part of the debate. This is clearly visible in the secondary

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picketing, as well as the fuel protest issues, where civil society actors protested against government actions and regulations but also against the stance taken by big corporations, business leaders and their associations. Typically, in challenger public spheres originating around material issues, the actions of civil society organisations are often primarily aimed at perceived misconduct by businesses, and target state regulation only in the second place. Challenger public spheres are therefore more inclusive in a double sense: they are marked on the one hand by a greater presence of civil society actors, which on the other pull actors from other backgrounds into the debate. 4.1.4 Conclusion Our analysis of the informal public sphere as refracted through the media’s coverage has begun with a deliberative dimension usually excluded when investigating the discursive quality of parliamentary settings (Steiner et al., 2004), jury deliberations (Gastil et al., 2002) or focus groups (Fishkin & Luskin, 2005; Luskin et al., 2002): the diversity of the actors who take part in the debate and their relative strength vis-à-vis each other. While only secondary in these other settings, the principle of inclusion is constitutive of public discourse and logically precedes any of the argumentative dimensions. As an analytical dimension, the inclusiveness of political discourse expresses both a deliberative category and a democratic intuition in the sense that the quality of the political process, and the public sphere it constitutes, depends first and foremost on the potential for all those affected by political norms to have a voice in it. The analyses in this section have produced important insights to deepen our understanding of political participation in the public sphere. Based on the initial impressions about the general differences between the two public spheres in terms of their actor distribution, we have examined the degree to which single actor groups, above all challengers, contribute to the debate. We have seen that, on the whole, the participation of civil society actors is by no means as marginal as we might have thought, based on the moderate hopes given by the theoretical account, where their involvement is portrayed as an exception of the courant normal of politics. When further assessing the differences between the public sphere types, it became clear that their presence is significantly greater in the debates that they initiate, and that they conversely only play an inferior role in centre-driven public spheres. Beyond these differences, civil society actors have an additional, important effect on the political process: their presence leads to an overall greater inclusiveness of challenger public spheres, due to their ability to draw other actor groups into the debate. By contrast, public spheres initiated by the political elite, where civil society actors are marginalised, have to be judged critically from a deliberative point of view. They are marked by two interrelated problems. First, as we have seen, the lower degree of participation by challengers leads to an overall lower level of inclusiveness. Second, and perhaps more severe, the deliberative vacuum left by the marginalised participants in civil society is

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hardly filled by the media in their function as mandataries of an enlightened public. Rather, in order to fulfil its role, journalism in most cases has to rely on input from organised voices, be they political parties, business associations, trade unions or social movement organisations. In their absence, journalists can only inadequately offset the lacking ‘discursive representation’ (Dryzek & Niemeyer, 2008) of groups, ideas and interests. This was certainly the case in the Anglo-Irish Agreement debate, which, until the signing of the treaty, was conducted almost entirely with the exclusion of civil society and its concerns, but perhaps it is even more clearly evidenced in the Commonwealth immigration issue, where the voices of immigrants were relegated to a background report series in The Times, on the political, cultural and economic consequences of immigration, but hardly found entrance to the debate otherwise – let alone in more common and frequent formats such as news reports. Debates such as this also highlight the limitations of quantifying approaches such as the present one and those discussed in the methods, which served as sources of inspiration. We can only assess the deliberative quality of the two public sphere types in very general terms, and are thus necessarily forced to gloss over some of the more qualitative aspects of their discourses. While adequate inclusion emerges as one of the central deliberative problems of public spheres initiated by the political elite, we should not forget that discursive engagement goes beyond mere representation. In other words, having a ‘voice’ is one thing, creating enough resonance and substantial ‘uptake’ by others is quite another (Goodin & Dryzek, 2006). Public spheres rooted in civil society in this regard certainly have the advantage of granting more actor groups a voice in the political process, particularly challengers, but it is a moot point whether their increased participation generates any reaction from others. Even in periphery-initiated public spheres they could still find themselves isolated if, despite their greater presence, they were not addressed by the other actors in the debate, above all the political elite. In other words, participation as a principle is tied to the assumption that the discursive presence of actors makes a discursive and possibly political difference. Taking up this point, the next section will focus more closely on the discursive connections between the participants in the public sphere by examining how those who have a voice, the speakers, relate to the addressees. In addition to examining the discursive networks that are generated through these relationships, the speaker-addressee constellation also allows us to say something about the internal permeability of the public spheres, i.e. the degree to which the actors can switch between communicative roles, and the addressees can thus become speakers.

4.2 Role change Participatory approaches to democracy emphasise the importance of its inclusiveness, which translates into the question of access to public discourse when focussing more specifically on the role of the media in the political

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process, and while access to, and inclusion in, a public sphere dominated by the mass media is certainly one of the most central dimensions of democratic discourse, it is only one side of a more complex story. Deliberative theories in particular have proposed a more comprehensive concept of political participation. This is most evident in D, which juxtaposes the participants in rational discourses and those affected by norms, and it is easy to see why both sides are important: as the example of the Commonwealth immigrants above illustrates, in certain debates some actors occupy the role of active participants as speakers, whereas others are systematically relegated to the role of addressees. Habermas is well aware of this when he writes that the informal public sphere is ‘more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 307). The point made by deliberative theory is that we have to look at both roles, those of the speakers and of the addressees, to obtain a fuller picture, as taking only one into account might lead us to premature conclusions about the true state of affairs. In Habermas’ characterisation of the deliberative procedure, the dimension that captures the relationship between speakers and hearers is the one he refers to as ‘role change’. It postulates a free transition between communicative roles, which we have simplified in the context of the present study to the two most basic roles that shape every discourse: those who raise validity claims and those who are their addressees. As challenger public spheres are expected to be more deliberative than centre-driven discourses, they should also show a greater permeability between these two roles. We therefore assume that the actor distribution of speakers should more closely match that of the addressees in civil society initiated debates than in those initiated by the centre (H1c). At the same time, the relationships established between speakers and addressees in challenger public spheres should differ markedly from those rooted in the centre, in the sense of generating more inclusive and intensive debates, and while we would not expect them to integrate all actors to an equal degree, challenger debates in contrast to inside access discourses should be characterised by a lower degree of hierarchy (H1d), and display an active core that includes more actors and a greater diversity of them, resulting in a debate that has a higher ‘discursive density’ (H2a). We will proceed in three steps to test the hypotheses. We will first compare, in a general, explorative way, the roles of speakers and hearers, and thereby build on and extend the approach we have taken to measure the inclusiveness of the public sphere types in the section above. In a next step, we will introduce the concept of deliberative networks by mapping the speaker-addressee relationships in the two public spheres and comparing their internal structure in terms of their balance and hierarchy. Lastly, we will examine the core/periphery structures generated by the actors’ discursive relationships and determine which public sphere type displays higher communicative density at its heart and is more balanced in terms of the

100 The deliberative quality of public spheres number and diversity of actors. In line with deliberative theory we assume challenger public spheres to be more deliberative than inside access discourses. 4.2.1 Deliberation and symmetric interaction: initial observations Whereas in more informal political conversations we would expect the participants to allow each other the same amount of time, it is obvious that debates that comprise a public sphere around a specific issue are characterised by certain asymmetries. We have explored some of these in Chapter 3, although it is hard to say in absolute terms whether, for instance, civil society’s presence is generally too low – even in challenger public spheres – or if that of the political elite is generally too high. Here, the concept of role change becomes valuable as a theoretical and methodological concept, for instead of taking recourse in an abstract standard or other extra-discursive data, we can evaluate the relationship between speakers and addressees. While this approach also has its drawbacks, such as when whole actor groups are excluded from discourse in both the roles as speakers and addressees, the clear advantage of it is that it measures the actor relationships of the debates within their own context. Table 4.6 presents their overall Table 4.6 Speaker-addressee distribution in the public sphere types (%) Challenger public sphere

Centre public sphere

Actor groups

Speaker

Addressee

Speaker

Addressee

Government/administration

18.6%

31.4%

24.6%

56.9%

House of Commons

12.2%

8.6%

28.4%

12.7%

House of Lords

3.2%

1.3%

4.3%

3.4%

Political parties

12.2%

10.5%

11.8%

11.4%

Judiciary

1.2%

1.3%

1.1%

1.6%

Civil society

8.9%

9.7%

11.4%

7%

Trade unions

21.7%

18.5%

0.1%

0.2%

Economic actors

7.8%

6.4%

0.0%

1.6%

Financial sector

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0%

Experts and universities

1.4%

0%

1.1%

0.3%

Think tanks

0.0%

0%

1.4%

0%

Journalists/media

12.2%

1.8%

14.5%

1.1%

Other

0.5%

4.2%

1.3%

3.7%

Total

100%

100%

100%

100%

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

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distributions according to public sphere type. Several discrepancies between the speakers and addressees merit our attention, although not all of them are problematic, as we will see. The biggest difference is between the roles of political actors as speakers, whose average across the two public sphere types is slightly above 60 per cent, and as addressees, whose prominence increases to over 72 per cent. Unsurprisingly, the contrast is even greater in centre public spheres, where the political elite is the addressee in 86 per cent of the cases, and contributes 70.2 per cent of all utterances – a difference of almost 16 per cent. Despite these differences, political actors can certainly not be described as underrepresented as speakers. Their presence as addressees in turn is a typical characteristic of the political process, although it clearly differs between debate types. As political actors have formal access to the decision-making process, they are in a certain sense always the addressees of any public utterance. The trajectory of both public sphere types sooner or later converges towards the political centre, as this is the institutional place where binding decisions are taken. The utterances of all the actors involved in the political process thus implicitly or explicitly always (co-)address the centre: civil society and the economy as those actor groups affected by policy proposals, the media as commentators of the political events, and political actors themselves as they demand, introduce or criticise new legislation. This explains the gap between the centre’s value as speaker and in its role as addressee. The media demonstrates a similar discrepancy between the two roles in both public sphere types, although in the opposite direction, and with the effect that they all but disappear as addressees. While journalists provide discursive platforms and are actively involved in the debates as commentators of the political process, it seems that they are not treated on a par with the other actor groups. The reason for this can be found in the role they play as mandataries in the public sphere. On the one hand, journalists play an active part in the debates as discourse facilitators, they solicit statements, integrate perspectives, comment on the stances of other actors, and sometimes advocate the views of the discursively underrepresented; yet, on the other hand, they themselves are only rarely perceived as participants in the political process. It is only when they are found in breach of their conduct that they become the focus of other actors’ attention. Because of this, their apparent underrepresentation as addressees is not so much a communicative distortion and cause for concern as it reflects the day-to-day routine of the political process in a mass-mediated public sphere. We will come back to this point below. The last group to address is civil society. In both public spheres, the actors from this group in most cases have a slightly higher presence as speakers than as addressees, although to different degrees and with some minor exceptions. On the whole, they display the reverse relationship between the two roles to that of political actors. This is mainly due to the fact that they

102 The deliberative quality of public spheres play a different part in the political process to political actors, as they form the informal input and thus occupy a different discursive position. While these discrepancies between the roles of speaker and addressee can be explained in one way or another for the single actor groups, the question from the perspective of deliberative theory is whether they are of such a scale that they lead to systematic distortions in the public spheres, obstructing the free flow of communicative modes and thus diminishing the internal porousness of the discourses. 4.2.2 The deliberative symmetry of public spheres Ideally – with some qualifications regarding the media – the structure of speakers and addressees should be more or less identical in each debate and for each public sphere type. Although we should expect differences between the actor categories with regard to their discursive presence, such as a stronger position of the political elite vis-à-vis civil society, the point is that each of the groups should be addressed to a degree similar to that to which they take part in the debates as speakers. As we have seen above, this criterion is only more or less fulfilled, as there are obvious discrepancies between the roles for political actors, the media and civil society in the two public sphere types. The question we therefore examine more closely in this section is whether these differences are substantial enough within both types to become statistically significant. This is the case if the speaker and addressee structures differ substantially from each other, which in turn would indicate a lack of deliberative quality. Note that this approach does not say anything about the presence of an actors’ group: it is not important that, for instance, civil society actors have a strong presence in the debate for it to be judged as deliberative, but that their role as speakers matches their role as addressees. It is a measure for dialogic symmetry and accordingly those public spheres are deemed deliberative, where speakers and addressees display the same actor structure. We compare the speaker and addressee distributions within the two public sphere types using a Chi-square test. The results in Table 4.7 confirm our initial impression that the speaker and hearer distributions do indeed differ significantly from each other and neither public sphere can be said to be highly dialogic. This is even the case once we exclude the media from Table 4.7 Chi-square test of speaker/addressee congruence

X-squared df p-value

Challenger public sphere

Centre public sphere

241.47

659.43

12 0.0005

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

12 0.0005

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the test (results not reported here), who play a highly asymmetric role and are most of the time marginalised as addressees. Based on these results, our hypothesis (H1c) is clearly rejected. It is easy to see, however, that the incongruence between speakers and addressees in both debate types is not only caused by the media but also by the uneven presence of the government, which occupies between 18.6 per cent and 24.6 per cent as speaker and between 31.4 per cent and 56.9 per cent as addressee, and the House of Commons in the case of inside access public spheres. It is no surprise that the government plays such an important role as an addressee in both public sphere types, particularly in centre-driven ones, as in the latter case it sets the agenda of the political process. Interestingly, although this is not the only source of distortion between speaker and addressee distributions, excluding the government from the analysis raises the p-value for periphery-initiated public spheres to 0.043, just below the critical threshold, while that of centre-driven debates remains unchanged.6 These results point to the different positions the political centre occupies in the two discourse types – and to a generally different actor structure. In debates initiated by the political elite, the government is the most dominant addressee, occupying more than twice as much space as in its role as speaker. Nevertheless, removing it from the analysis has no apparent effect on the mismatch between the speaker and addressee distributions, which by consequence means that the dialogicality in centre public spheres is more fundamentally flawed on the level of the different actor groups. They are skewed in two ways: first, the general actor structure is strongly tilted to the side of the political elite; and, second, the speaker and addressee distributions are asymmetrical to the extent that they appear to be taken from different populations. In contrast to this, challenger public spheres come closer to living up to the deliberative expectations once we remove the actor that causes the greatest discrepancy. We have to be aware, however, that on this aggregate level of the analysis we cannot tell what causes the asymmetries – in other words who brings the addressees into play – and who ignores them. To answer this question we need a different approach that allows us to map the relationships between speakers and addressees and the discursive space that they constitute in more detail. The following section does exactly this by modelling the speakeraddressee relationships in the two public sphere types as communicative networks. 4.2.3 Deliberative roles and discursive spaces Social network analysis is a recent and fast-evolving method of data analysis that is ideally suited to our purposes – and empirical work within the deliberative paradigm quite generally – as it allows us to go beyond the examination of the surface structure of the debates, which has been the dominant approach in the previous sections, to model the relationships between the

104 The deliberative quality of public spheres actors more accurately. Apart from gaining insights into the structural relationships that constitute the public sphere types on a general level, we can submit the deliberative networks to further statistical analysis to reveal some of the hidden dynamics that drive the debates. The idea behind social network analysis is straightforward: in an increasingly networked society (Castells, 2011), it makes sense to analyse the relationships by which it is structured (Wasserman & Faust, 2009) to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying processes, mechanisms and dynamics. This is all the more the case if we start from a theoretical background such as deliberative democracy, which puts the relationships between actors at its very centre. Social networks are formally made up of nodes, actors in our case, and the edges that connect them, i.e. specific relationships such as friendship, work, family relations, financial transactions – or in our case deliberative orientations and communicative modes. Public spheres can thus be thought of as discursive spaces established by the deliberative relations between actors who are co-operatively engaged in solving a problem of common interest by implementing generally binding norms. Social network analysis then allows us to map and analyse the networks that are generated by the relationships between speakers and hearers in a debate. In social network analytical terms, such a view of political debates results in a directed and valued network: we take into account the deliberative orientation that connects speakers to addressee, and we also consider how often each relationship occurs. This allows us to go beyond a summary view of what goes on in a public sphere to uncover the discursive dynamics at play in a more detailed way. It also allows us to use different network measures to assess the degree of deliberativeness of the interaction patterns. Challenger and centre public spheres as deliberative networks Social networks can be depicted as graphs that allow us to gain a first impression of the structure and dynamics present in a public sphere, before we move on to a more detailed analysis. In line with the deliberative approach, we assume that challenger public spheres are more balanced than centre-driven discourses and that the corresponding discursive space is more evenly structured. In other words, while both public sphere types are characterised by differences of power and actors from the political-administrative complex, who will always occupy a privileged position due to their proximity to the decisionmaking institutions, we still expect these discursive hierarchies to be less present in those debates that conform more to the deliberative model. Figure 4.1 presents the actors and their relationships, which constitute the challenger public sphere. The size of the nodes is proportional to their indegree, i.e. the instances in which they are addressed by others. Accordingly, the width of the arcs indicates the strength of the relationship between speakers and addressees; loops are self-references within the same actor group.

The deliberative quality of public spheres Parties

Lords

Transitive triads

Commons

UK

Trade unions

105

Network hierarchy

Finance Government Experts

60 0.3182

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts, N = 1,397. Size of nodes is proportional to weighted indegree, size of arcs is proportional to interaction between the nodes.

Media Economy Civil society Judiciary

Figure 4.1 Periphery public sphere speaker-addressee relationships

The first and most obvious element to notice is the relative density of the network, which reflects the fact that most actors are connected to each other, thus creating an overall balanced structure. This is apparent in the two measures we can employ to assess the degree of deliberativeness of the public sphere, the number of transitive triads and the overall hierarchy of the network. The first measure simply counts how many triadic configurations exist in the network that exhibit some kind of equilibrium in terms of how the actors are connected and corresponds to the idea that a friend of a friend is also a friend.7 The more transitive configurations there are, the more balanced relationships between the actors exist. The overall hierarchy as the second measure includes the region beyond the immediate neighbourhood of an actor, and examines the extent to which the directed path between a pair of nodes is reciprocated. The more such reciprocal connections exist, the less the network is characterised by hierarchy as the communication between the actors flows in both directions. The actual measure has a value between 0 and 1 and the closer it is to zero, the more balanced the structure of the network. The visual impression of an even structure in the challenger public sphere is reflected in a high degree of transitive triads (60) as well as a low degree of overall hierarchy (0.318). Taken together, challenger public spheres display a substantial amount of communicative equality that integrates the different actor groups and cuts across social strata. That said, the government still constitutes the topological centre as the actor that is most often addressed, which corresponds to its formal position in the decision-making process. At the same time, and in contrast to the centre-rooted public sphere we examine further below, the government engages with challengers to a substantial degree: over 30 per cent of its interactions are directed either towards the unions (12.3 per cent) or – which is the larger share – to civil society actors (22.4 per cent). Partly resulting from this, challengers in this public sphere enjoy a comparatively strong position, particularly the trade unions, which are discursively recognised not only by those in power – the political actors – but also by

106 The deliberative quality of public spheres others, and are the addressees of nearly 20 per cent of all utterances. In fact, as the graph above shows, they become a smaller second centre in the network, which somewhat balances the dominant status of the government. The media in turn have a special role across the public sphere types that we will encounter again in subsequent analyses. As discourse platforms they rarely become the addressee of other actors’ utterances and therefore occupy a relatively weak position in the public sphere in terms of discursive acknowledgement. At the same time, however, they are actively engaged in the debates, displaying the third highest overall outdegree score (147 and thus almost on a par with the trade unions’ 149) as they scrutinise the positions and arguments of policy proponents and opponents. They shape and integrate the political process in more complex ways as they connect more evenly to actors from different categories, civil society, politics and the economy. Quite a different picture emerges from the interaction patterns in centredriven public spheres with regard to the overall structure, as well as in relation to the single actor constellations (see Figure 4.2). The network that is established through their connective choices is clearly less dense than that of challenger public spheres and demonstrates the opposite characteristics: whereas the value for the overall hierarchy is higher, the number of transitive triads is lower. Overall, centre public spheres thus exhibit a less balanced structure, which is also reflected on the level of specific actor groups, above all the political elite, and here in particular the position of the government. As in challenger public spheres, the government in centre-driven discourses is the focal point of the network, but in contrast to the former here it occupies a more hegemonic position that shapes the interaction and the resulting discursive space to a greater degree. The greater imbalance of power in centre-driven public spheres is mirrored in the connective choices of the single actors. On the whole, nearly 60 per cent of all the relationships established in the network have the government as their addressee, whereas it is only 33 per cent in challenger debates. In the case of civil society actors, Experts Economy

49

Transitive triads Civil society

Network hierarchy

0.4462

Commons UK

Parties Government

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts, N = 1,612. Size of nodes is proportional to weighted indegree, size of arcs is proportional to interaction between the nodes.

Media

Trade unions

Judiciary

Think tanks Lords

Figure 4.2 Centre public sphere speaker-addressee relationships

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over 54 per cent of their utterances are directed towards the government (over 76 per cent to political actors in general), compared to 40 per cent in challenger public spheres. The media in turn addresses the government 59 per cent of the time (centre debates) and 25 per cent (challenger discourses). The hierarchical structure is further reinforced by the government’s selfreferencing: it is the addressee of its own utterances 34 per cent of the time in centre-driven debates, compared to just 16 per cent in those initiated by challengers. In fact, if we group all political actors (government, House of Commons, House of Lords, the political parties and the judiciary) together, what we see emerging in centre-driven discourses is the near-total communicative closure of the political elite vis-à-vis impulses from the rest of society, as 93 per cent of all of their contributions address other political actors. In challenger public spheres, by contrast, the self-referencing of members of the political centre accounts for 68 per cent of the utterances. We have to keep in mind that the self-referencing is not to be equated with consensus. Indeed, some of the cases, such as the Anglo-Irish Agreement issue, where political actors control the debate according to their terms, are marked by a high degree of controversy within the political elite. The increasing orientation of civil society towards the centre in these instances can then be interpreted as attempts to intervene in the political process. The media, in turn, follow the main action and comment on the tug-of-war between the political actors, and consequently journalists have few resources left to cover other actors, stories and points of view. In those debates where civil society actors are not well organised, as for instance in the Commonwealth immigration issue, this necessarily leads to their underrepresentation in the media’s coverage and ultimately results in a truncated public sphere. In contrast to this type, public spheres rooted in the periphery are characterised by a different communicative pattern. Here, the discursive space is noticeably broader as the actors’ connective choices are generally more varied, and it is more balanced, as above all the political elite engages more strongly with civil society actors. In these public spheres challengers appear to succeed in putting their issues onto the political agenda and thus forcing political actors – and the media – to engage with them. The marked differences between the two public sphere types are thus wholly in line with our expectations regarding their deliberative structure (H1d). Role change, discursive density and the core of deliberative networks The network analytical perspective has highlighted some of the differences between the public sphere types, and so far suggests that those debates that are promoted by civil society show a higher deliberative quality than those that are initiated by the political centre. We can now further test this assumption. We generally assume that public spheres originating in civil society establish a discursive space that is broader than in centre-driven public spheres. Furthermore, we also expect that in these public spheres

108 The deliberative quality of public spheres actors engage more intensely with one another, in other words that challenger networks demonstrate a higher ‘discursive density’. We can test both assumptions simultaneously by fitting a core/periphery model to our data using the social network analysis software package UCINET (Borgatti et al., 2002). The procedure determines which actors sustain the strongest relationships with each other, and are thus located at the structural centre of the network, and which actors by contrast are only weakly connected and therefore occupy a more peripheral role.8 Additionally, the algorithm calculates the densities for the core and the periphery based on the relationships of the actors. In our context we expect the core of the network in challenger public spheres to consist of more actors, i.e. to be more inclusive, and because the core is characterised by the strength of their relationships it should also display a higher discursive density. Table 4.8 presents those actors that are part of the core of challenger and centre-driven public spheres and their corresponding densities. As we can see, our expectations about the network structure are only met to a certain extent, and hypothesis (H2a) is thus only partly confirmed. Challenger public spheres are indeed characterised by an active core that is not only broader in terms of the different actor groups which make it up, but also integrates more actors from civil society, although the differences are rather moderate. At the same time, however, the deliberative interaction in the structural centre of the discursive space is considerably less intense than in centre public spheres. Picking up a point made in the analysis above, this is mainly due to the hegemonic role the political elite occupies in this debate type, as it is not only the focal point of most of the interaction and contributes most utterances to the debate (72 per cent of all utterances in centre public spheres vs. 48 per cent in challenger ones), the degree of self-referencing of Table 4.8 Core/periphery model of role change actors in challenger and centre public spheres Public sphere type

Structure

Members

Density

Challenger

Core

Government; House of Commons; political parties; media; civil society actors; trade unions; economic actors

17.262

Periphery

Experts and universities; financial institutions; judiciary; House of Lords; think tanks; the UK

0.119

Core

Government; House of Commons; political parties; media; civil society actors; experts and universities

42.667

Periphery

Economic actors; judiciary; House of Lords; trade unions; think tanks; the UK

0.262

Centre

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

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political actors (66 per cent) is also more than twice as high here as in challenger public spheres (31 per cent). Both dynamics result in an overall higher discursive density of the deliberative core. This is not to say that the interaction within the political centre in public spheres initiated by the political elite is marked by harmony and agreement – quite to the contrary. Some of the fiercest disputes occur precisely in these debates: the clash between the unionist parties of Northern Ireland and the Thatcher Government are evidence of this, as well as the deep disagreement between the Labour Government and Parliament over the scope of the proposed anti-terrorism legislation that involved a veritable backbench revolt. On closer examination, and as we can see in the networks above, it is above all the deliberative orientations between the political executive and the legislature that make up the bulk of the interaction in the centre, which can be interpreted as a struggle among the separate powers for political dominance. Democratic as this may be, however, in the case of centre-initiated public spheres it also leads to the observed discursive closure. The analysis thus leaves us with a somewhat ambivalent result: while public spheres anchored in civil society succeed in integrating more actors – and particularly more challengers – and in establishing a wider discursive space at the core of the political process, the intensity of the interaction is considerably more reduced than in centre-driven public spheres. In the latter type, the political centre becomes equivalent to the structural core of the discourse, as its dominance shapes the interaction patterns within the political elite as well as with non-institutional actors. It remains to be seen in the following chapters whether greater participation in the core of the debate goes hand in hand with less discursive density. 4.2.4 Conclusion As this chapter concludes the first part of the analysis, which has focused on what we have termed the ‘democratic dimension’ of discourse quality, this section brings together the results of the analysis of the inclusiveness of public spheres, as well as the role change between speakers and addressees within them. Political public spheres and the communicative processes that constitute them are initiated and sustained by various actors, by political actors who propose or oppose a policy proposition – Commonwealth immigration, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 in the present study – or by members and organisations of civil society, whose discontent and disagreement with the status quo reaches a critical mass from where it spills over into the media and is taken up by the political system – the nuclear disarmament debate, the secondary picketing issue and the fuel protest. There are numerous other and more complex ways in which policy proposals or vague political sentiments originate and diffuse through society, but the two main trajectories of political agendabuilding have their starting point either in the political-administrative centre

110 The deliberative quality of public spheres or in the periphery of civil society. According to deliberative theory, they structure the political process in different ways and the main question we are interested in is whether these basic distinctions lead to visible differences in the deliberative quality of the public spheres they constitute. The inclusiveness of political discourse in terms of access to the media is the primary dimension from which to evaluate the public sphere, as the legitimacy of political decisions directly depends on those affected engaging in public discourse. To paraphrase Kant, we must be able to see ourselves as the authors of our laws, and this in turn can only occur to the extent that we can take part in the process through which it is created. Of course, this is not to say that participation in the public sphere should be spread equally between all actors, as it will always be the case that the political elite occupies a dominant position. The question is rather to what extent the different actor groups participate in the political process and how this affects the resulting structure of the public sphere, which is shaped by their mutual orientation. We have addressed some of these questions in the first section by investigating the degree of inclusiveness of periphery- and centre-initiated public spheres, and the analysis has revealed systematic differences between the two types. On the whole, civil society actors are clearly more active in challengerinitiated discourses and their presence increases the overall inclusiveness of these debates – also by way of an indirect mechanism, as they draw other actors into the debate. By including the addressees in the analysis, the second section has then equally clearly shown that in challenger public spheres the interaction between speakers and hearers is more balanced than in those initiated by the centre. In the latter, the one-sided dominance of political actors as speakers is even further exacerbated in their role as addressees. In fact, the tendency is so pronounced and the resulting distortion in the overall structure of the actors so substantial that speaker and addressee distributions become highly dissimilar; from a statistical point of view, they could be taken from different populations – or debates for that matter. This point, however, also holds for challenger discourses and both public sphere types in this respect fall short of providing the necessary porousness that would allow the participants in the debates to change more freely between the roles as addressees and speakers. As a tendency, however, most of the results confirm the theoretical assumptions, according to which we generally expect challenger public spheres to be more deliberative than centre-rooted ones. The picture becomes more complex, however, once we test the communicative relationships between the actor groups more thoroughly. On the one hand – and in line with the previous results – the differences between the two public sphere types are put into even starker relief as the social network perspective uncovers the dynamics that lead to the hegemonic status of the political elite in inside access debates. The discursive pull of the political-administrative system in these public spheres is considerable, resulting in a level of self-referencing

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111

that closes political actors off almost entirely from the rest of society. This is accompanied by what are largely one-way interactions between noninstitutional actors – civil society, media, experts, etc. – and a non-responsive political elite. By contrast, challenger public spheres demonstrate a bifocal deliberative structure which puts both the political system and civil society at the centre of the debate. Consequently, the interaction patterns here are more evenly structured and conform more to what we would expect from a deliberative public sphere. Indeed, when further testing the structural properties of the discursive networks generated by the deliberative relationships of the actors, challenger public spheres consist of an active core that is both broader and more inclusive than its centre counterpart, yet, on the other hand, and against our theoretical expectations, the discursive density in centre public spheres is substantially higher than in those rooted in civil society, and this is in turn largely caused by the political centre itself. This is perhaps to be taken as a first hint that, contrary to their theoretical depiction, public spheres initiated by the political centre might not in all respects represent a flawed and deficient version of the ideal type, for although they exclude most of the discursive impulses from civil society, they have their own advantages. It remains to be seen whether these dynamics are confirmed in the following analyses and reveal a systematic trade-off between deliberative diversity and discursive density. For now, the examination of the first two deliberative dimensions of the public sphere types has revealed that their inclusiveness and the actor relationships are more deliberative in those debates initiated by civil society than in those that have their origin in the political centre. With these caveats in mind, the analyses largely tend to support the hypotheses, although they have also produced some counterintuitive and contradictory results. Since we examine the public sphere as rendered through the lens of the media, a few words about their role are in order. We have seen that, overall, journalism plays an important but somewhat ambiguous role. While the media are responsive to civil society impulses, they appear to be so mainly when these impulses come from larger, coordinated campaigns and actions in the form of demonstrations, protests, ‘days of action’ and so on. In contrast, the media only inadequately deal with those cases where members of civil society are scattered, unorganised and without the support of advocacy groups, even though these actors are equally affected by political norms – the omission to integrate the voice of Commonwealth immigrants in the corresponding debate is a striking case. The predominant discursive orientation of journalists is towards the political elite, which partly occurs in their function as the ‘fourth estate’ to criticise the powerful and hold them accountable, as the coverage of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and their vociferous stance shows. One of the major unintended consequences of this pattern, however, is that the media silently pander to the status of political actors, and thus tend to ‘index’ (Bennett, 1990) political debates to their terms and conditions, unwittingly reproducing rather than

112 The deliberative quality of public spheres challenging the existing basic imbalance of power, which only serves to further exclude those already marginalised. Supplementing the central and intuitive concepts of participation and inclusiveness with the notion of role change thus adds an important layer to the analysis of the public sphere. More specifically, it allows us to examine political discourses beyond the mere question of access by taking into account the participants’ interaction patterns. The following chapters gradually build on this approach as we shift the focus from the ‘democratic’ dimensions of deliberation to the ‘argumentative’ ones. We next examine the role that reciprocity plays between the actors in the two public sphere types and thus foreground more strongly the intersubjective nature of public reason.

4.3 Reciprocity ‘Deliberative democracy asks citizens and officials to justify public policy by giving reasons that can be accepted by those who are bound by it’, as Gutmann & Thompson (1996, p. 52) summarise the central tenet of their deliberative approach. The give-and-take of reasons lies at the very heart of deliberative theory, because justifying a position on an issue, defining the common good in ways acceptable to others or ‘the unforced force of the better argument’ all involve co-operative processes in which speakers and addressees engage. The legitimacy of political decisions thus ultimately resides in the mutual orientation of the actors in political discourses through which they ultimately generate the ‘communicative power’ (Habermas, 1996) that is so central to the democratic process. By its very nature, reciprocity is more important – and easier to trace – in formal settings and closed groups than in the diffuse, anarchic structure that is the public sphere. Precisely because of this, however, it is a core element of the political process, as it allows us to assess the real amount of dialogue that occurs between the actors, and by extension how strongly a debate as a whole is discursively integrated. The mere presence of actors in what we have termed the two democratic dimensions of deliberative quality, important as they are, in this respect tells us only little about how strong the actors’ degree of mutual engagement and co-operative search for the best arguments really is. In other words, while a stronger presence of civil society actors in outside initiative debates can be taken as a sign of a more deliberative public sphere, this will need further support in terms of whether their contributions are taken up by other actors at all. The public sphere as a communicative space and process is distinctly more than the sum of disjointed statements. Reciprocity as a deliberative dimension puts interaction in the proper sense of the term at its centre, and thus captures the to-and-fro of the reasons given that ideally lead to considered public opinions, which in turn guarantee the legitimacy of the decisions taken by the political apparatus. Against this background, the guiding question in this section is to what extent the actors’ contributions to the debates are reciprocated by others – and by whom.

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In line with deliberative theory, we expect a higher discursive quality of those public spheres originating in civil society as opposed to those that are initiated by actors from the centre. With regard to the present discursive dimension, the reciprocal relationships established by the actors ideally should coincide with the general relationships between speakers and addressees examined in the previous section. Although this is not to be expected, the difference between challenger and centre-driven public spheres should become visible in the fact that the reciprocal relationships in the former mirror the basic speaker-addressee pattern to a greater degree than in the latter (H1e). They represent, in other words, a proportional subset of the basic interaction pattern in challenger discourses, whereas inside access debates should be marked by further distortions in this respect. This difference should also become apparent in the networks created by the participants’ relationships, which we expect to be marked by greater balance and thus less hierarchy in outside initiative debates, whereas the discursive distortions present in inside access models should be mirrored by more uneven interaction patterns (H1f). The second hypothesis examines more closely the discursive space generated by the actors’ reciprocal orientations. Here, we expect that their relationships in challenger public spheres should lead to debates characterised by an active core that is, on the one hand, broader in terms of the number and the diversity of actor groups, and which on the other is more vibrant, i.e. it generates more intensive debates than in centre-driven political processes (H2b). We will proceed, in a similar way to the previous section on role change, to analyse how reciprocity shapes the two public sphere types, not least because the concept builds on and extends the examination of speakeraddressee relationships. We will therefore first explore on a very general level the role that reciprocity plays in the political process as such, before we move on to examining the role reciprocal relationships play within outside initiative and inside access models, and test how far the actor distributions differ from each other. As we will see, this view already reveals some general imbalances with regard to their deliberative structure. As a next step and in line with the approach taken in the previous section, we will then more specifically examine the discursive space generated by the actors’ reciprocal relationships, taking again a social network analysis perspective. This allows us to map in greater detail the dynamics at play within, and the differences between challenger and centre public spheres, and above all the hierarchies that structure the debates. As a last step we will compare the two core/ periphery structures to determine which public sphere type demonstrates the higher degree of reciprocity in terms of both the actors included in the core and the discursive density of their interaction. 4.3.1 Monologue or dialogue? According to our definition, an utterance counts as reciprocal when speakers either explicitly refer to another actor but do not make reference to the

114 The deliberative quality of public spheres Table 4.9 Frequencies of reciprocal speech acts Speech act type

Value

Mere reference, no content

24%

Reference to content

2%

Evaluation of counter argument

2%

No reference

72%

Total

100%

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

content of the utterance; when they refer to the content without, however, assessing it in any detail; or when they explicitly refer to the argument of another actor and evaluate it. Table 4.9 presents the proportions of the incrementally more complex forms of two-way communication in relation to the total of all speech acts in all six of the debates. The main impression we glean from this is that the overwhelming form of communication in the public sphere is monologic rather than dialogic in character. In 72 per cent of the speech acts speakers do not address another actor’s contribution to the debate, and in those cases where they do, they merely seem to acknowledge it in passing, without engaging with the content of the arguments more thoroughly. We have, of course, to bear in mind that because of the way it is defined, this is a rather conservative measure of reciprocity, as it omits all implicit forms: for reasons of interrater reliability only those instances are coded, where a speaker makes an explicit reference to another actor. Additionally, journalistic formats and styles contribute their part to keeping the level of reciprocity artificially low, as they tend to juxtapose statements rather than present them as parts of an ongoing dialogic exchange. In other words, while it might appear to be rather low, the true level of reciprocity, which includes all implicit references, should be considerably higher. The important question at this initial stage of the analysis is whether the actor groups connected by a certain degree of reciprocity form a subset that mirrors the main population within the two public sphere types, or whether their distribution is skewed in a certain direction. This would be an indication that the two-way communication we see in the public sphere, although an important deliberative dimension, can lead to a distorted form of deliberation that privileges some actors over others. We are thus primarily interested in the degree to which the distribution of speakers and addressees in the main population of the public sphere types is reflected in the subset consisting of those actors that are connected through their reciprocal ties. The main idea behind this way of examining the public spheres builds on the approach developed in the previous section on role change, and extends it to the analysis of the actors’ two-way exchanges. Accordingly, instead of comparing speakers and addressees, in this case we match the basic

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115

Table 4.10 Chi-square test of reciprocity actors vs total actors in both public sphere types Challenger public sphere

Centre public sphere

All speakers vs reciprocity speakers

Value

All speakers vs reciprocity speakers

Value

X-squared

33.431

X-squared

21.865

df

711

df

6

p-value

2.201e-05

p-value

0.001281

All addressees vs reciprocity addressees

Value

All addressees vs reciprocity addressees

Value

X-squared

46.697

X-squared

21.986

df

8

df

6

p-value

1.751e-07

p-value

0.00128

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N1 = 3,009 (all speech acts), N2 = 842 (reciprocal speech acts). Tests are based on all actor categories with at least five occurrences.

distribution of the speakers in a public sphere type with that of those speakers who show a reciprocal orientation. We then repeat the same procedure for the addressees. This allows us to see whether the dialogic orientation of the actors differs significantly from the way they generally relate to one another, and whether this leads to shifts in the power structure of the public sphere. Similar to the analytical strategy employed in Chapter 3, we use a Chi-square test to compare the different distributions, and the results are presented in Table 4.10 As we can see, when measured against the actor distribution in the main population, the reciprocal relationships connecting speakers and addressees in both public sphere types are highly asymmetric, and actors engaged in reciprocal relationships form subgroups that deviate in their composition from the general speaker-addressee constellations. It is likely that the differences are not random, but that reciprocal ties are built on different principles than the actors’ general orientation, and therefore lead to different actor configurations and coalitions, which in turn produce different power structures that permeate the public spheres. Our first hypothesis in the section is thus clearly rejected (H1e). The social network perspective adopted in the next section allows us to explore these differences more thoroughly, as well as the dynamics that lie behind them, thereby gradually shifting the focus from a comparison within the public sphere types, to contrasting one against the other. 4.3.2 Inclusion or exclusion? The reciprocity of discursive spaces If deliberation can very generally be thought of as the give-and-take of reasons, then the relationships that are generated through this process reveal

116 The deliberative quality of public spheres important aspects of how political discourses are shaped. As we have seen above, the reciprocated ties between the actors form a minority of the utterances, i.e. the explicit and thorough engagement with another’s contributions to the debate plays only a marginal role – and it creates a pattern that differs significantly from the basic speaker-addressee interaction of the public spheres. Mapping the actual two-way communication allows us to go one step further and examine on a more detailed level whether these relationships demonstrate some form of deliberative distortions. Figure 4.3 depicts the reciprocal interaction of the actors in periphery public spheres. As we can see, this deliberative network is sparser than the one that is generated by the general speaker-addressee relationships in the last chapter. Consequently, there are fewer transitive relationships, although the hierarchy of the network remains largely unaffected by this. In other words, although the network displays a rather balanced structure overall, the local coordination between the actors is less pronounced. This has effects on the relationships between them, and their status in the discourse. To an even greater degree than in the basic speaker-addressee relationships, which were the topic of the previous section, this network appears to have two centres rather than one, formed by the government and the House of Commons, on the one hand, and the trade unions, on the other hand. Their status results from different dynamics: the government’s position is most strongly affected by ties with the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and its self-referencing is rather low. The opposite is the case for the trade unions, which appear as their own addressees in 65 per cent of all the cases – the highest value in the network and considerably higher than their corresponding baseline value in the role change network (43 per cent). The effect of both trends is a public sphere largely split between two actor groups that have little communication running between them. In the case of the government, this is not so much due to its own discursive activities as to the communication patterns generated by the other institutional actors. In fact, the government remains moderately open to Judiciary

Economy Lords

Government

Trade unions

Experts

Transitive triplets

19

Network hierarchy

0.3455

Note: Basis consists of all reciprocal speech acts, N = 372. Size of nodes is proportional to weighted indegree, size of edges is proportional to interaction between the nodes.

Civil society Commons Media Parties UK

Figure 4.3 Periphery public sphere, reciprocity network

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impulses from civil society actors, and engages with their contributions to a greater extent than the other way round. Its position in the network is mainly the result of communication patterns that connect the political institutions, i.e. the House of Commons and the House of Lords and their corresponding representatives. While this may render some of the political actors immune to impulses from other parts of society, we have to take into account that this is typical of a political process close to its decision stage. Perhaps more critical than this is the fact that the House of Commons, the institutional forum of democratic debate, shows a discursive closure similar to that of the trade unions, demonstrated by the greater self-referencing of its reciprocal ties (49 per cent) compared to their general value (33 per cent). Given that almost all of its remaining deliberative activity is directed towards the government, parts of parliament thus appear to become discursively detached from the rest of society. The story is slightly different, although even more one-sided, when we turn to examine the trade unions, the second communicative centre of the network. Their status primarily results from their inward-looking communication, which accounts for over 60 per cent of their speech acts. This is mainly explained by the rifts than run through them in some of the debates, although it has the effect that they become partly uncoupled from the political process and its institutions, which in turn might contribute to explaining their failure to successfully lobby for their policies in the debates examined. Their status is further promoted by the media’s orientation, which mainly splits their attention between the unions and the political parties. This is remarkable insofar as the media thus integrate the public sphere to a much lesser degree, but also because their reciprocal ties, compared to their basic orientation examined in the section on role change above, exclude both the government and civil society, which accounted for almost 50 per cent of their interaction. The judiciary, lastly, occupies an interesting position, as it is more pronounced than in the basic network, which is indicative of the debate type: as most of the political conflicts that make up this public sphere are of a material nature, which in turn often involves distributive questions that pit employees against employers and corporations, it is no surprise to find that courts and judges stand between the trade unions on the one side and the economy on the other. On the whole, the topological constellation generated by the reciprocal relationships shows that despite the low level of hierarchy the network is structured by some form of inequality. The imbalance in the interaction becomes evident in the comparatively few transitive relationships between the actors, which are representative of a discourse that is polarised between the trade unions and the political institutions, and where the media as an integrative force for the public debate plays a marginal role. Turning to centre-initiated discourses, we can see that they are shaped by other interaction patterns as Figure 4.4 shows. Here, the tendency of this debate type to establish a hegemonic position in the political executive,

118 The deliberative quality of public spheres documented in the previous section, is largely reproduced and further intensified. As a consequence, the network as a whole is very imbalanced, displaying only nine transitive triplets compared to the nineteen of the challenger public spheres, and the internal hierarchy is considerably higher. As in challenger public spheres, although to a substantially greater extent, the government’s position is not so much the result of its own self-referencing as it is due to the engagement of other actors with its communicative output. The difference between the two discourse types is that in inside access debates, nearly all of the other actors direct their attention primarily towards the political centre, on average 67 per cent of their ties, which leads to the one-sided pattern and a network firmly centred on the government. One reason for this is that centre type public spheres are, by definition, initiated by political actors, mostly the government, which together with the House of Commons and the political parties receive close to 90 per cent of the attention, although the latter two, as well as those outside the political institutions, primarily take on a reactive stance, leaving the political initiative mostly in the hands of the executive. Reflecting these discursive dynamics, the actors from civil society are moved to the margins of the debate, although perhaps this is not their main problem. The more serious issue, and partly the cause of their status in the network, is their one-sided orientation towards the political centre, which undermines any connection between the different challengers themselves – there is no mutual reciprocal orientation between civil society actors and the trade unions – and the forging of larger alliances to counter the hegemonic position of the government. The media in turn does little to ameliorate the situation, as they too concentrate most of their resources (68 per cent) on the government’s output, and ignore civil society almost completely, as only 3 per cent of the speech acts are directed towards them. While the media’s institutional focus might be interpreted as being part of their public Experts Economy

Transitive triplets Network hierarchy

9 0.5625

Civil society Commons UK

Parties Government

Trade unions Media

Judiciary

Think tanks Lords

Figure 4.4 Centre public sphere, reciprocity network

Note: Basis consists of all reciprocal speech acts, N = 470. Size of nodes is proportional to weighted indegree, size of edges is proportional to interaction between the nodes.

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watchdog function, their role as mandataries entails more than criticism of the powerful. It requires above all that they address the concerns of those affected by the norms debated, mainly members of civil society, and give them a voice. Compared to the general speaker-addressee structure examined in the previous section, the reciprocal orientations of the participants in centreinitiated public spheres do not so much reveal a different kind of underlying dynamic as they reinforce the impression of the existing discursive distortions. They exist, above all, between the institutional actors, who form an almost hermetically closed deliberative circle, and the extra-institutional challengers, whose lack of coordination means that political power remains largely uncontested. Based on these results, a verdict about the deliberative balance of the two public sphere types seems clear and we can thus confirm the hypothesis (H1f), although the analysis has also revealed distinct shortcomings in both cases. Periphery-initiated discourses are by no means as egalitarian in their participation structure as we expected, showing signs of a partial polarisation between civil society and the political centre, whereas the reciprocal relationships in inside access debates serve to strengthen the dominance of the political elite. At the same time, challenger discourses are clearly more deliberative, not least because there is more coordination if not co-operation between the actors, and the overall structure is less hierarchical. To further test this, the next section examines the internal core-periphery structure of both networks, assuming that, in line with the findings so far, the core of challenger-initiated public spheres should demonstrate a more diverse range of actors, and denser communication patterns. 4.3.3 Reciprocal density and discursive integration The analysis so far has shown that challenger-initiated political discourses span a public sphere that is more balanced in terms of the actors’ reciprocal orientations than its centre counterpart. The question this section seeks to answer, then, is whether greater discursive symmetry goes hand in hand with a higher deliberative performance, i.e. whether periphery public spheres also demonstrate a higher discursive density and whether they incorporate more – and more diverse – voices at their core. In line with the analytical strategy employed in the previous section, we conduct a core-periphery analysis to determine which actors engage in more intense reciprocal relationships and therefore form the core of the discursive network, the public sphere’s centre of gravity, so to speak, and which ones occupy its periphery. The results in Table 4.11 present a mixed picture. Generally, both public sphere types are relatively exclusionary in character, as only about a third of all the actors in debate form the core. Challenger public spheres still seem to be somewhat more integrative, as their active nucleus includes not only actors from the political-administrative complex,

120 The deliberative quality of public spheres Table 4.11 Reciprocity core/periphery actors and densities in challenger and centre public spheres Public sphere type

Network structure

Members

Challenger

Core

Government; House of Commons; trade unions

8

Periphery

Civil society actors; economic actors; experts and universities; media; judiciary; House of Lords; political parties; the UK

0.339

Core

Government; House of Commons; political parties

35.333

Periphery

Civil society actors; economic actors; experts and universities; media; judiciary; House of Lords; trade unions; the UK; think tanks

0.153

Centre

Density

Note: Basis consists of all reciprocal speech acts in the debates, N = 842.

but also comprises the trade unions as a specific civil society group. To a certain extent this redresses parts of the assessment made above, as it shows that despite the fragmenting tendencies of periphery-driven discourses, their core integrates both of the most prominent poles. At the same time, the greater overall balance and lower level of hierarchy in these public spheres does not translate into a greater number of actor groups in the core than in those constituted by the political centre. Of course, discourses initiated by the political elite are still more problematic, since their core consists exclusively of actors from the political-administrative centre. Indeed, the political centre in this case becomes co-terminus with the structural core of the public sphere, as all other actor groups are pushed to the margin of the discourse – including members of the House of Lords, who despite their institutional affiliation play only a minor role in the debates. The apparent effect of a purely institutional core is that its density is substantially higher – 35.3 compared to just 8 in challenger debates. In the context of the other results in this section, this underlines the discursive closure which divorces large swathes of the political elite from the rest of society, but it also means that we can only partly confirm our hypothesis (H2b), because while the cores of challenger debates are more inclusive in terms of their actor diversity, they are not broader with regard to the number of actor groups they comprise, nor are they more vibrant, as the deliberative interactions in inside access discourses prove to be seven times more intense. 4.3.4 Conclusion Seen from the angle of reciprocity, the public sphere is neither a monolithic structure that consists of a mass of monologues, nor is it a discursive space where everyone equally engages with everyone else. Rather, it reveals

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public spheres as having a more complex and ambivalent shape. The first thing to notice is certainly the general lack of two-way communication in the debates, although we have also pointed out the conservative nature of our measure. If we take the actual reciprocity that we can identify in the debates, however, then the thread of actors, views and arguments that it ties together is rather thin. While this is the case for both public sphere types, this is also the point at which their similarities end. Public spheres rooted in the political centre demonstrate a lopsidedness that results from an asymmetrical reciprocal orientation of the actors, who overwhelmingly engage with the political elite and thus introduce a political power structure to the exchanges that finds its expression in the lack of transitive relationships and the high degree of hierarchy which pervades the network. One of the consequences of this interaction pattern – or the lack thereof – is the discursive closure of the political centre, which becomes almost impermeable to impulses from the outside, but it also impedes the forming of any alliance structure between the other actors, above all one that would span civil society, experts, economic actors and so on, as they all separately engage the centre in the attempt to force their way into the debate. These one-sided speaker-addressee relationships highlight a political discourse that is dominated in near absolute terms by the political elite, and describes a power-ridden public sphere (vermachtete Öffentlichkeit) that works according to the terms and conditions of the centre, while relegating the voices and views of the other actor groups to the fringe of the political process, and thus to a role as spectators rather than as participants. Centre public spheres in this respect bear strong overtones of what Habermas calls ‘representative publicity’, i.e. a display of political power before an audience rather than conceiving it as a co-operative process that integrates different actor groups. In contrast to this rigid structure, the political discourses in challenger public spheres are more in flux, clearly less hierarchical and while being far from egalitarian, civil society actors figure more prominently. At the same time, rather than being fully integrated, the challenger voices in fact lead to a partial polarisation of the discourse, which is bridged only to a minor extent by the media’s reciprocal orientation. Instead of being a unitary discursive space, the typical challenger discourse therefore depicts a sphere of loosely connected publics (Calhoun, 1997), whose contours we have already seen emerge in the previous section. If centre public spheres are marked by a strong centripetal pull, challenger public spheres are subject to countervailing forces that are reflected in their bipolar structure; although here too the discursive balance clearly tilts towards the political elite. This becomes even more evident when we examine the core-periphery structure of the deliberative networks established by the actors’ reciprocal relationships. Here, challenger public spheres might not be as broad and diverse in their core as we expected, although they integrate the actors from civil society that are most relevant in the material debates we have

122 The deliberative quality of public spheres analysed – the trade unions. This finding in turn somewhat dampens the doubts about their structural polarisation as it shows that at least part of civil society is integrated into the active core of the network. In centre public spheres in turn, all discursive power is wielded by the political elite, whereas the other actor groups are only loosely attached to it – including the House of Lords, whose weak discursive status parallels their institutional role in the debates. Despite the fact that in both cases the core of the deliberative network consists of exactly three actor groups, it is centre public spheres which demonstrate a considerably greater discursive density. The overall picture that emerges from the analysis is a complex and, in several instances, rather counterintuitive one as only one hypothesis is clearly confirmed. In contrast to the ‘democratic’ dimensions of inclusiveness and role change, the differences between the public sphere types with regard to the actors’ reciprocal orientation – the first of the ‘argumentative’ facets of discourse quality – appear less prominent, and in some cases contradict the theoretical assumptions. The findings therefore seem to suggest that the overall greater inclusiveness of challenger public spheres and their higher degree of porousness with regard to the actors’ role change, examined in the previous two sections, does not automatically translate into a greater amount of two-way communication between them. In other words, access to the public sphere is no guarantee for the actors’ engagement in it. The following section examines whether the deliberative dimension of reflexivity produces similar patterns and thus results comparable to those for the two public sphere types.

4.4 Reflexivity The media have long been seen as promoters, perpetrators, accomplices and certainly as one of the prime suspects in ‘dumbing down’ political culture, and how we debate policy issues (Barnett, 1998). Coming from different theoretical traditions and with different focuses but reaching similar conclusions, Walter Lippman’s (1922) Public Opinion, John Dewey’s (1927) The Public and its Problems and Adorno and Horkheimer’s (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published in German in 1944) voice early concerns about the vitality of the public sphere – and the role of the mass media by extension. Whereas from our theoretical point of view ‘dumbing down’ generally refers to a lack of deliberation in its different dimensions, as a verdict it most centrally suggests that while there is ample talk, most of it is cheap, and the rational parts are few and far between. This chapter addresses the question of how far political debates can be considered to live up to the ideal of rationality in terms of the reflexivity of the actors involved. From the vantage point of deliberative theory we mainly assume that there are systematic differences according to the public sphere type. In this view, challenger public spheres should be more reflexive than centre-driven ones, since discourses conforming to the outside initiative models of public discourse should generally

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generate a higher discursive quality than those corresponding to inside access or mobilisation models. As we have seen, the former are characterised by a greater diversity of actors, who can bring a greater variety of perspectives to a debate, and integrating these different and often competing positions requires a higher degree of rationality, i.e. a greater amount of justifications and thus a higher degree of reflexivity on the part of the participants. The rationality of democratic discourse presupposes rational actors, whose degree of reflexivity thus becomes one of the primary dimensions of an argumentative account of democracy (Goodin, 2003; see Honneth, 1998 for a current interpretation of Dewey’s thought on democracy; Steiner, 2012), and while reflexivity corresponds mainly to what Goodin (2000) has termed ‘deliberation within’ and is therefore methodologically plagued with the problem that ‘it is largely an internal process’ (Dahlberg, 2001), in this study we shift the focus and relax the conditions by interpreting the participants’ speech acts as the public traces of their private reflections. In the context of the present study this simply translates into the number of justifications the actors use to make their point. Because challenger public spheres generate discourses that are more vibrant, malleable and egalitarian, we assume that there should be no significant differences between the baseline structure of the speaker-addressee distribution and the subset of those speakers and addressees connected through reflexive speech acts. Conversely, the discursive distortions characteristic of inside access type debates should be mirrored by a lack of correspondence between speakers and addressees in the public sphere in general, and those whose interaction is based on reflexivity (H1g). In a similar vein, the political topology generated by the actors’ give-and-take of reasons should be more balanced in civil society initiated discourses than in those which originate within the political elite, which should be marked by greater hierarchy (H1h). Lastly, unhindered access to challenger debates should widen the debate to include more actors as well as a greater variety of actor groups, and lead them to engage in debates that are more vibrant than in centre-initiated political processes (H2c). As in the other chapters, we will first have a general, explorative look at the deliberative dimension in the debates by examining the overall presence of reflexive speech acts as well as the distribution of the corresponding actor groups, both overall and within the two public sphere types. We will then turn to analysing more specifically the differences between the public sphere types, mapping the discursive spaces that reflexive relationships create, and testing whether those that constitute periphery-driven public spheres are more balanced than centre-rooted ones, and whether they generate a higher discursive density. 4.4.1 Dumbing down or reflexive? To get an initial idea about the level of reflexivity in the different debates, we will first examine the overall distribution of the number of justifications.

124 The deliberative quality of public spheres Table 4.12 Overall rationality in % Speech act type

Value

No justification

45%

One justification

40%

Two or more justifications

15%

Note: Basis consists of all speech acts in the debates, N = 3,009.

Table 4.12 presents the percentages of non-reflexive and reflexive utterances. As outlined in the methods chapter (Chapter 3), reflexivity is measured on a three-point scale for each speech act, where 0 indicates that the utterance has no justification, 1 that it has only one justification, and 2 that it has two or more justifications. In a positive reading we can say that the majority of utterances are reflexive and have at least one justification, although the more complex forms are restricted to a smaller fraction of speech acts. Turned the other way round, of course, almost half the speech acts are uttered without the speakers justifying them. There are primarily two reasons that might help explain why the overall level of reflexivity is lower than we might have expected – after all, deliberative theory conceives of the political process as a discursive filtering mechanism that separates convincing from unconvincing arguments. We have to bear in mind, however, that not all utterances require a justification: our analysis distinguishes between critical and supportive utterances, demands and statements, of which particularly the latter mostly report facts and therefore may only rarely incur a discursive burden of proof. If there is a connection between the type of illocution used by the speakers and the level of reflexivity of the utterances, we should find most of the non-reflexive utterances in the category of statements. In fact, however, the majority are made up of demands (40 per cent), followed by statements, which account for only 25 per cent of non-reflexive speech acts, criticism (23 per cent) and support (12 per cent). Uttering political claims vis-à-vis others, it seems, does not necessarily involve embedding them in a reason-giving context. This is because demands are often part of larger argumentative structures typically involving other speech act types such as criticism, which addresses an actor’s discontent with a state of affairs and outlines the reasons for it. Demands, understood as claims to change the status quo, come at the end of such a more complex discursive structure, which mostly involves justifications at earlier stages. The other reason for the low degree of reflexivity is to be found in the nature of media coverage, which, because of the constraints of space, tends to condense and curtail what might originally have been fully fledged arguments. This is only exacerbated by the fact that the orientation of journalists to news factors such as the conflict between two competing positions – at least implicitly – favours the highlighting of the existing

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controversy and how it unfolds (‘horse race journalism’), rather than the reasons for it. Lastly, because we only code those justifications that are explicitly mentioned, all reasons that are implicit or on whose common knowledge on the part of the readers journalists can rely, are ignored. As a first test of how the actor’s reason-giving shapes the public spheres, we will juxtapose those actors connected by reflexive utterances with those in the ‘baseline’, i.e. their general distribution examined in the section on role change. More specifically, we are interested in whether the speaker and addressee distributions of the reflexive part of the debates match the general actor structure. As in the previous section on reciprocity, we use a Chi-square test to assess how far the actor distributions correspond to each other. The idea is that if we find considerable differences, then the reflexive side of the public sphere is not a representative subset of the debates, which would indicate a discursive distortion in the political discourse. Table 4.13 summarises the results of the Chi-square test. As we can see, there is no significant difference between the speaker and addressee distributions within both discourse types except for the speakers in public spheres initiated by the political elite. Measured by their own standards, in all other cases the relationships established by the reflexive orientation of the actors form a coherent subset in the two debate types. Centre-driven debates, however, seem to differ on this count. A closer look at the data reveals that the biggest discrepancies between the actor distributions occur in the category of the media, which demonstrate a higher presence as reason-giving actors, and the House of Commons, where the trend points in the opposite direction and which is thus less engaged in rational exchanges compared to its general presence in the debates. While this could be given a Table 4.13 Chi-square test of reflexive actors vs total actors in both public sphere types Challenger public sphere

Centre public sphere

All speakers vs reflexivity speakers

Value

All speakers vs reflexivity speakers

Value

X-squared

10.563

X-squared

43.711

df

911

df

8

p-value

0.3069

p-value