"Deliberative Reforms in the Political System". Project sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, August 2010-July 2014 (with Karolina Milewicz and Alda Wegmann)

In this project, I propose a new vision for democratic politics, dubbed "noble politics". "Noble politics" has strong roots in deliberative democracy, and its goal is to advance two essential aims of deliberation, namely epistemic fruitfulness and consensual outcomes. Contrary to classic definitions of deliberation, noble politics" is not just about a small and socially homogeneous "gentlemen’s club" with "calm consideration" of the issues at hand and a strong gear towards consensus; rather, it puts a strong prime on passionate contestation and confrontation in a highly diverse setting. As psychological and philosophical scholarship argues, both contestatory forms of engagement and cognitive diversity in groups may produce epistemically superior outcomes compared to constructive dialogue in the context of homogeneous groups. Yet contestatory forms of engagement may eventually undermine consensual outcomes. Therefore, "noble politics" leave ample room for finding consensual outcomes, but it makes these consensual outcomes dependent on a prior exposure of participants to an adversarial and rigid inquiry. The concept of "noble politics" will be explored via experimental and observational research. In concrete, the project will test how specific political constellations (coalition vs. government-opposition settings) interact with specific communication styles (contestation vs. constructive dialogue) and group composition (high vs. low degree of cognitive diversity) to produce both epistemically superior and consensual outcomes.

Publications:

Bächtiger, André (2011). "Contestatory Deliberation". Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington (DC), September 2-5, 2010, and the Conference on Epistemic Democracy, Yale University (October 2011). Under Review.

Bächtiger, André and Alda Wegmann (2012). "Scaling up Deliberation". In: Elstub, Stephen and Peter McLaverty (eds.), Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases. Forthcoming Edinburgh University Press.

Eisenkopf, Gerald und André Bächtiger (2012). "Mediation and Conflict Prevention". Forthcoming Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Bächtiger, André (2012). "Deliberation, Discourse, and the Study of Legislatures". In: Strøm, Kaare, Saalfeld, Thomas, and Shane Martin (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bächtiger, André, Simon Niemeyer, Michael Neblo, Jürg Steiner, and Marco R. Steenbergen (2010). "Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, their Blind-spots, and Complementarities." Journal of Political Philosophy 18: 32-63.

Bächtiger, André and Dominik Hangartner (2010). "When Deliberative Theory Meets Political Science. Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in the Study of a Philosophical Ideal." Political Studies 58: 609-629.