Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• micro-politics
• democratic innovations
• citizen’s assemblies
• deliberation
• learning relationships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Brenton Prosser PhD is senior research fellow (adjunct) at the Australian National University and Director of Public Policy with Nous Group international consultants. Formerly, he was senior research fellow to the Democracy Matters Citizens Assembly project on English devolution led by Professor Matthew Flinders (University of Sheffield). Other key contributors to this project included Katie Ghose (Electoral Reform Society), Professor Will Jennings (University of Southampton), Edward Molloy (Electoral Reform Society), Dr Alan Renwick (University College London), Mark Sandford (Parliament of Westminster), Professor Graham Smith (Westminster University), Dr Paolo Spada (University of Southampton) and Professor Gerry Stoker (University of Southampton/University of Canberra). The Democracy Matters Citizens Assembly project was awarded the 2016 British Political Studies Association Award for democratic innovation.

ORCID

Brenton Prosser http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8058-2973

Matthew Flinders http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-9010

Will Jennings http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

Alan Renwick http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4344-2082

Paolo Spada http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7050-2079

Gerry Stoker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8172-3395

Notes

1 See: http://citizensassembly.co.uk/home-page/about/academic-papers/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council Urgency [grant number ES/N006216/1].