Studying public deliberation after the systemic turn: the crucial role for interpretive research

Abstract

The recent shift towards a deliberative systems approach suggests understanding public deliberation as a communicative activity occurring in a diversity of spaces. While theoretically attractive, the deliberative systems approach raises a number of methodological questions for empirical social scientists. For example, how to identify multiple communicative sites within a deliberative system, how to study connections between different sites, and how to assess the impact of the broader context on deliberative forums and systems? Drawing on multiple case studies, this article argues that interpretive research methods are well-suited to studying the ambiguities, dynamics and politics of complex deliberative systems.