Democracy, peace, & deliberation

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the pe... See more

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it , making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the probl... See more

In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves. We may end up believing - in a highly specific way - in things that we know we are ‘supposed’ to believe, given that we are Republicans or Democrats, Conservative or Labour Pa... See more

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias sugges... See more

It is precisely because people recognize that they are involved in a repeated game that they become willing to negotiate solutions to their differences. That is why enduring collective forms such as social movements and political parties have persisted despite repeated efforts to replace them with more efficient arrangements. These vehicles of coll... See more

To be stable and effective, both democracy and democratic publics require people to be socially embedded in ongoing relationships rather than temporary mini-publics. Such relationships may be less efficient in the short term, so that some optimal policies remain out of reach, but they are better over time at generating political compromises that ca... See more