Focus groups and assemblies in Ankara City Council in the scope of deliberative democracy

2023-2
Mermer, Elif Meltem
Deliberative democracy is one of the new democracy theories put forward as a remedy to the representation crisis in traditional representative democracies. Political decisions are ideally taken by consensus, justified by a culture of discussion in accordance with the discourse ethics within this theory. Mini-publics are also one of the ways in which deliberative democracy is practiced. In this study, the focus group and the assembly meetings of the Ankara City Council were examined within the framework of deliberative democracy. The aim of this study is to measure whether the city council meetings are really an example of deliberative democracy and if they are, to measure the quality of the deliberation in these meetings. In this context, two different city council meeting records were measured with the Discourse Quality Index. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants of city council meetings and the results were compared. The results were analyzed in the context of the principles of discourse ethics which are participation, respect, justification, common-good orientation, and disposition to change.

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Citation Formats
E. M. Mermer, “Focus groups and assemblies in Ankara City Council in the scope of deliberative democracy,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2023.