Investigating Deliberativeness Comparatively

Abstract

This article develops a normative model of public deliberation and proposes ways to apply it in the comparative empirical analysis of political media content. In the first part of the article, a set of normative claims connected to deliberativeness is explicated that revises some of the familiar claims found in the literature. Deliberative media content, it is argued, can provide a repository of diverging justifications for political positions as well as model deliberative behavior in audiences. In conjunction with an attentive, deliberating public, deliberative media content can also serve to procure and withdraw legitimation with respect to political decisions and the polity as a whole. In the second part of the article, a new research design is proposed that operationalizes deliberativeness in print media by taking into account apparent differences in the cultures of journalism. The proposal involves measuring deliberativeness on four different levels of analysis—the idea, the utterance, the article, and the page/edition—as well as in three different political/cultural contexts—the liberal, democratic corporatist, and polarized pluralist models of media and politics as distinguished by Hallin and Mancini.