Content area
Full Text
The concept of deliberation has become so faddish that it is in danger of being 'stretched' until it becomes virtually a synonym for talk of any kind. A long time ago, Sartori (1970) warned of the dangers of concept stretching in political science, and this warning is still valid. Based on Sartori's work, Collier and Levitsky (1997) have also prominently written about the danger of concept stretching, in their case specifically in relation to the concept of democracy. One encounters the problem not only with regard to deliberation but also with many other concepts used in political science.
There are certainly different versions of the concept of deliberation. But as Goodin (2005: 183) points out, on the basis of a review of the literature: 'As regards standards for what counts as "good" discourse and deliberation, there seems to be an impressively broad scholarly consensus'. Deliberation does not simply mean talk of any kind; the concept has a very specific meaning. For fruitful and rigorous research, this specificity must be kept. If the concept is stretched too far it begins to mean everything and therefore nothing.
A particularly extreme example of concept stretching with regard to deliberation is a paper by Austen-Smith and Feddersen (2006). I use this example as a useful illustration to make my point, although there are other examples where I could make the same point (Steiner et al , 2004: 43-52). Austen-Smith and Feddersen use the concept in its very opposite meaning from the standard usage in the deliberative literature. They present a formal mathematical model in which they establish theoretically under what conditions members of political committees are willing to share private information with other committee members. Their example is a jury consisting of three members, who have to choose whether to acquit or to convict a defendant. Two jury members are cautious and wish to have at least three pieces of evidence of guilt to convict; the third jury member is less cautious and considers two pieces of evidence of guilt as sufficient to convict. The question is under what conditions the jury members are willing to share their private information on guilt with the other jury members. The assumption is that when it serves their individual preferences, jury...