The aim of this thesis is to explore the under-studied area of deliberative democratic politics at the local level, while adding to the literature on deliberative theory itself. Empirical research was conducted through the qualitative tools of participant observation in Project Lyttelton’s Energy Matters Workshop and in-depth interviews with Project Lyttelton members, workshop participants and local government representatives. A comparative analysis was also undertaken between two locally focussed initiatives looking at citizen engagement and democracy in relation to climate change. The findings of this research suggest that Project Lyttelton’s Energy Matters Workshop answers the call for a deliberative approach through its use of the key institutional features of deliberative democratic processes. The research findings also show that local deliberative initiatives may not be about reaching consensus or agreement in relation to a particular issue such as climate change. Rather, they may be focused on building up a network of citizens that discuss new ideas, build awareness, invigorate public engagement, highlight shared interests and motivate new initiatives. However, the research data also draws attention to compelling, and as yet unanswered questions, about just what conditions are needed for local deliberation to affect public policy and climate change decision-making, how deliberative practices could be integrated within government structures themselves, how the current political framework (and context) could act as a spur to those at the local level, and how local participation and deliberation could have a voice in the largely international climate change arena. This research adds to the scholarship on deliberative theory by examining what deliberation looks like at the local level, while providing further empirical research for deliberative theory itself.

This thesis uses our lived experience of speech online to analyse the most common justification for freedom of speech: the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. It opens with an account of a conversation in the feminist blogosphere that explicitly addressed the operation of social power in discussion. The lessons of that conversation is compared to accounts of the marketplace of ideas metaphor offered by theorists like Sunstein, Fiss, and Boyd White, as well as more internet-oriented theorists like Lessig, Benkler and Balkin. From that, and building on the insights of critics like Fraser and Mansbridge, the thesis argues that we ought to reject the "liberal-economic" paradigm of the function of speech and deliberation in a democracy, and proposes that we replace the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor with that of a "critical democratic culture." The thesis concludes by illustrating the usefulness of that new metaphor through the example of hate speech.

This thesis uses our lived experience of speech online to analyse the most common justification for freedom of speech: the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. It opens with an account of a conversation in the feminist blogosphere that explicitly addressed the operation of social power in discussion. The lessons of that conversation is compared to accounts of the marketplace of ideas metaphor offered by theorists like Sunstein, Fiss, and Boyd White, as well as more internet-oriented theorists like Lessig, Benkler and Balkin. From that, and building on the insights of critics like Fraser and Mansbridge, the thesis argues that we ought to reject the "liberal-economic" paradigm of the function of speech and deliberation in a democracy, and proposes that we replace the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor with that of a "critical democratic culture." The thesis concludes by illustrating the usefulness of that new metaphor through the example of hate speech.

Legal positivism posits that the observation of how officials and citizens treat the legal system’s rules combine to constitute law’s existence. This is not an understanding verified by cases such as Nigeria’s legal system. Using historical evidence from the UK National Archives, and examples of recent court cases, I attempt to show that although such legal systems do, in fact, exist, they defy positivism’s conceptualization. They suggest that while the legal legitimacy of law is one thing, it does not account for obedience; and neither is the social fact of obedience necessary in defining legal validity. This thesis aims to suggest that far from being an outlying case, Nigeria provides interesting philosophical illumination about what positivism does not explain about legal systems in general—namely, what determines obedience. This thesis uses the political philosophies of Aristotle and Rousseau to construct a philosophical understanding of the basis for obedience to law. It suggests that it is by participation in the function of a legal system, that law is shown to a given population to have a specific purpose that is tied to the moral nature of the state. This thesis asserts that participation serves to illuminate law’s moral legitimacy as an especial type of legitimacy that is, in a sense, prior to its legal legitimacy and as what explains obedience separately from law’s legal validity, which simply explains its plain existence. This thesis further uses a field experiment centred on a transportation system in Lagos, Nigeria to test, empirically, the hypotheses generated by its theoretical investigations that: 1: the greater a people’s direct participation in creating their laws, the greater they perceive of the law’s moral legitimacy. and 2: The greater the people’s belief in the law’s moral legitimacy, the greater their free obedience to the law. The results suggest that the manner in which citizens are allowed to participate on the formulation and enactment of rules affects the extent to which they go on to obey those rules. These results, further, give empirical grounds for the thesis’ theoretical combination of an Aristotelian understanding of law’s authority with a reformulation of Rousseau’s argument that participation is necessary for, and derived from, freedom.

This study aimed to describe and analyze the work on values withing the adult education of the correctional service by gathering teachers’ and supervisors’ experiences of how and why they work with values that should characterize adult education. This has been done through an analysis of their experiences based on deliberative democratic theory and deliberative dialouge to identify challenges and opportunities in their professional practice. The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured approach with a phenomenographic approach, leading to the following conclusions: Teachers and supervisors face the daily challenge of interpreting and integrating the values in a way that includes all students with different cultural backgrounds and values. Finding a balance between promoting equality and respecting different perspectives can be difficult to achieve. Integrating the values can be challenging when students’ behaviors do not align with the expected values, making it difficult to transfer the values to practical situations and to get students to reflect on their actions and consequenses. This requires long-term and continuous work to challenge and reshape students’ values and attitudes. However, with deliberation as a teaching method, teachers and supervisors can promote understanding, reflection, and dialouge regarding the values. By actively creating a respectful environment, students can be encouraged to express their opinions and reflect on their values, leading to increased awareness and understanding of the values. This includes approaches such as clear communication of rules and goals emphazising the values, individual conversations, and active intervention in cases of abusive treatment, where teachers and supervisors can demonstrate what is acceptable and unacceptable to create a respectful and inclusive environment.

Of the numerous public policy debates currently taking place throughout the United States, perhaps no issue receives more attention than the persistence of “chronically” low-performing public schools. As of 2009, approximately 5,000 schools—5% of the nation’s total—qualified as chronically low performing (Duncan, 2009d). Certainly, these statistics merit the attention of policy scholars, yet the political contestation of interests attempting to influence how the federal government should address such issues has reached a new fevered crescendo. Given the increased politicization of the federal government’s role in education and the growing number of interests attempting to influence the debates concerning school reform, education policy scholars have recognized the need to extend the field of policy studies by using analytical frameworks that consider both the discourse and performative dimensions of deliberative policy making. Therefore, this study addresses this particular need by employing a critical interpretive policy analysis that illustrates how both dominant discourses and the deliberative performances of the federal government shaped the policy vocabularies embedded within the Title I School Improvement Grant program of 2009 as the commonsense solutions for the nation’s chronically low-performing schools. In addition, this study provides a historical analysis, illustrating how the omnipresent threat of an economic crisis has been a primary influence in the politics of federal governance since the global economic collapse of the 1970s. This study demonstrates how over the course of the last four decades the United States has consistently reduced its commitment to the public sector, choosing instead to promote economic policies informed by the ideals of market-based liberalism. Subsequently, this study presents the argument that education, specifically the “chronic failure” of public schools, has emerged as a “primary emblematic issue” (Hajer, 1995) and now serves as an “effective metaphor for the nation’s economic crisis.” Thus, with such issues presented as a contextual backdrop, this study examines how the Obama/Duncan Administration operationalized dominant discourses and performative practices to establish consensual support for a turnaround reform agenda, effectively defining the policy solutions made available to those who participated in the revision of the Title I SIG program of 2009. / text

Humanitarian interventions tend to be justified by claims to the existence of an obligation upon ‘us' (the benevolent saviours) to intervene militarily when a state is responsible for large-scale atrocity crimes against its own population. However, this justification is paradoxical, given that there is rarely held to exist a commensurate obligation to address structural violence (even when ‘we' may be partly responsible for, or complicit within, structures that are violent). The paradox arises because structural violence can be harmful – even evil – in its own right, and can also lead to – or exacerbate – direct violence. Hence, intervening militarily, and inevitably causing further harm in the act of intervening, results in a moral shortfall. This shortfall is indicative of a prevailing understanding of harm that is blind to the potential for structures to be violent. In responding to the paradox, I adopt a critical cosmopolitan perspective to argue that because structural violence can be harmful on a great scale, and because it is co-constitutive of direct violence, we ought not to countenance intervening with the use of military force (with what this brings in the form of inevitable intended and unintended harm) to stop direct violence without also considering and addressing violent structures, especially if they are violent structures that we are, ourselves, embedded within. Therefore, it is morally imperative to engage in an ongoing process of illumination and addressing of evil structures to rectify the harms they cause, alongside any efforts to stem direct violence, if any sort of intervention is to be legitimate and just. This requires us to a) expand our understanding of harm and evil at the global level, and b) engage in consistent and sustained deliberative processes that bring to the forefront structural violence and structural underpinnings of direct violence.

It is seemingly accepted that a democracy functions better with a reasonably informed citizenry. As we cannot acquire knowledge about a complex reality on our own, democratic societies operate through a set of institutions of which two are attributed the explicit task to assist citizensa legitimate pathway to knowledge. These institutions include news media and science. Evidence from recent years indicates that more and more elected politicians across the democratic world engage in attacks towards these institutions, with the deliberate aim to undermine their legitimacy. Because the functionality of news media and science essentially relies on their legitimacy, this trend has raised societal concerns in parallel with scholarly interest. While recent research has made important contributions to better understand political attacks towards institutional knowledge providers, several dimensions are still understudied. This thesis addresses such dimensions. Using quantitative content analysis, the research conducted in this thesis explores prevalence, party distribution and expressions of delegitimizing criticism (characterized by a presence of incivility and/or absence of reasoning) towards news media and science(conceptualized as epistemic authorities) among tweeting Members of Parliament (MP) in Sweden. The study analyzes single tweets by all Swedish MPs represented in the national parliament (and on Twitter) over a one-year study period (31st of October 2020 - 31st of October 2021) (N = 1828). Results from the exploration show that Swedish politicians engage in delegitimizing evaluations of epistemic authorities in a small and concentrated scale. Findings are several; Swedish politicians are remarkably more hostile towards the news media than towards science;one party affiliation contribute to more than half of all delegitimizing evaluations; delegitimizing criticism takes on several expressive forms but addresses to a large extent dimensions surrounding poor quality and partiality. The conducted study contributes to research about political hostility towards institutional knowledge providers in empirical and theoretical regards and provide entrances for further discoveries. A special request for futureresearch is to engage in more in-depth and detailed assessments of dimensions having been explored, for example by mixing in qualitative methods.

羅爾斯於一九九三年發表《政治自由主義》，試圖為多元社會的整合提供一套哲學基礎。羅爾斯認為價值的差異與分歧是當代社會的重要特徵，多元的宗教觀、哲學觀、道德觀、人生觀是一個既存的事實，然而合理的公民能夠形成「交疊共識」，支持一套政治性正義觀，作為規範社會基本結構的基礎。尤其在面對憲政核心爭議與基本正義問題時，合理的公民能夠擱置具爭議性的整全性學說，遵循公共理性的理念，根據同一套政治性正義觀所提供的政治價值與正義原則來解決爭議、凝聚共識、證成決策。不過，羅爾斯的公共理性論受到許多批評，其至少面臨「公共理性無法證成政治共識」、「公共理性不公平地排除整全性學說」、「公共理性是多種而非一種」、「公共理性將淪為膚淺的大眾理性」四種挑戰，此四種挑戰分別是對於公共理性之「完備性」、「公平性」、「單一性」、「公共性」的質疑。針對這些挑戰，羅爾斯對其理論進行了三項主要修正：第一，以「寬觀點公共理性」與「包含式公共理性」補充「排除式公共理性」。第二，公共理性的內容是由一整套「自由主義政治性正義觀之族系」所給定，「正義即公平」也只是諸多合理的政治性正義觀之一。第三，羅爾斯承認公共理性的侷限，然而在必要時，得以「基於公共理性的投票」做出決策。根據這些修正，筆者認為羅爾斯的公共理性論能夠回應「完備性」、「公平性」、「單一性」三方面的挑戰，但是仍無法完全解決「完備性」的問題。因此在本文中，筆者試圖以「寬觀點公共理性」與「廣泛的反思均衡」證成「羅爾斯式的審議理論」，以突破公共理性的限制。尤其是筆者認為，「羅爾斯式審議理論」具有「公共證成的審議模式」、「尊重民主文化」、「兼顧程序正義與實質正義」、「滿足『真誠要求』」、「強化公民意識」、「重視公共理由」等特質，體現了一種自由主義式的審議式民主理論。因此，當我們思索「多元社會的政治共識如何可能？」時，「羅爾斯式審議理論」是一項較合理的方案。 / This dissertation intends to explore John Rawls’s idea of public reason. Public reason is the core conception of Rawls’s political liberalism. Its subject is the public good concerning questions of fundamental political justice. Rawls argues that, though value diversity is the fact of a modern democratic society, reasonable citizens will follow a political conception of justice endorsed by the overlapping consensus between different kinds of comprehensive doctrines in order to resolve the deep conflicts. Especially, when the problems about constitutional essentials and basic justice occur, reasonable citizens will abide by the idea of public reason to deal with the problems. The idea of public reason is helpful for us to justify political consensus in a pluralistic society. However, some philosophers challenge the idea of public reason. They criticize that the idea of public reason cannot deal with the hard issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and affirmative action. Faced with these criticisms, Rawls revises his theory in three aspects. First, he revises the exclusive view of public reason by the inclusive view of public reason and the wide view of public reason. Secondly, he argues that the content of public reason is given by a family of reasonable political conceptions of justice. Thirdly, he asserts that we can make a political decision by voting in accordance with the idea of public reason if it is necessary. But, these revisions seems cannot completely overcome the shortcoming of the theory of public reason. Therefore, I want to justify Rawlsian deliberative theory based on the wide view of public reason and the wide reflective equilibrium to overcome the shortcoming of the idea of public reason. Owing to Rawlsian deliberative theory can reconcile liberalism and deliberative democracy, strengthen our civic friendship, and urge us to value public reasons more, I think it is a more plausible theory to justify political consensus in a modern pluralistic society.