Current Issue

Contributions are invited for a special collection* entitled “Psychological Phenomena in Democratic Deliberation: Research and Practice Spanning Boundaries,” of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy (formerly the Journal of Public Deliberation).

The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2020.

This special collection will be curated by David L. Brinker (Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, Tufts University), Michael E. Morrell (Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut), Justin Reedy (Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma), and Robert C. Richards, Jr. (University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service).

A notable focus of recent research on democratic deliberation has been the role of psychological phenomena at the levels of the individual and the group. At the individual level, recent inquiry has furnished novel findings about learning and other aspects of information processing, attitude change, emotions, motivated reasoning, social identity, and the roles of frames and other cognitive structures. At the level of the group, recent research has yielded new results concerning group polarization, group cognition, and group identity. Two patterns characterize much of this recent research. The first is a focus on citizens’ lay conceptualizations of elements of democratic deliberation, such as listening, decision-making procedures, public knowledge, and public participation. The second is the use of concepts from disciplines beyond political science and political psychology—including relational communication and motivational and social psychology—to explain how psychological phenomena that function primarily in areas of participants’ lives unrelated to political deliberation are activated during deliberation and influence deliberative interaction and outcomes. This special collection of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy aims to present current, innovative theorizing and empirical research concerning psychological aspects of democratic deliberation in these and related areas.

We invite manuscripts from scholars around the world, reporting results of theorizing or empirical inquiry concerning the following broad topics related to psychological phenomena in democratic deliberation. Research questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited, to, the following:

(1) Psychological inputs to democratic deliberation:

• To what extent are cognitive structures initially developed to function primarily outside of policy deliberation—such as frames for making sense of communication in intimate relationships, or the goals and plans that structure interpersonal influence attempts— factors in deliberative discussion?
• How do deliberative participants’ lay understandings of the components of deliberative discussion—such as public knowledge, decision making, or listening—affect deliberative interaction and outcomes?
• To what extent do cognitive constructs related to participants’ gender, race, ethnicity, or religious identity affect the process or outputs of deliberation? 

(2) Psychological aspects of the deliberative process:

• What is the current state of knowledge about the relationship of the affective dimension of deliberative participation to other aspects of deliberative interaction and to outcomes of deliberation?
• What deliberative inputs affect processes of sense-making, perspective-taking, identitynegotiation, and consciousness-raising during deliberation, and how do those processes affect the outputs of deliberative interaction? 
• What deliberative inputs foster processes of creativity and innovation in deliberating groups, and how do those processes relate to learning and other forms of individual- or group-level information processing? 
• To what extent do psychological aspects of group socialization interact with other aspects of the deliberative process and influence deliberative outcomes? 

(3) Other psychological mediating and moderating variables:

•  How do moderating or mediating variables such as the need for cognition and the need for evaluation affect not only learning and opinion change, but also sense-making, perspective-taking, emotional processing, identity-negotiation, consciousness-raising, and creativity during deliberation?
• How do contextual factors—including social inequality and the characteristics of organizations that host deliberations—constrain or augment the influence of those intermediary variables? 

(4) Psychological outputs of democratic deliberation:

• What deliberative inputs and process elements contribute to psychological outputs of democratic deliberation at the individual level such as self-awareness, self-efficacy, trust, and willingness to be civically engaged, and at the group level such as collective identity and group efficacy? 

For instructions on manuscript preparation, please see the “Author Guidelines” below.Manuscripts will be vetted and refereed.

Manuscripts should be submitted by the submission deadline to Robert Richards by email at rcrichards@clintonschool.uasys.edu with the subject line “JDD Special Collection”.

For questions concerning this special collection, please contact the Journal of Deliberative Democracy’s co-editors Nicole Curato (Nicole.Curato@canberra.edu.au) and Kim Strandberg (Kim.Strandberg@abo.fi) or special-collection co-curator Robert Richards (rcrichards@clintonschool.uasys.edu).

*A “special collection” is similar to a virtual special issue. Manuscripts accepted for this special collection will be published in regularly scheduled issues of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. Each manuscript, once accepted for publication, will also be made publicly available on a special web page dedicated to the special collection. In addition, that page will include an essay, written by the curators, providing an overview of the collection and situating the collection in relation to other relevant scholarly literature. 

For more information, and to view the Author Guidelines, please click here.