ABSTRACT
‘Deliberation’ is one of the most frequent keywords in political science journals. A search within the titles, keywords and abstracts of articles published in some of the most influential journals in the field over the last ten years typically yields dozens of results (e.g., 24 articles in Political Theory). An identical search within Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics yields surprisingly few results: two, zero and six articles, respectively, featuring ‘deliberation’ or ‘deliberative’ in titles, keywords or abstracts. A full text search for these terms produces these results: 32 articles in Journal of Language and Politics, 41 in Discourse & Society and 15 in Discourse Studies, compared to 216 in Political Theory and 114 in British Journal of Political Science since 2005. While, judging by these statistics, discourse analysts appear to be less interested in the study of deliberation, political analysts seem to regard it as the “organizing principle of political communication research”, its “central organizing theme” (Gastil and Black 2008). On this view, political communication research is a form of deliberation critique, where political and media practices are constantly measured against the deliberative ideal. 1
