UMI/ProQuest URL	http://80-wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/9811586
PUBLICATION NUMBER	AAT 9811586
TITLE	Bridging of differences in dialogic democracy
AUTHOR	Elliott, Janice Marilyn
DEGREE	PhD
SCHOOL	FIELDING GRADUATE INSTITUTE
DATE	1997
PAGES	272
ADVISER	Melville, Keith; Shapiro, Jeremy
ISBN	0-591-62320-X
SOURCE	DAI-A 58/10, p. 4050, Apr 1998
SUBJECT	POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS (0344)
ABSTRACT	Democracies are struggling with pluralities--cultural and political differences. Reconciling these in a legitimate, non-coercive fashion is the challenge. This dissertation examines attempts to bridge such differences through dialogue or discourse in the public sphere. It builds on a discursive conception of democracy which ties legitimacy to the quality of deliberation exhibited in political processes. Five “Renewal of Canada Conferences” are studied as attempts to address, through deliberation and dialogue, the politics of recognition and difference. The research develops a picture of the discursive quality of these processes of public deliberation and the conditions that contribute to, or hinder, discursively healthy bridging of differences. It is situated in literatures regarding deliberative democracy, critical-theory, differences in public spheres, and dialogue. A critical-theoretical design examines discursive quality from three perspectives: agency or action (the communicative interaction); structural (communicative infrastructure), and the interaction of these two. A relatively more successful conference is compared with one that was less successful. Actual dialogue is examined to determine the quality of discourse and whether differences are bridged. Conditions (communicative arrangements, processes, actors qualities) that affect the quality of discourse are investigated. Agency and structure are examined using Habermas's theory of communicative action and validity claims as an ideal type of communication that is aimed at mutual understanding. The study found a reciprocal-spiral relationship among actors, infrastructure and communicative interaction. Healthy discourse that enables the construction of mutual understanding requires a communicative infrastructure that attends to both content and relations. Conditions that enable thematizing of differences, building of relational knowledge, trust and mutual recognition help to break down dominant discourse and stereotyping. Such infrastructural conditions interact with actors attitudes, capacities and actions to enable, or hinder, the reaching of mutual understanding. Theoretically and methodologically, the research demonstrates the value of a critical-theoretical and ideal-typical approach. It corroborates the utility of abstract concepts such as validity claims in facilitating an understanding of real world communicative processes. It extends these abstractions to the real world through the development of concrete indicators that are used to examine both actions and structure. For practitioners, it identifies agency and infrastructural conditions that interact to construct mutual understanding.