Andrea Felicetti
Biographic Data
| ID | 277083 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Felicetti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Felicetti |
| SIGNATURE | FELICETTI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Padua |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7793-1012 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Democratizing the genomic revolution? Comparing democratic innovations in France and the UK
The ongoing revolution in the field of genome editing (GE) has ignited intense debate around new genomic techniques (NGTs) in Europe. Their societal and ecological implications underscore their critical importance. However, the development and implementation of NGTs present significant challenges from a democratic perspective. Amid calls for democratizing NGTs governance, democratic innovations have been proposed as potential solutions. This pape…
A bottom-up perspective on democratic innovations in Italy
Depending on what levels of government and actors in a political system one focuses upon, democratic innovations might seem thriving or waning. This emerges clearly when looking at the main trajectories of democratic innovation in Italy. Compared to other liberal democracies, at the national level, Italy is a laggard; yet, a more dynamic landscape of democratic innovations exists at the local level. Some regions have drafted pioneering legislatio…
Facing Democratic Challenges
The discovery of CRISPR has fuelled the debate surrounding new genomic techniques (NGTs). This is of paramount importance given their potential impact on societies and ecosystems. Despite early enthusiasm about the potential of NGTs to “democratize” genome editing, it is increasingly evident that their introduction poses substantial challenges from a democratic point of view. Although greater engagement with the public sphere is urgently needed, …
Far-Right on the Offensive
This article examines public sphere responses to a far-right attack in Macerata, Italy, just before the 2018 national elections. Adopting a deliberative democratic perspective, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles discussing the attack. Our findings reveal a limited capacity for democratic resilience. The communication following the attack was neither reflective nor inclusive, despite the unanimous rejection of politica…
Designing a personal voting guide
Evidence from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) shows the efficacy of a deliberative minipublic serving as a trusted information proxy for an electorate that votes on initiatives and referenda. This paper builds on that model by envisioning a decentralized online process that offers the function of the CIR without the planning and expense of convening the minipublic itself. The resulting model, which we call the Personal Voting Guide, …
Solidarity and Deliberation After Extremist Attacks
Introducing the laddering technique to the study of democratic innovations
Bouncing Back or Forward? Two Approaches to Democratic Resilience After Extremist Attacks
Violent extremist attacks pose a serious threat to democracy, undermining its institutions, norms and practices. This article examines the disruptive impact of violent extremism on the public sphere and considers the role of political leaders in responding to these challenges. Leaders are widely recognised as the key actors shaping the public discourse after extremist attacks, by either reinforcing or resisting the division intended by these atta…
Toward a new perspective on forms and sites of democratic life
Theoretical research is challenging traditional understandings of the role of citizens in democracies. Phenomena such as anonymity, non‐participation, and spectatorship, previously overlooked or deemed problematic, are now being reconsidered. Acknowledging that these phenomena can, in some cases, enhance democracy is important. However, there is still little guidance on how they might be studied empirically. This paper shows that there are specif…
Reflective Inclusion
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation
Some scholars warn about democratic disaffection of young people potentially leading to processes of ‘democratic deconsolidation’. Conversely, others interpret young people's preference for non-conventional forms of participation as a manifestation of democratic renewal. We surveyed respondents from nine European countries and analysed differences in attitudes of opposition to democracy across age groups and how these preferences shape political …
Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation
Participatory governance in megaprojects
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the sett…
The Deliberative Camp
This chapter introduces the Deliberative Camp, a research method based on the informal practices of social movements that blend both participation and deliberation. Camps or acampadas have been a main development within the anti-austerity movements. As a form of political practice, Deliberative Camps provide a democratic model of engagement for activists, civil society actors, and citizens to develop knowledge and take action on urgent political …
Casting a new light on the democratic spectator
The idea of citizens being mere spectators who "watch" politics is widespread in public and academic debates. Scholarship in relation to democratic theory tends to see spectatorship as a state in which citizens are politically uninterested, isolated, and passive. Although this understanding aptly captures the problems about the idea of spectatorship, it is only a partial awareness and prevents us from seeing that positive forms of spectatorship a…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Systemic Unsustainability as a Threat to Democracy
Resilient socioeconomic unsustainability poses a threat to democracy whose importance has yet to be fully acknowledged. As the prospect of sustainability transition wanes, so does perceived legitimacy of institutions. This further limits representative institutions’ ability to take action, making democratic deepening all the more urgent. I investigate this argument through an illustrative case study, the 2017 People's Climate March. In a context …
Mo.Se
Mosaic is an ancient type of art used to create decorative images or patterns combining small components. A digital version of a mosaic can be useful for archaeologists, scholars and restorers who are interested in studying, comparing and preserving mosaics. Nowadays, archaeologists base their studies mainly on manual operation and visual observation that, although still fundamental, should be supported by an automatized procedure of information …
Learning from Democratic Practices
Contemporary democracies feature an increasingly diverse and complex variety of democratic practices. The systematic observation of these practices offers a valuable yet neglected source of insight for current debates on democratic systems and for institutional design. Taking democratic practices as the starting point for theorization counters the tendency to think that democracy has some sort of fixed core around which a political system should …
A problem‐based approach to understanding public support for referendums
A prominent explanation of widespread popular support for referendums is dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy. In this article, the aim is to gain a better understanding of how dissatisfaction affects support for referendums. Drawing on previous research, it is argued here that citizens follow a problem‐based approach in their support for referendums, in that referendums are considered a suitable solution to address so…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
Introduction
Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation…
Innovating Democracy Against Democratic Stress in Europe
We investigate the interaction between democratic innovations and social movements in the context of the growing stress on representative democracy in Europe. In particular, we focus on citizen-led democratic innovations that emerged from popular protests against national political systems. We explore the crowd-sourced Constitutional Reform in Iceland and the G1000 in Belgium and consider three different stages: the onset of these innovations, th…
Digital Media and Knowledge Production Within Social Movements
In this article, we aim at contributing to ongoing discussions on the nexus between digital media and social movements. We investigate how activists problematize the inclusion of digital media within their courses of action and exploit these tools to produce and diffuse alternative knowledge on the issues on which they mobilize. We do so by studying Transition Italia (TI), the Italian hub of the transnational Transition movement struggling for re…
Participatory deliberative democracy
Defining what democracy means nowadays seems increasingly problematic as several alternative democratic visions are being developed and contrasted in normative theory and political practice. On the one hand, there are traditional accounts of democracy that are highly formal and minimalistic. Citizens are endowed with political rights, which they use to advance their interests, particularly through regular elections, which delegate power to govern…
Improving deliberative participation
This article argues for the assessment of deliberative mini-publics as a dynamic part of a wider deliberative system. The approach draws primarily on Dryzek’s (2009) deliberative capacity building framework, which describes the democratic process as ideally involving authentic deliberation, inclusiveness in the deliberative process, and consequentiality or deliberation’s influence on decisions as well as positive impact on the system. This approa…
Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation
Some scholars warn about democratic disaffection of young people potentially leading to processes of ‘democratic deconsolidation’. Conversely, others interpret young people's preference for non-conventional forms of participation as a manifestation of democratic renewal. We surveyed respondents from nine European countries and analysed differences in attitudes of opposition to democracy across age groups and how these preferences shape political …
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
A problem‐based approach to understanding public support for referendums
A prominent explanation of widespread popular support for referendums is dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy. In this article, the aim is to gain a better understanding of how dissatisfaction affects support for referendums. Drawing on previous research, it is argued here that citizens follow a problem‐based approach in their support for referendums, in that referendums are considered a suitable solution to address so…
Innovating Democracy Against Democratic Stress in Europe
We investigate the interaction between democratic innovations and social movements in the context of the growing stress on representative democracy in Europe. In particular, we focus on citizen-led democratic innovations that emerged from popular protests against national political systems. We explore the crowd-sourced Constitutional Reform in Iceland and the G1000 in Belgium and consider three different stages: the onset of these innovations, th…
Learning from Democratic Practices
Contemporary democracies feature an increasingly diverse and complex variety of democratic practices. The systematic observation of these practices offers a valuable yet neglected source of insight for current debates on democratic systems and for institutional design. Taking democratic practices as the starting point for theorization counters the tendency to think that democracy has some sort of fixed core around which a political system should …
The Australian Citizens' Parliament
Active citizen participation is increasingly being recognized as essential to effective public policymaking. A key challenge for public administrators is how to effectively engage constituents' diverse viewpoints in sound deliberation that will likely result in coherent, agreed judgments. This paper investigates one such public deliberation process, Australia's first Citizens' Parliament, which brought together 150 randomly sampled Australian cit…
Participatory governance in megaprojects
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the sett…
Between deliberation and contestation
Nuit debout represents one of the main mobilizations in France in recent years and the most important anti-austerity movement in the country since the financial crisis. Based on document analysis and fieldwork, this paper addresses the development of master frames within the context of free spaces. The introduction of the parliamentarian debate on the French Jobs Act can be understood as a suddenly imposed grievance that triggered the emergence i…
Reflective Inclusion
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
Casting a new light on the democratic spectator
The idea of citizens being mere spectators who "watch" politics is widespread in public and academic debates. Scholarship in relation to democratic theory tends to see spectatorship as a state in which citizens are politically uninterested, isolated, and passive. Although this understanding aptly captures the problems about the idea of spectatorship, it is only a partial awareness and prevents us from seeing that positive forms of spectatorship a…
Localism and the Transition movement
This article explores the relationship between localism and contemporary community engagement. In particular, it focuses on the Transition movement, an especially interesting case, given its localistic and community-oriented nature. The article begins wit
Participatory deliberative democracy
Defining what democracy means nowadays seems increasingly problematic as several alternative democratic visions are being developed and contrasted in normative theory and political practice. On the one hand, there are traditional accounts of democracy that are highly formal and minimalistic. Citizens are endowed with political rights, which they use to advance their interests, particularly through regular elections, which delegate power to govern…
Bouncing Back or Forward? Two Approaches to Democratic Resilience After Extremist Attacks
Violent extremist attacks pose a serious threat to democracy, undermining its institutions, norms and practices. This article examines the disruptive impact of violent extremism on the public sphere and considers the role of political leaders in responding to these challenges. Leaders are widely recognised as the key actors shaping the public discourse after extremist attacks, by either reinforcing or resisting the division intended by these atta…
Sociological history of New England Town Meetings
Historical New England Town Meetings have long had an important role in the collective imaginary as exemplary models of democratic participation. However, scholarly investigation has pointed to important limitations with respect to the democratic credentials of these assemblies. In this paper, we engage with recent theorising from deliberative democracy to provide an updated historical examination of the deliberative and democratic qualities of T…
Citizen Forums in the Deliberative System
This article analyzes contemporary democracies from a deliberative democratic standpoint and focuses on the connection between public and empowered spaces. The idea of deliberative systems and the concept of “transmission” are introduced to discuss the ways in which the public is able to affect the empowered spaces. While elections perform important democratic functions, alone they cannot provide a good quality means for connecting deliberation i…
The Australian Citizens' Parliament
Active citizen participation is increasingly being recognized as essential to effective public policymaking. A key challenge for public administrators is how to effectively engage constituents' diverse viewpoints in sound deliberation that will likely result in coherent, agreed judgments. This paper investigates one such public deliberation process, Australia's first Citizens' Parliament, which brought together 150 randomly sampled Australian cit…
Collective Identity and Voice at the Australian Citizens’ Parliament
This paper examines the role of collective identity and collective voice in political life. We argue that persons have an underlying predisposition to use collective dimensions, such as common identities and a public voice, in thinking and expressing themselves politically. This collective orientation, however, can be either fostered or weakened by citizens’ political experiences. Although the collective level is an important dimension in contemp…
Localism and the Transition movement
This article explores the relationship between localism and contemporary community engagement. In particular, it focuses on the Transition movement, an especially interesting case, given its localistic and community-oriented nature. The article begins wit
Citizen Forums in the Deliberative System
This article analyzes contemporary democracies from a deliberative democratic standpoint and focuses on the connection between public and empowered spaces. The idea of deliberative systems and the concept of “transmission” are introduced to discuss the ways in which the public is able to affect the empowered spaces. While elections perform important democratic functions, alone they cannot provide a good quality means for connecting deliberation i…
Improving deliberative participation
This article argues for the assessment of deliberative mini-publics as a dynamic part of a wider deliberative system. The approach draws primarily on Dryzek’s (2009) deliberative capacity building framework, which describes the democratic process as ideally involving authentic deliberation, inclusiveness in the deliberative process, and consequentiality or deliberation’s influence on decisions as well as positive impact on the system. This approa…
Sociological history of New England Town Meetings
Historical New England Town Meetings have long had an important role in the collective imaginary as exemplary models of democratic participation. However, scholarly investigation has pointed to important limitations with respect to the democratic credentials of these assemblies. In this paper, we engage with recent theorising from deliberative democracy to provide an updated historical examination of the deliberative and democratic qualities of T…
Participatory deliberative democracy
Defining what democracy means nowadays seems increasingly problematic as several alternative democratic visions are being developed and contrasted in normative theory and political practice. On the one hand, there are traditional accounts of democracy that are highly formal and minimalistic. Citizens are endowed with political rights, which they use to advance their interests, particularly through regular elections, which delegate power to govern…
Toward an assessment of marginality in democratic systems
This article offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of marginality of actors and ideas in democratic systems. We do so with respect to the extensive public debate that ensued from the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks of January 2015. Using content analytical data retrieved from The Guardian, we assess the degree and nature of marginality as indicated by the presence of different types of intervention in the public debate. Our findings sh…
Non-deliberative politics in deliberative democracy
This article advances one of the most important debates in recent scholarship on democratic theory: the one on deliberative systems. In the wake of the systemic turn deliberative scholars agree that not all components of a deliberative system can or even need to be deliberative. However, there is little clarity about the role of non-deliberative politics in a system and to what extent these are justifiable while we seek a more deliberative societ…
Between deliberation and contestation
Nuit debout represents one of the main mobilizations in France in recent years and the most important anti-austerity movement in the country since the financial crisis. Based on document analysis and fieldwork, this paper addresses the development of master frames within the context of free spaces. The introduction of the parliamentarian debate on the French Jobs Act can be understood as a suddenly imposed grievance that triggered the emergence i…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
Introduction
Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation…
Innovating Democracy Against Democratic Stress in Europe
We investigate the interaction between democratic innovations and social movements in the context of the growing stress on representative democracy in Europe. In particular, we focus on citizen-led democratic innovations that emerged from popular protests against national political systems. We explore the crowd-sourced Constitutional Reform in Iceland and the G1000 in Belgium and consider three different stages: the onset of these innovations, th…
Digital Media and Knowledge Production Within Social Movements
In this article, we aim at contributing to ongoing discussions on the nexus between digital media and social movements. We investigate how activists problematize the inclusion of digital media within their courses of action and exploit these tools to produce and diffuse alternative knowledge on the issues on which they mobilize. We do so by studying Transition Italia (TI), the Italian hub of the transnational Transition movement struggling for re…
A problem‐based approach to understanding public support for referendums
A prominent explanation of widespread popular support for referendums is dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy. In this article, the aim is to gain a better understanding of how dissatisfaction affects support for referendums. Drawing on previous research, it is argued here that citizens follow a problem‐based approach in their support for referendums, in that referendums are considered a suitable solution to address so…
Systemic Unsustainability as a Threat to Democracy
Resilient socioeconomic unsustainability poses a threat to democracy whose importance has yet to be fully acknowledged. As the prospect of sustainability transition wanes, so does perceived legitimacy of institutions. This further limits representative institutions’ ability to take action, making democratic deepening all the more urgent. I investigate this argument through an illustrative case study, the 2017 People's Climate March. In a context …
Mo.Se
Mosaic is an ancient type of art used to create decorative images or patterns combining small components. A digital version of a mosaic can be useful for archaeologists, scholars and restorers who are interested in studying, comparing and preserving mosaics. Nowadays, archaeologists base their studies mainly on manual operation and visual observation that, although still fundamental, should be supported by an automatized procedure of information …
Learning from Democratic Practices
Contemporary democracies feature an increasingly diverse and complex variety of democratic practices. The systematic observation of these practices offers a valuable yet neglected source of insight for current debates on democratic systems and for institutional design. Taking democratic practices as the starting point for theorization counters the tendency to think that democracy has some sort of fixed core around which a political system should …
The Deliberative Camp
This chapter introduces the Deliberative Camp, a research method based on the informal practices of social movements that blend both participation and deliberation. Camps or acampadas have been a main development within the anti-austerity movements. As a form of political practice, Deliberative Camps provide a democratic model of engagement for activists, civil society actors, and citizens to develop knowledge and take action on urgent political …
Casting a new light on the democratic spectator
The idea of citizens being mere spectators who "watch" politics is widespread in public and academic debates. Scholarship in relation to democratic theory tends to see spectatorship as a state in which citizens are politically uninterested, isolated, and passive. Although this understanding aptly captures the problems about the idea of spectatorship, it is only a partial awareness and prevents us from seeing that positive forms of spectatorship a…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Participatory governance in megaprojects
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the sett…
Reflective Inclusion
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation
Some scholars warn about democratic disaffection of young people potentially leading to processes of ‘democratic deconsolidation’. Conversely, others interpret young people's preference for non-conventional forms of participation as a manifestation of democratic renewal. We surveyed respondents from nine European countries and analysed differences in attitudes of opposition to democracy across age groups and how these preferences shape political …
Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation
Political science (28 works) · Politics (28 works) · Democracy (25 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Social Media and Politics (18 works) · Deliberation (11 works) · Deliberative democracy (11 works) · Public Administration (10 works)