Measuring Democratic Listening

A Listening Quality Index

Bibliographic Data

ID7972147
AuthorsMary F Scudder (0000-0002-5849-5849, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume75
Issue1
Pages175-187
Publication date2022-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Research Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1065-9129 • E-ISSN: 1938-274X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1065912921989449
OpenAlexW3127803965
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited45

Recent political theory in the area of deliberative democracy has placed listening at the normative core of meaningfully democratic deliberation. Empirical research in this area, however, has struggled to capture democratic listening in a normatively relevant way. This paper presents a new, theoretically informed instrument for measuring and assessing listening in deliberation. Here, I tackle the observational challenge of measuring the act of listening itself, as opposed to either the preconditions or outcomes of listening. Reviewing existing measures, I show that each, in isolation, fails to capture the most democratically meaningful aspects of listening. The paper argues, however, that existing and novel measures can be usefully combined to allow researchers to capture different degrees of democratic listening. Using Rawls’s concept of “lexical priority,” I aggregate relevant components of listening into a normatively significant lexical scale. The paper describes this novel measurement and highlights how it can be used in empirical research on democratic deliberation

Active listening · Cognitive psychology · Deliberation · Deliberative democracy · Democracy · Empirical research · Epistemology · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communication · Computer Science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Media and Politics

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