Political communities occasionally come to crossroads where fundamental, far-reaching decisions must be made. At such times, it can enhance the democratic and substantive quality of decision-making if significant numbers of citizens are invitedRead More
Twenty years ago, the American political psychologist Robert E. Lane (1917 – 2017) published The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000). In it, he showed that Westerners (and Americans in particular) wereRead More
Reading the title of this article might evoke pictures of people violently shouting at each other or bursting out into tears while pleading their cause in front of an audience. Whereas the firstRead More
Could radicalization be prevented or reversed by bringing together those that have seemingly entered this path, with other not (yet) radicalized citizens, to discuss fundamental issues like: democracy, pluralism, freedom, autonomy, respect andRead More
Robert Dahl (1915 – 2014) is one of the most influential political scholars of the last century. His ideas on political scholarship, pluralism, democracy and deliberation also influenced Social Science Works. On Dahl,Read More
Imagine we are dealing with a person with a rather monistic mindset, thus believing, assuming or hoping that all questions can only have one right answer, that all these answers can be neatly,Read More
On January 30, 2018, Charles Lindblom died at the age of 100. His ideas on, among others, policy making processes, democracy, the limits and possibilities of social and political science, impairment, and usableRead More
People hardly ever change their mind. The more they feel forced to justify themselves, the more they feel questioned, criticized, disrespected, and the smaller the chance that they will open their mind toRead More
There are many factors that explain the upheaval of populism. Postmodernism is one of them. In the Netherlands, certainly the columnist represented and helped to shape the postmodernist mood, a mood characterized byRead More
In our deliberative democracy and integration projects we treat our participants – natives as well as migrants – as citizens, able and willing to discuss in a rational way the big themes likeRead More
