National political cultures in a transnational arena : EUropean citizens at the (Deliberative) Poll (®)

Abstract

This work consists of several sections, and includes a substantial literature (about 85 pp., Including theory), a dense descriptive component (about 15 pp.), that precedes the empirical part (about 35 pp.). This research project was born to answer a very general question: does culture influence debate, deliberation among people? To answer, a broad review of the existing literature on this subject was carried out, with particular (but not exclusive) attention for two existing fields: those about studies on deliberative democracy and political culture that are present in various and contiguous scientific disciplines (from political science to sociology, to anthropology, to political philosophy, to include constitutional law and political psychology). The thesis that comes out focuses on the main contribution of two scholars, Habermas and Rawls, to a different extent fundamental for the drafting and implementation of the dependent variable (deliberation, precisely), accompanied by others, Douglas and Wildavsky above all, whose production have contributed to building the independent variable (culture). This seemed to be the most logical and useful way to follow in the editorial work, as it was possible to link the results achieved so far by multidisciplinary analyses, especially in recent years, to a new approach to the theme of the relationship between culture and deliberation. Among the goals achieved by this thesis, there was adding new data to existing empirical studies on deliberative democracy and political culture: this has been done by recovering, transcribing and personally coding recordings from the most important transnational study case of Deliberative Poll, EuroPolis 2009, thus completing a partial set of data previously available. Another goal was to "operationalize" the political culture, the cultural orientations of a representative sample of 27 EU countries, using an extremely interesting and useful anthropological theory, the Cultural Theory developed by Ellis, Thompson and Wildavsky in 1990 and based on previous studies by the anthropologist Mary Douglas: for this purpose, the data from the European Values Study of 2008 were used, thus allowing them to "map" these states in relation to their position in relation to the four individualist, fatalist, hierarchical and egalitarian orientations. During the realization of this work, the main protagonists of the EuroPolis project were contacted, and then they agreed to be interviewed by the author on some issues included in the descriptive section, thus providing further insights into this work. As far as the results of the empirical analysis of the thesis are concerned, these are linked to the four hypotheses elaborated and tested in the final section, and they provide results that, though partially not in line with expectations, may, however, explain much about the opinion of European citizens with regard to an issue such as immigration (still increasingly critical), and also allow for a possible rethinking of the way in which a very important instrument is used, such as the deliberative survey (e.g. on the role of moderators in the discussion groups). To conclude, it is possible to say that this work, among the various results, has allowed the possibility of exploring, through a large amount of data and particularly significant situations, the "consequences of culture within a deliberative process".