Accounting for Culture in Deliberation through Meta-discursive Analysis

This study suggests a meta-discursive approach for analysing citizens’ perceptions of public discourse in their society, as a basis for adapting deliberative theory to the particularities of varying contexts. Utilising qualitative meta-discursive analysis of open-ended responses collected from Israeli communication students (N = 204), we examine Israelis’ descriptions of existing public debate and their perceptions of the desired nature of public debate, thus disclosing cultural-discursive barriers to deliberative practice. We found that respondents’ perceptions of existing political discourse point to non-deliberative characteristics which align with ethnographic scholarship, while their normative concept of public discourse aligns with deliberative norms. Based on these findings, we propose a theoretical premise for the cultural adaptation of deliberative theory, which suggests engaging in a meta-discursive study of a given speech community as precursor to adapting deliberative norms to specific cultural contexts.