Deliberation and Non-Deliberative Communication

The goal of this work is to clarify how certain democratic goods — notably, empowered inclusion and mutual respect — can be both antecedents to and outcomes of successful communication. When exclusion or a lack of basic mutual respect prevent deliberation from happening in the first place, where do the antecedent conditions of empowered inclusion and mutual respect come from? To answer this question, I propose distinguishing between deliberation and non-deliberative communication. More specifically, I offer a typology that distinguishes between deliberation, political communication, non-political reason-giving and non-political communication. This framework clarifies theoretical disputes and empirical mixed findings in the deliberative democracy literature and offers insight to practitioners and activists interested in using communicative practices to achieve aims related to incentivizing inclusion or promoting mutual respect.