Suchergebnisse

The New England town meeting has often been seen as the archetypical deliberative citizen forum (see, e.g., Mansbridge 1980). More recently, political theorists have begun to appreciate the way in which any particular public forum might be better understood as part of the larger deliberative system (Parkinson, Mansbridge, 2012). Much of this work draws on modern-day examples (Parkinson 2006). But a return to the American founding era reveals that while town meetings are often praised and have many democratic virtues, they also embody a limitation on popular action generally and especially on democratic dissent.

A study of citation patterns shows that it is rare for Systems writers to cite findings from the cognitive sciences, though common in writers in analogous areas. This raises the possibility that there may be useful areas of modern psychology that systems practitioners are currently neglecting. Behavioural economics is suggested as a potential example, introducing the idea of a 'decision illusion', the distinction between System 1 and System 2 brain systems which are believed to underlie these illusions, and a range of examples. This raises the problem of how to interface descriptive (and usually reductionist) domains such as psychology with normative systems methods. It is suggested that this can be managed by switching attention from 'How to do it' to 'What might go wrong', raising the possibility that systems methods might be much enriched by a systematic analysis of failure modes.