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That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to earn citizens' trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Policies on preventing radicalization and recruitment to violent Islamist organizations have been widely criticized for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims as a group. Sweden has stood out by international comparison by announcing an approach built on inclusion and participation, especially with regard to Muslim civil society. But what does it mean to make a policy process inclusive and participatory? How can values of inclusion and participation be combined with efficient implementation and realization of policy goals, especially in a policy area where discourse and practice have tended to reinforce patterns of exclusion and discrimination? This article develops a framework that puts the roles of participants at the center: what expectations, boundaries and capacities come with an invitation to participate? Based on interviews with actors involved in the Swedish policy process, including Muslim civil society leaders, the study suggests that participation, in this case, meant primarily being present, thereby confirming commitment and stakeholder status and contributing legitimacy, and providing instrumental knowledge and communication networks. While Muslim representatives were often not expected to be more involved, some indicated that they themselves hesitated to go beyond these roles for several reasons. They expressed a concern that merely having opinions or critique could be interpreted as 'radical' and as not accepting the idea that Muslims as a group should have special responsibilities for preventing radicalism. One way of overcoming such obstacles is through subtle, indirect exercises of influence that allow policy-makers and administrators to anticipate the concerns and interests of affected groups without requiring their direct participation.

Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of the politics of participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factors external to spaces of participation interact with aspects of participation within them. The framework conceptualizes participatory budgeting as political spaces, whose boundaries are shaped by ideologies, interests, and patterns of social exclusion. In dynamic spaces, such boundaries are constantly renegotiated and contestation helps maintain their openness. In static spaces, by contrast, predefined boundaries are imposed on participants who may accept or reject them. Empirical examples of participatory budgeting illustrate the usefulness of this framework. The article ends by discussing key avenues for further research.

That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to earn citizens' trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Deliberative systems theory suggests that a democratic society works well when citizens' experiences and views, as expressed in various forms and sites of communication, are connected and taken up by other citizens as well as policy-makers. Pluralism, which is not always easily reconciled with high-quality deliberation in every instance, is seen as instrumental to the realization of democratic values and sound decision-making. This perspective raises new methodological challenges, such as (1) identifying sites of communication that serve important functions in a deliberative system, (2) connecting different sites and (3) assessing their impact. Recent scholarship has found that these challenges can be fruitfully met by applying interpretive methodology, which, like deliberative systems theory, aims to understand social interactions on their own terms, and not by measuring their correspondence to theoretical ideal-types. However, for theory development, as well as to help improve actual deliberative systems, researchers also need to make generalizable inferences. This paper develops a relational approach that combines interpretive methods with structural theory, which allows researchers to assess and explain the deficiencies, as well as the opportunities, that citizens experience. The principles of relational analysis are illustrated by research on citizen deliberation about urban riots.

Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of thepoliticsof participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factorsexternalto spaces of participation interact with aspects of participationwithinthem. The framework conceptualizes participatory budgeting as political spaces, whose boundaries are shaped by ideologies, interests, and patterns of social exclusion. In dynamic spaces, such boundaries are constantly renegotiated and contestation helps maintain their openness. In static spaces, by contrast, predefined boundaries are imposed on participants who may accept or reject them. Empirical examples of participatory budgeting illustrate the usefulness of this framework. The article ends by discussing key avenues for further research.

What is the appropriate way to respond to actions that break basic norms of respectfulness, sincerity, and public-mindedness? At the same time as this question has become a central concern for democratic societies, a 'systemic' turn has unsettled established solutions for democratic theorists. From the systemic perspective, it is more important how actions contribute to public discourse than whether they meet standards of deliberation individually. This article challenges theorists to consider three additional propositions: (1) to be inclusive and deliberative, the system and its parts must be mutually supportive; (2) well-performing systems have sufficient reflective capacity to examine their own deficiencies when violations of basic norms occur; and (3) the performance of a deliberative system needs to take into account both the frequency of violations and the reflective qualities of the system's response. For a well-performing system, violations of basic norms are opportunities to learn and strengthen the support for spaces of deliberation.

Cooperation between movements and political elites are frequently associated with the risk of cooptation. Because it undercuts contentious actors, cooptation may seem rational for elites that seek to protect their interests. However, recent scholarship questions whether this view is empirically valid. Adding to these debates, this article demonstrates that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that elites always act to maintain power, cooptation may often not be the rational choice of strategy. This article presents a typology of elite responses that focuses on three phases of elite–movement interaction: preparatory, term-setting, and confrontation phases. In each phase, elites' choice between cooptation and conditional cooperation depends on whether legitimacy appears instrumental to achieve their goals. Cooperation, as opposed to cooptation, generates legitimacy and can, therefore, be used strategically by movements.

The term 'meta-deliberation' refers to processes of addressing problems with the way that conversations about shared concerns – our ordinary deliberations – proceed. This article discusses the distinction between meta-deliberation and ordinary deliberation and examines three questions raised by previous arguments about meta-deliberation: (1) what kinds of communication should count as meta-deliberation, (2) does meta-deliberation always lead to reflective understanding and improvements in practices of deliberation, and (3) why would deliberative systems need meta-deliberation? Consistent with the systemic perspective on deliberation, this article suggests an inclusive view of which acts and sites may contribute to processes of meta-deliberation: it argues that meta-deliberation faces the same potential problems as ordinary deliberation, such as unequal power relations and narrow perspectives, and therefore requires careful examination; but when meta-deliberation works, it provides societies with reflective capacity, which helps them locate systemic weaknesses. The article concludes by discussing how further studies can help make meta-deliberation more inclusive in order to serve system-level critical reflection.

Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This 'dual orientation' places them theoretically between social movement studies' focus on strategic considerations and the 'sincere' (truthful) communication envisioned by democratic theorists to be a condition for 'authentic' deliberation, in which actors genuinely seek to understand each other's views. Engaging with both fields of theory, a framework is developed for separating actions that are strategic, sincere and employ sincerity as strategy. Actors choose sincerity as a strategy when they practice truthful reasoning as a means to advance their interests in the public sphere. As illustrated by green movements, the concept captures how activists may handle three risks in public discourse: commercialization, politicization and idealization.

The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it demonstrates that cooptation appears rational only on the condition that cooperation is valued lower than political domination. But elite-movement interaction may result in mutually strategic relationships that are conditional on each side's recognition of the other's interest. Two empirical cases illustrate this possibility: the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin American participatory budgeting. In both cases, the actors involved chose a strategy of "mutually assured autonomy" over cooptation.

Both advocates and critics of deliberative theory have regarded power relations as problems for public deliberation. Three aspects—interests, ideology and status differences—have been thought to distort deliberative processes. This article discusses a growing body of case studies that indicate that these "problems" may actually, under certain conditions, help facilitate inclusion and equality in deliberation. The crucial task is to specify the mechanisms that explain such unexpected outcomes and the conditions under which they may appear in other cases. This article specifies three such mechanisms that help explain positive outcomes in a number of case studies. The argument for focusing on mechanisms and conditions serves as a correction both to critics who find the theory of deliberation naïve and to advocates who have taken the critique against deliberative theory too lightly.