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This text advances a 'naturalized' normative theory of deliberative democracy; one that is informed by an empirically-grounded analysis of public deliberation in naturalistic settings and in unadulterated form, and goes on to provide institutional design proposals for how to improve it.

"Democratic theory's deliberative turn has hit a dead end. It is unable to find a good way to scale up its small-scale, formally-organized deliberative mini-publics to include the entire community. Some turn to deliberative systems for a way out, but none have found a credible way to deliberatively involve the citizenry at large. Deliberation Naturalized offers an alternative way out-one we have been using all along. The key sites of democratic deliberation are everyday political conversations among people networked across the community. Informal networked deliberation is how all citizens deliberate together, directly or indirectly. That is how public opinion emerges in civil society. Networked deliberation satisfies the classic deliberative desiderata of inclusion, equality, and reciprocity reasonably well, albeit differently than standard mini-publics. Reconceptualizing democratic deliberation in this way highlights some real threats to the networked mode of deliberative democracy, such as polarization, message repetition, and pluralistic ignorance. Deliberation Naturalized assesses the extent of each of those threats and proposes ways of protecting real-existing deliberative democracy against them. By focusing on the mechanisms underpinning every democratic deliberation among citizens, Deliberation Naturalized offers a truly novel approach to deliberative democracy"--

AbstractTransnational altruism comes in many forms, prominently among them private giving through charitable NGOs. This paper focuses on the altruistic actions of those giving to charitable organizations and especially on the subsequent altruistic choices of those second-order, donor-organizations. Leaving choices about how donated money should be used exclusively in the hands of donors is morally problematic in various ways. This is why transnational relationships that involve private giving from rich to poor should be democratized. We propose thus a new moral principle for guiding altruistic behavior: democratic altruism. We develop our argument by focusing on the moral powers and formative agency that donors exercise through their charitable behavior, in particular through their choice to support particular types of aid or organizations. We argue that if and when donors give, they should do so in a way that allows the poor to exercise formative agency as well, in decisions over how donated resources should be used on the ground.