Welcome

to the BIDS (Bern Interdisciplinary Center for Deliberation Studies) at Bern University. Our mission is to advance the understanding of deliberation, to stimulate interdisciplinary and empirical research on deliberation, to organize workshops on deliberative democracy, and to establish an international network of deliberative scholars. 

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Mission Statement

Deliberation is taking center stage in contemporary political philosophy. Deliberation means that political actors and citizens enter into a reasoned discussion or discourse, i.e., they justify their positions with a focus on the common values, weigh arguments and positions with respect, and are willing to yield to the force of the better argument. Political philosophers view deliberation as a necessary means to arrive at legitimate decisions in modern pluralistic societies where a common religious view or a comprehensive moral outlook no longer exists and where the authority of tradition has greatly weakened.

Long the exclusive domain of philosophers, there is now a growing community of scholars who empirically investigate deliberation. Scholars in Law and Political Science at Bern University have been at the forefront of this empirical turn in deliberative theory. For instance, they have developed an instrument for measuring deliberation (the “Discourse Quality Index”), have studied political institutions that enhance the quality of deliberation in the real world (Deliberative Politics in Action, Cambridge University Press), and have situated discourse theory within the scope of contemporary theories of legal and political philosophy (Prozedurale Theorien der Gerechtigkeit, Nomos).

The BIDS (Bern Interdisciplinary Center for Deliberative Studies) provides an institutional framework for advanced studies on deliberation. Our mission is to stimulate interdisciplinary and empirical research on deliberation, to organize workshops on deliberative democracy, and to establish an international network of deliberative scholars.

Axel Tschentscher, André Bächtiger, Marco R. Steenbergen, and Jürg Steiner