Political Conflict and Political Preferences: Communicative Interaction Between Facts, Norms, and Interests (ECPR Monographs Series)

What are the practical effects of deliberation and when can we expect it to be successful? Political Conflict and Political Preferences addresses what appears to be a blind spot in theories of deliberative democracy: the conceptual and empirical relationship between communication and political preferences. A model of preference transformation and the distinction between discussion, deliberation, debate, and bargaining as modes of political interaction serve as a framework for the analysis of a fundamental and highly polarizing conflict—the status and handling of embryonic stem cells.