‘Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political Speech,’ by Catherine Hafer and Dimitri Landa
The We Are What We Read series is, in part, about what defines the field of law & economics. The field’s natural home lies in applications that are, well, economic. Hence its longstanding—and now standard—role in contracts, corporations, antitrust, torts, and other areas. For this selection, I wanted to show how law & economics can illuminate something less obviously tied to economic activity: deliberation. The article also illustrates what I think defines law & economics: a set of methodological tools, rather than a collection of substantive or value commitments—or a movement.
“Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political Speech,” by Catherine Hafer and Dimitri Landa, is, if anything, more timely now than when it was written. The public, both in the United States and elsewhere, is deeply divided, and polarization has become a defining feature of our political moment. The article also brings together two bodies of scholarship that seldom speak to each other: deliberative democracy and formal theory, which uses mathematical models to study political behavior.