Women's Empowerment through Deliberative Democracy

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Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in deliberative democracy which is defined as informed participation by broader citizens included in the deliberative process of decision-making. Deliberation allows minority groups have opportunity to participate freely and legitimately in producing collectively decisions to issues that concern them.This paper first reviews and analyzes literature of deliberative democracy and women’s empowerment, and the current status of deliberative democracy practice in Taiwan. Secondly, the author examines women’s personality strait correspond to deliberation. We found that men and women are distinct and differ on some personality traits and women score higher than men in sociability, warmth, self-consciousness, tender-mindedness, altruism, and empathy and more interested in people-oriented activity and occupation. Women were also reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men. This article advocates for reciprocity theory of deliberative democracy which are correspond with the women personality trait of extraversion, warmth, agreeableness ,tender-minded and altruism and for discursive theory correspond with sociability and narrative and also for procedure theory correlate to conscientiousness.

Stream: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender

Paper: Women’s Empowerment through Deliberative Democracy

Chun-wen Lin is an assistant professor in the Department of Child Care at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, 1, Shuefu Rd., Neipu, Pingtung 912, Taiwan;cwlin@mail.npust.edu.tw. Her area of specialization is in early childhood educational policy, educational administration and educational law. She is also interested in science education,indigenous education and distant education.