Northern Ireland desperately needs a deliberative model to prevent it becoming a dictatorship of electoral democracy

Simon Burall of Involve, a think tank specialising in democracy and public engagement, recently authored a new report entitled ‘Room for a View’, which focusses on the idea of UK democracy as a deliberative process. Paul Braithwaite welcomes the report’s insights and argues a deliberative model is urgently needed in Northern Ireland. He writes that the repetitive cycle of institutional crisis legitimated by zero-sum elections is a dangerous game that can only go on for so long.