Qualification: Variations of Institutional Design for Empowered Deliberation
Johnson and Gastil provide an independent institutional-design qualification of Kaal's separation between open deliberation and accountable judgment. Their comparative analysis treats the scope of authority as a design variable: deliberative outcomes may be provisional and require ratification or approval. They describe participatory-budgeting sequences that combine open community forums with specially elected bodies, and North American processes where public deliberation generates preferred outcomes that a non-deliberative public vote finally determines. This supports the narrower distinction between deliberative input and an institutionally authorized binding decision. It does not establish that the later decision stage is reputation-weighted, automated, or accountable in Kaal's technical sense, and it does not validate the agentic reputation substrate.
institutional-designrisk-and-incentivesscholarly-growth-coveragescholarly-literaturedeliberative-democracybinding-decisionsaccountability