Deliberation and protest: a closer look at social fora dynamics.

The paper focuses on two key domains: the psychosocial dynamics of protest in socialmovements and deliberative democracy theory and practice. Explorative research on an ItalianSocial Forum has been carried out, aimed at: a) verifying the consistency and the correspondence between the construct of deliberative democracy and the interactive functioning of social fora; b) probing the factors underlying the “social psychology of protest” (Klandermans, 1997); c)integrating the two domains at an empirical level. Results lack generalization but provide usefulindications to renew the theoretical assumptions concerning the psychosocial processes involved indeliberative interaction and protest.