Affiliation:
1. Department of Political Science, University College London, London, UK
Abstract
Weber and Habermas have inspired many academic studies. However, the ideas of those two thinkers have not previously been brought together in an international deliberative context. This article allows the ideas of Weber to meet and interact with those of Habermas while studying deliberative quality at an international level. The study is applied to the International Maritime Organisation’s deliberations. Through the content analysis of 1175 speeches, the article arrives at significant results demonstrating the importance of bureaucratic quality for the deliberative performance of the International Maritime Organisation’s member states. The speeches are coded using an amended version of the discourse quality index coding scheme. An amended version of the discourse quality index is developed to make it more useful for an international institutional context. Following the coding process, the quantitative analysis and interview findings demonstrate that meritocratic recruitment and permanent representation both matter for the deliberative performance of the International Maritime Organisation’s member states.