Abstract

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 to have opportunity to participate freely and legitimately in producing collective decisions to issues that concern them. This paper first reviewed and analyzed the literature of deliberative democracy and women’s empowerment, and the current status of deliberative democracy practice in Taiwan. Secondly, the author examined women’s personality traits corresponding 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 are more interested in people-oriented activities and occupations. Women were also reported to have higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men. This article advocates reciprocity theory of deliberative democracy which corresponds with women’s personality traits of extraversion, warmth, agreeableness, tender-mindedness and altruism; discursive theory corresponding with sociability and narrative; and also procedure theory correlating to conscientiousness.