Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative Democracy
From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 11.1
Deliberative democracy has a distinctly different justification than either competitive or participatory models, and has gained a lot of attention among political scientists in the past several decades. While its roots trace back to Aristotle and Athens, the modern theory gained prominence due to philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. These theories placed an exceptional prerequisite of mindset on the participants. The presumption is that they come as political equals with prior policy preferences, and present arguments that a reasonable person might accept, while also being open to changing their own opinions on the subject based on counter-arguments. Deliberation is a very specific sort of dialog in which equals seek to come to a collective decision without coercion. It is a discussion or debate in which the participants, ideally, remain open to persuasion, and involves a carefully organized giving and weighing of arguments. Thus, deliberative democracy embraces competition about ideas, as distinct from competition about power.
A deliberative representative democracy that is not tied to competition for power through elections is a possibility. Competitive democracy is ultimately about math – whoever has the most votes wins, and gets their way (though, depending on voting rules, it isn’t actually quite so simple). According to two of deliberative democracy’s foremost contemporary proponents, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, it is about public reason and justification for policies that could “be accepted by free and equal persons seeking fair terms of cooperation.” While some deliberative theorists, such as Jürgen Habermas, have suggested that the “unforced force of the better argument” can ideally lead to consensus, the realistic objective is fair consideration of different views regardless of whether it moves in the direction of consensus. In some cases, deliberation may actually lead to increased polarization rather than consensus. Because consensual compromise is far from certain, deliberative democracy must also incorporate some kind of voting, at least within the deliberative bodies.
Deliberative democracy has plenty of critics. An obvious criticism is the charge of unrealistic utopianism. It seems to expect too much in the way of civic-mindedness from its citizens, while glossing over human selfishness. Ilya Somin wrote:
“Advocates of ‘deliberative democracy’ want citizens to actively participate in serious dialogue over political issues, not merely go to the polls every few years. Unfortunately, these ideals don’t take into account widespread political ignorance and irrationality. Most voters neither attain the level of knowledge needed to make deliberative democracy work, nor do they rationally evaluate the political information they do possess. The vast size and complexity of modern government make it unlikely that most citizens can ever reach the levels of knowledge and rationality required by deliberative democracy, even if they were better informed than they are at present.”
Judge Richard Posner, endorses the Schumpeterian elite-domination view of “democracy” as both realistic, but also superior to the deliberative notion of democracy. In his book, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, Posner dismisses the notion of deliberative democracy as quixotic at best. He says U.S. citizens
“have little appetite for abstractions and little time and less inclination to devote substantial time to training themselves to become informed and public-spirited voters.”
Even setting aside the notion that deliberation should be a widespread practice throughout the citizenry, Posner still rejects deliberation as the heart of what elected representatives should do. Deliberative democracy
“hopelessly exaggerates the moral and intellectual capacities, both actual and potential, not only of the average person but also of the average official.” …
“It asks too much of representatives, in particular in asking them to set aside career imperatives and other tugs of self-interest.”
Indeed, true democratic deliberation is sadly absent within elected chambers in most policy domains.
Defenders of deliberative democracy, such as Mark E. Warren, contend that
“deliberative approaches to collective decisions under conditions of conflict produce better decisions than those resulting from alternative means of conducting politics: coercion, traditional deference, or markets. The decisions resulting from deliberation are likely to be more legitimate, more reasonable, more informed, more effective, and more politically viable.”
Many contemporary advocates of what they call “deliberative democracy” have shifted the focus from having society-wide deliberation with opponents giving arguments for their position, to having microcosms of participants coming together without pre-established positions on policy questions. Participants engage in learning, hearing arguments from advocates for and against positions, and then adopt a position as a group.
In the previous chapter I mentioned that many sortition advocates see it as primarily a form of participatory democracy, because it brings everyday people into decision making. However, even more advocates refer to it as fundamentally a reform of deliberative democracy. However, it seems these advocates are effectively reapplying the term coined by twentieth century philosophers to a different system – one that employs deliberation, but not the mass-based-justification-argument-between-opponents concept originally put forth by Rawls and Habermas. That term is undergoing a redefinition (in activist parlance, if not philosophy journals) to now mean democracy using a large number of deliberative mini-publics.
Cristina Lafont, is an ardent advocate of mass participatory form of deliberative democracy.1 In a Journal of Political Philosophy article she insists that any move towards deliberative democracy must include the general population in deliberation and increase political involvement of all citizens. Lafont argues that the normative goals of (the philosopher’s concept of) deliberative democracy precludes decision-making mini-publics.
“In particular, any uses that may weaken the feedback loop between political decision-making and actual deliberation in the broader public sphere ought to be rejected.”
She asserts in her more recent book, Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy , that allowing a sortition body to make final decisions is illegitimate, or “quintessentially opposed to the ideal of self-government,” because it expects citizens to “blindly defer” to an “elite” of randomly selected people.
Lafont, notes that a citizen, who was not selected by lot, might agree with the minority voters in a citizens’ assembly, rather than the majority – so, why blindly follow the majority of mini-public? Interestingly, she doesn’t ask why that citizen should “blindly defer” to decisions of the majority of an elected chamber, when the citizen may well have voted against their nominal “representative.” She only offers the weak tea of reducing the influence of money in elections, media, and political parties. Elections are so ingrained in modern governance, that this attitude is common. Hervé Pourtois writes that reformers should focus on “how we might increase the deliberative character of electoral democracy.”
These philosophers believe mini-publics are only useful if they can somehow promote deliberation in the general public. This vision may be possible for a few high-visibility issues, which she assumes would be the only issues to prompt the use of mini-publics. Indeed, this is exactly what is done with the Oregon Citizens Initiative Review law, in which a small randomly selected group of citizens review a select ballot referendum question and report their assessment in the Voters’ Pamphlet, distributed to all voters by the Secretary of State. But with thousands of public policy decisions being made at the local, state, and national level, engaging the general population on more than a tiny fraction of them is clearly an impossibility. Because of rational ignorance (each voter having de minimis impact due to the mass of other people), as Posner writes, it is fantasy to hope that the bulk of the population will have the “appetite… time… [or] inclination” to devote the necessary effort. Thus, delegation to representatives is essential for the vast majority of public policy decisions. The question is, what sort of people these representatives should be, and whether elections or lottery create a more representative and less corrupt body.
While, Lafont believes sortition bodies that shape or decide public policies would be illegitimate due to this “blind deferral”, James Fishkin, the inventor of deliberative polling, responds that:
“To accept the result from such an institution, should one exist, is not to follow others “blindly” but on the basis of articulated reasons which have been weighed against other articulated reasons in a process that represents everyone and in which you can see your viewpoints and interests represented. If such institutions were to become commonplace, I believe they would acquire empirical (psychological and sociological) legitimacy as people came to understand them by participating in them.”
The key feature of sortition that makes it a workable means of supporting both participatory and deliberative democracy, which is also epistemically superior, is that it does not ask all citizens to participate in deliberation all the time, but for focused periods of time – sequentially – in a manner that facilitates informed, deliberative, and representative decision-making. As I will discuss in later chapters, it is possible to institutionalize sortition in such a manner that huge numbers of short duration panels are used, each dealing with distinct policy matters, thus allowing nearly all citizens to directly participate in “ruling” at various points in time. I agree with Barber's recommendation for a democracy where “all of the people can participate some of the time in some of the responsibilities of governing.” This can empower the people as a whole to rule. But simply replacing elected legislators with randomly selected lawmakers within a legislative body that functions in a similar fashion, would be a monumental mistake (and actualize Lafont’s allegation of a new random elite.) As I have written elsewhere sortitional democracy requires an entirely new multi-body design. This form of sortition negates the calculus used by the critics of deliberative democracy.
She earned her PhD in philosophy, under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas.