Deliberative democracy

Deliberative democracy, also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term used by some political theorists, to refer to any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional economics-based theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry.

The term "deliberative democracy" was originally coined by Joseph M. Bessette, in "Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government," in 1980, and he subsequently elaborated and defended the notion in "The Mild Voice of Reason" (1994). Others contributing to the notion of deliberative democracy include Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, John Rawls, Amy Gutmann, James Fishkin, Dennis Thompson, and Seyla Benhabib.

Cohen's outline

Joshua Cohen, a student of Rawls, most clearly outlined some conditions that he thinks constitutes the root principles of the theory of deliberative democracy in the article "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy" in the book The Good Polity. He outlines 5 main features of deliberative democracy, which include:

• An ongoing independent association with expected continuation
• The citizens in the democracy structure their institutions such that deliberation is the deciding factor in their creation and that they allow deliberation to continue.
• A commitment to the respect of a pluralism of values and aims within the polity.
• The participants in the democracy regard deliberative procedure as the source of legitimacy and as such they also prefer those causal histories of legitimation for each law be transparent, and easily traceable back to the deliberative process.
• Each member and all members recognize and respect each others' having deliberative capacity
  • this can be construed as the fact that in a deliberative democracy, we "owe" one another, in the legislative process, reasons.

Cohen also goes further than deliberative democracy as a theory of legitimacy and forms a body of substantive rights around it based on achieving "ideal deliberation":

1. It is free in two ways:
   1. The participants regard themselves as bound solely by the results and preconditions of the deliberation. They are free from any authority of prior norms or requirements.
   2. The participants suppose that they can act on the decision made, the decision through deliberation is a sufficient reason for compliance with it.
2. It is reasoned: parties to deliberation are required to state reasons for proposals, and proposals are accepted or rejected based on the reasons given, as the content of the very deliberation taking place.
3. Participants are equal in two ways:
   1. Formal — anyone can put forth proposals, criticize, and support measures. There is no substantive hierarchy.
   2. Substantive — The participants are not limited or bound by certain distributions of power, resources, or pre-existing norms. "The participants…do not regard themselves as bound by the existing system of rights, except insofar as that system establishes the framework of free deliberation among equals."
4. Deliberation aims at a rationally motivated consensus: it aims to find reasons acceptable to all who are committed to such a system of decision-making. When consensus or something near enough is not possible, majoritarian decision making is utilized.

Association with political movements

Deliberative democracy is usually associated with left-wing politics and often recognizes a conflict of interest between the citizen participating, those affected or victimized by the process being undertaken, and the group-entity that organizes the decision. Thus it usually involves an extensive outreach effort to include marginalized, isolated, ignored groups in decisions, and to extensively document dissent, grounds for dissent, and future predictions of consequences of actions. It focuses as much on the process as the results. In this form it is a complete theory of civics.

The Green Party of the United States refers to its particular proposals for grassroots democracy and electoral reform by this name.

On the other hand, many practitioners of deliberative democracy attempt to be as neutral and open-ended as possible, inviting (or even randomly selecting) people who represent a wide range of views and providing them with balanced materials to guide their discussions. Examples include National Issues Forums, Choices for the 21st Century, Study Circles, Deliberative Polls, and the 21st-Century Town meetings convened by AmericaSpeaks, among others. In these cases, deliberative democracy is not connected to left-wing politics but is intended to create a conversation among people of different philosophies and beliefs.

Strengths and weaknesses

A claimed strength of deliberative democratic models is that they are more easily able to incorporate scientific opinion and base policy on outputs of ongoing research, because:

• time is given for all participants to understand and discuss the science
• scientific peer review, adversarial presentation of competing arguments, refereed journals, even betting markets, are also deliberative processes.
• the technology used to record dissent and document opinions opposed to the majority is also useful to notarize bets, predictions and claims.

According to the proponents, another strength of deliberative democratic models is that they tend, more than any other model, to generate ideal conditions of impartiality, rationality and knowledge of the relevant facts. The more these conditions are fulfilled, the greater the likelihood that the decisions reached are the morally right ones. Deliberative democracy has thus an epistemic value: it allows participants to know the moral good. This view has been prominently held by Carlos Nino.

A failure of most theories of deliberative democracy is that they do not address the problems of voting. James Fishkin's 1991 work, "Democracy and Deliberation" introduced a concrete way to apply the theory of deliberative democracy to real-world decision making, by way of what he calls the Deliberative opinion poll. In the deliberative opinion poll, a statistically representative sample of the nation or a community is gathered to discuss an issue in conditions that further deliberation. The group is then polled, and the results of the poll and the actual deliberation can be used both as a recommending force and in certain circumstances, to replace a vote. Dozens of deliberative opinion polls have been conducted across the United States since his book was published.

The political philosopher Charles Blattberg has criticized deliberative democracy on four grounds: (i) the rules for deliberation that deliberative theorists affirm interfere with, rather than facilitate, good practical reasoning; (ii) deliberative democracy is ideologically biased in favor of liberalism as well as republican over parliamentary democratic systems; (iii) deliberative democrats assert a too-sharp division between just and rational deliberation on the one hand and self-interested and coercive bargaining or negotiation on the other; (iv) and deliberative democrats encourage an adversarial relationship between state and society, one that undermines solidarity between citizens.

Social choice theory presents deliberative democracy with a distinct challenge. Critics of deliberative democracy have pointed to Arrow's impossibility theorem as limiting the use of deliberative democracy. Deliberative theorists (in particular Christian List/ cf. http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/ ) have responded with a recent body of research in support of the claim that deliberation actually makes the conditions necessary for Arrow's Theorem to apply less likely.

See also

• Anticipatory exclusion
• AmericaSpeaks
• Consensus
• Consensus democracy
• Democracy (varieties)
• Green parties
• List of politics-related topics
• Meritocracy
• Online deliberation
• Ralph Nader's Concord Principles

References

• Blattberg, C., "Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 155-74. New version available online.
• Elster, Jon (ed). (1998) Deliberative Democracy. Table of Contents
• Nino, C. S. (1996)The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. [ISBN 0-300-07727-0]
• Steenhuis, Quinten. (2004) "The Deliberative Opinion Poll: Promises and Challenges". Carnegie Mellon University. Unpublished thesis. Available Online
• Cohen, J. (1989) "Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Legitimacy," from Hamlin, A. and Pettit, P. (eds), The Good Polity. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 17–34
• Bessette, Joseph (1980) "Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government," in How Democractic is the Constitution?, Washington, D.C., AEI Press. pp. 102–116.
• Bessette, Joseph, (1994) The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy & American National Government Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Talisse, Robert, (2004) Democracy after Liberalism Publisher: Routledge [ISBN 0-415-95019-8]

External links

• Center for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University
• Deliberative Democracy Consortium — A movement to promote Deliberative Democracy at the national level, internationally
• The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation — A hub for this growing community of practice, with hundreds of members and thousands of resources