Deliberative Democracy

Ian O'Flynn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509523498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Today, deliberative democracy is the most widely discussed theory of democracy. Its proponents argue that important decisions of law and policy should ideally turn not on the force of numbers but on the force of the better argument. However, it continues to strike some as little more than wishful thinking.

In this new book, Ian O'Flynn examines how the concept has developed over recent decades, the family disagreements which have emerged, and the criticisms that have been levelled at it. Grappling with the familiar charge that ordinary people lack the motivation and capacity for meaningful deliberation, O'Flynn considers the example of deliberative polls and citizens' assemblies and critically assesses how such forums can fit within a broader democratic system. He then considers the implications of deliberative democracy for multicultural and multi-ethnic societies before turning to the prospects for the most ambitious deliberative project of all: global deliberative democracy.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of democratic theory, as well as anyone who is curious about the prospects for more rational decision-making in an age of populist passion.

1
Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy is a normative view about how democracies should be arranged – about how their basic institutions should be structured and about how their members should engage with one another when deciding important matters of law and public policy. In the words of Joshua Cohen:

The notion of a deliberative democracy is rooted in the intuitive ideal of a democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens. Citizens in such an order share a commitment to the resolution of problems of collective choice through public reasoning, and regard their basic institutions as legitimate in so far as they establish the framework for free public deliberation. (1989, 21)

Of course, no actually functioning democracy fully answers to this ideal. Arguably, none comes even close. But deliberative democrats believe that the ideal can and ought to be pursued. They contend that democracies can be reformed in more deliberative directions, and they have developed a range of different theories, or approaches, to that end. While deliberative democrats do not agree on every point, they do agree that democratic legitimacy should be rooted in deliberation. People should give reasons for their views, but they should be equally willing to listen with an open mind to what others have to say. At the end of the day, they may still have to vote to resolve the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved. But what they will be registering at that point is not their prior views and opinions but an enlarged or more encompassing point of view.

Deliberative democracy, then, is an approach to democracy that emphasizes the importance of deliberation. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, deliberation is ‘the action of thinking carefully about something, especially in order to reach a decision’. In a deliberative democracy, that action or activity is something that people do together as political equals. They give reasons for their views, and they seek to weigh those reasons equally in balance (Fishkin 2018, 21). In other words, they seek to assess them on their merits in an endeavour to arrive at an agreed judgement or a shared view. So described, what is genuinely interesting and challenging about deliberative democracy is not that people talk and argue with one another, but that they genuinely attempt to discuss with one another, seeking out ‘considerations capable of determining the intellect’, to use John Stuart Mill’s ([1871] 2007, 4) phrase. This is obviously a demanding standard – one we will return to repeatedly throughout this book. But at this early juncture, it is worth noting that deliberative democracy is not a new idea.

For instance, writing in 1788 in defence of the newly drafted United States Constitution, James Madison famously argued that new structures for governing the nation were needed not just to contain the perils of political faction, but to enable ‘the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest’ to prevail over ‘the clamours of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain’ (Shapiro 2009, 216). The degree to which the constitution championed by Madison has succeeded in turning American national government into a deliberative democracy is a moot point (Bessette 1994, 3). At the time of writing, Donald Trump has just been voted out of office and the prospects for a more deliberative democracy are once again improving. However, powerful factions continue to push their own narrow agendas, while many at the margins of society are still being denied a genuine voice. Of course, the United States is hardly unique in these respects. Right around the world, there are many national leaders who favour populist rhetoric over the mild voice of reason. The failure to curtail the spread of misinformation on social media is deeply troubling, as is the failure to properly regulate social media companies themselves. Yet while the challenges are certainly great, deliberative democracy is itself a powerful intellectual movement.

Today, deliberative democracy is central to theoretical discussions of the meaning and value of democracy and it is also a vibrant object of empirical concern. As such, it features prominently in a range of different academic fields, including (though certainly not limited to) political philosophy, political science, international relations, legal theory, comparative politics, public administration, political psychology, environmental politics, political sociology, planning and policy analysis (Kuyper 2018). Ideas drawn from these bodies of literature have been influential in parliamentary committees, regulatory bodies, and public corporations. They have also been influential at various points in public administration, in such fields as priority-setting in health care, decisions on land-use planning and establishing environmental standards. And they have also been influential in arguments about governmental reform more generally, including electoral system reform and the reform of second chambers (see, e.g., Beswick and Elstub 2019; James 2004; Parkinson 2007).

In mass democracies, legislative decision-making will inevitably take centre stage – a fact reflected in a great deal of early writing on deliberative democracy (e.g., Bessette 1994; Uhr 1998; Steiner et al. 2004). However, deliberative ideals have also inspired a worldwide movement of activists and practitioners concerned to improve the quality of democracy ‘from the bottom up’ (cf. della Porta 2013; Drake 2021). Some of these activists and practitioners may not have come across the term ‘deliberative democracy’ as such. Moreover, their goals may be very different. The climate change movement is not the same as the feminist movement; the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is not the same as the Araucanía Movement in Chile; the Black Lives Matter movement is not the same as the Los Indignados movement in Spain; and so on. But what unites them is the belief that governments should pay attention to what ordinary people have to say and give reasons for their decisions that any reasonable person could be expected to endorse (cf. Holdo 2019; Nummi et al. 2019).

Even so, the lingering suspicion is that deliberative democracy is unrealistic – perhaps utopian. According to some critics, deliberative democrats fail to appreciate what politics is all about; according to others, they fail to appreciate what people are really like. It must be obvious that the shift from (deliberative) theory to (deliberative) practice would require not just a fundamental restructuring of many long-established democratic norms and institutions – for example, the view that democracy is best understood in terms of majority rule, or the view that politics is best understood in terms of a competition for scarce resources – but a concomitant change of political mindset. Critics doubt that change on this scale is actually possible; some doubt that it is even desirable.

Two basic criticisms

To get a sense of what is at issue here, let us begin by considering Michael Walzer’s claim that democratic societies would be ill-advised to overemphasize the importance of deliberation or to seek to make it central to their understanding of democracy. Yes, we should make some room for deliberation, but only, he contends, ‘in the larger space that we provide for more properly political activities’ (1999, 68). Walzer’s list of ‘properly political activities’ includes organizing, mobilizing, demonstrating, debating, lobbying, bargaining, fundraising, campaigning and voting. Each of these activities may involve deliberation, but none of them is fundamentally deliberative – which, in Walzer’s view, is probably just as well.

Take, for example, bargaining. The parties to a bargain may each want to reach an agreement that is fair, and they may agree to deliberate together about what would be fair. But in bargaining, the parties do not focus on the merits of the case (Barry [1965] 2011, 86–8). While they may seek an outcome that is fair to all sides, they do not think of themselves as engaged in a shared endeavour to arrive at an agreed judgement. In a bargain, one party does not try to convince the other party that the better arguments are on its side. Rather, it tries to convince the other party of the advantages that will accrue to it if it accepts the terms that it is offering. In the words of Adam Smith: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages’ ([1776] 1976, 27). Assuming that both parties are equally free to walk away from the negotiation table, a bargain will be reached only when each of them considers it advantageous to do so (O’Flynn 2015, 210–11).

Or consider debating. In ordinary usage, the term is often treated as a synonym for deliberation. And in practice the two may easily feature within the same communicative or discursive process. But while, for example, party leaders participating in televised debates at election time do give reasons for their policies – reasons they seek to impress upon a broader audience – they do not listen to one another with an open mind or seek to arrive together at an agreed judgement (cf. Davidson et al. 2017). As Walzer puts it: ‘A debate is a contest between verbal athletes, and the aim is victory. The means are the exercise of rhetorical skill, the mustering of favourable evidence (and the suppression of unfavourable evidence), the discrediting of the other debaters, the appeal to celebrity, and so on’ (1999, 61). So, while both deliberation and debating are forms of communication, and while both involve an exchange of reasons, the aim in each case is different. In deliberation, the aim is an agreed judgement or a shared view, while in debating the aim is to win the audience over to your cause – as often as not, through point scoring and the selective use of information.

Now, Walzer’s point is not just that deliberation is often the junior partner in political life, but that it should probably remain so. We should refrain from treating it as a properly political activity in its own right and, by extension, from treating it as central to our conception of democracy (cf. Gutmann and Thompson 1999, 255). As Walzer defines it, deliberation denotes ‘a particular way of thinking: quiet, reflective, open to a wide range of evidence, respectful of different views’ (1999, 58). So described, it seems more suited to the academic seminar or, better, jury room than to the cut-and-thrust of daily politics (1999, 62). For obvious reasons, we expect the members of a jury to be impartial or disinterested; we expect them to carefully weigh up the available evidence, to seriously consider alternative possibilities, and to focus their attention solely on reaching the correct verdict. However, political life is very different. It is, in Walzer’s view, marked by the ‘permanence of conflict’ and, as part of that, by the perpetual struggle for ‘wealth and power’ (1999, 67). It is about interests, identity and ideology, and the ‘endless’ struggle for control.

For Walzer, then, the problem with deliberative democracy is that it is out of kilter with political reality. While we should make room for deliberation, we should be careful not to allow it to distract us from those other ‘properly political’ activities that (he believes) can really make a difference to our lives. For instance, in a world dominated by powerful interest groups, what ordinary people really need to do is to organize, to pool their resources, to mobilize, to demonstrate, to campaign, to vote in consort etc. (1999, 68–9). For ‘while legitimacy is strengthened if good arguments can be made about the substantive issues at stake, the victory is rarely won by making good arguments’ (1999, 66).

This first line of criticism allows that deliberation can have a role, albeit a subordinate one. However, a second, much-discussed line of criticism doubts even this. On a deliberative conception of democracy, people do not try to impose their views on one another, for example, through strategic voting (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 3). Instead, each side tries to convince the other that the better arguments are on its side. To that end, they engage in an exchange of reasons (and other relevant considerations) in the hope of arriving at a shared view or an agreed judgement on what needs to be done. In reality, of course, we should not expect deliberation to be completely clean; it may be intermixed with partisanship, prejudice, hyperbole, ulterior motives, etc. But the basic idea remains that of decision on the merits of the case – what ultimately matters is the soundness of the reasons that we give for our decisions (Barry [1965] 2011, 87–8).

The worry is, however, that ordinary people may lack the motivation and the capacity for meaningful deliberation. Deliberation requires us to spell out the reasons for our views and to listen with an open mind to what others have to say. But since each voice is but one among many, ordinary people may have no real incentive to spend the time that careful reasoning requires, including the time to become sufficiently informed (Lupia 2016). Granted, much will depend on the nature of the topic and the context. The members of a local environmental group may be factually knowledgeable and politically vocal. But on issues of broader national significance, especially when those issues involve highly technical considerations, the average person’s motivation to learn new information and seek out opportunities to shape public discussion is likely to be very low (see Downs 1957; Olson 1965).

Even if the problem of motivation could be overcome, the problem of capacity might still persist. Deliberation is exacting; it requires time and effort. Among other things, it also requires a capacity for impartial or objective judgement (see Neblo 2015, 92; O’Flynn and Setälä 2020, 3). Yet we know from the political psychology literature that people are prone to letting their emotions get the better of their critical faculties. People are naturally biased towards information that confirms their prior views and tend to discount or dismiss information that challenges those views – especially when the issue under discussion bears on their personal happiness or wellbeing (see, e.g., Kahneman et al. 1982; Kunda 1990). For instance, people may deny new scientific information about climate change if that evidence does not sit comfortably with their existing way of life. After all, accepting the reality of climate change portends unpleasant environmental consequences and would require most people to make significant changes to their daily routines and larger worldview.

In short, people may fail to reason as we think they should when confronted by information that is contradictory and unsettling. In order to avoid ‘cognitive dissonance’, they may, in effect, unconsciously seek to deceive themselves. Far from keeping an open mind or being responsive to ‘the strength of the better argument’, in Jürgen Habermas’s (1984, 25) celebrated phrase, people may instead engage in ‘group think’ or ‘tribal’ or identity politics. On some accounts, people are prone to irrationalism. For instance, Achen and Bartels (2016, 116–45) point to evidence of blind retrospection – the fact that voters punish elected leaders for droughts, floods and even shark attacks, that is, for events that are way beyond anyone’s control.

Normative theory and empirical research

Deliberative democrats are alive to these other related criticisms. Indeed, it is probably no exaggeration to say that almost everything that has been written about deliberative democracy since the late twentieth century has been in response to them (at least to some degree). Whether that betrays a certain insecurity on the part of deliberative democrats or a courageous willingness to fight their corner is an interesting question. While this present book can also be read as a response to deliberative democracy’s critics – explicitly or implicitly, the two objections just discussed will reappear at multiple points throughout the text – there is one crucially important point to reinforce.

As already noted, deliberative democracy is a normative ideal. The term also refers to a range of theories about how this ideal might be pursued. There are some important differences between these theories – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Deliberative Democracy
• 2 Deliberative Differences
• 3 Deliberative Mini-Publics
• 4 Deliberative Systems
• 5 Pluralism and Deliberative Democracy
• 6 Global Deliberative Democracy?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement