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limits of deliberative democracy? « Previous | |Next »
January 12, 2006

According to the advocates of deliberative democracy, citizens' participation in the democratic process has a rational character. Deliberative democracy explains the process of opinion and will-formation as a public discursive activity where citizens are engaged in argumentation that is aimed at promoting the more generalizable interests by the force of a better argument.

What has happened to freedom? Freedom to shape things? Freedom to decide between different policy options? Isn't discussion and debate a step in the process of arguing for this policy option rather than that? For more money to spent on health care as opposed to tax cuts for the wealthy? And that involves negotiating and deal making.

What has happened to power. It's rarely the case that the better argument wins the debate. People listen to your argument when you hold the balance of power in the Senate.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:54 PM | | Comments (5)
Comments

Comments

I think deliberative democracy is an industrial era response to impure democratic nature of representative systems. The Imagining Australia folks want a Deliberative Day (to replace the Queens Birthday).

I dont think it is a good idea. Civic involvement and education would be better served with sortitionists/ratifiers IMNSHO. We have the technology now (juries) and much of the population is as educated as a parliamentarian.

The world has moved to a systems mode of thought. Even terrorism is a systems repsonse to warfare. Sortitionists are more systems aware than deliberation days are.

Gary, It seems to me that Deliberative Democracy (DD)is an updated version of the Town Meetings that used to be an integral part of local politics in the New England states of the USA.

I also think it is a mistake to assume that freedom and DD are mutually exclusive. See for instance The Discipline of Community at:

1. www.dabase.net/disccomm.htm

John

But participatory deliberation is not the opposite of "freedom", i.e. human agency, but rather an "essential" and formative exercize of its capacities. It is not a matter of the imposition of a "general will" from above and behind, but rather a process of discovering a mutual and accountable freedom.

Nor is it purely a matter of abstract argument and generalization of "interests", but also of the concrete resolution of conflicts. "Unity" can not be achieved without differentiation, and the process affords the hope of a "higher" synthesis, while, if the rule of the majority is the ultimate criterion of decision-making, the participatory process and the recognitions and acknowledgements it generates and embodies sets limits on the scope of majority imposition, else the deliberative process and its legitimating effects can not be renewed.

Admittedly, the relation between the rational and the political is always a vexed one, and it's hard to imagine how direct participatory deliberation in a democratic/republican frame could be instituted within the vast functional complexity of modern societies. But, at least, as a micrological model, the notion can serve as an index and criterion for assessing extant political arrangements and processes, insofar as they inevitably deviate from the rational potential of the political and the struggle to achieve equal freedom and common justice.

Cameron,

Deliberative democracy makes a lot of sense of the processes of the Senate in the way that it reviews and improves legislation and pushes the limits of current public policy.

I see the process of deliberation as an important part of federalism---the states and the commonwealth, and the executive, parliament and judiciary--all debating one another.

But freedom to debate policy amongst citizens is not the same thing as freedom to make decisions and get outcomes that improve health care in one's region.

John C,
I agree that 'participatory deliberation is not the opposite of "freedom", i.e. human agency, but rather an "essential" and formative exercise of its capacities.

It strikes me though that our currently lived liberal democracies divide the polity into the political delberation between the political institutions (Congress,Parliament etc) and the deliberation within the local organizations and associations in civil society.

Yet a vital liberal democracy requires the local organizations and associations to mediate between the individual and the state.

It is that mediation between civil society and the state that is decaying, due to the atrophy of the local membership in the political parties.

So we have an atomized and unorganized mass in civil society that lacks rational freedom and autonomy as self-determination in a political sense.