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.

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