Deliberative Democracy. Ian O'Flynn
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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