Deliberative Democracy. Ian O'Flynn
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of collective choice and forms that aggregate non-deliberative preferences. … [T]he results of voting among those who are committed to finding reasons that are persuasive to all are likely to differ from the results of an aggregation that proceeds in the absence of this commitment.
To all of this, Cohen adds a further important condition: institutions that seek to mirror the ideal deliberative procedure should encourage a focus on the common good. Of course, the idea of the common good – that is, a good that is common to an entire society rather than to some particular section of it – is contentious (Mansbridge et al. 2010, 68). For some, the idea is not just vague and imprecise, but is also open to political manipulation (see Dahl 1989, ch. 20). Yet for Cohen, the hallmark of a common good is its being ‘acceptable to all who share the commitment to deliberation’ (1989, 23). So long as our decision procedures are deliberative – so long as they conform to the ideal deliberative procedure – the decisions that result have a good claim to be in the common good (cf. O’Flynn 2010).
In summary, then, Cohen thinks that an ideal deliberative procedure would treat people as free and equal, oblige them to give reasons for their views, emphasise the importance of the common good, and facilitate consensus. As I indicated above, these four criteria have remained central to the definitional question in deliberative theory ever since. Deliberative theorists disagree about how they should be specified (they are, after all, highly abstract). But they also disagree about whether or to what degree each criterion is necessary or desirable. In a nutshell, contrasting definitions have contested these ideas. Of course, there have been some attempts to assess the field and settle the matter of definition (e.g., Curato et al. 2017). But since deliberative democracy is, in the first instance, a normative theory – a theory that is at bottom evaluative – the worry is that these attempts may be read as little more than an attempt to impose a singular view.
In the next chapter, we will examine these deliberative differences in more detail.
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