Deliberative democracy

Given some scepticism of modern democracy, there have been various critiques and proposals for new models of democracy. One of these - one whose ideas have been very informative - is deliberative democracy. the idea of deliberative democracy is that the quality of the talking stage of democracy, rather than the decision-making procedures of democracy, is what is most important. Deliberative democracy has been developed and redeveloped by various influential academics, including Habermas, Cohen, Fishkin, Dryzek, Warren and others. In many cases they agree on what deliberative democracy looks like, and there are a few areas where there are some contested ideas.

I'm not going to try and describe the current academic consensus - or lack thereof - of deliberative democracy. My aim here is to outline some concepts from deliberative democracy that have been influential on my thinking. I'll go through some of the main points below.

Deliberation as legitimating

The most central thing about deliberative democracy is that the core of democracy is people talking to each other. Without good quality talking - that is, deliberation - whatever decision that people make will be of a lower quality.

One reason for this argument is that decision-making procedures such as votes can be configured in a variety of different ways. That means that the same people with the same interests and worldviews can end up with different answers because the decision-making procedure changed. If that's the case, how can we trust that the answer was really the right one? It would be more an artefact of procedure than something that represents the will of the people.

Even if there were only one voting procedure that made sense, deliberative theorists are still a bit sceptical. When people engage in a decision-making procedure such as voting, they think about what they want, and then they vote to try and have those interests served. So a vote is a way to collect together these different interests, and then formulate a way for one of them to win. Of course, there are some voting procedures that make it likely people will compromise with each other, but for deliberative theorists this isn't far from the same thing. Deliberation, rather than voting, is what makes the outcome an acceptable outcome.

Public, open and honest discussion

So what does good quality deliberation look like? It should be public, and people should go into it with honesty and an open mind. People should be ready to express their interests, but they should also be ready to listen to the interests of others. Primarily, they should be open to changing their mind.

There are a few factors of interest here. One is that deliberation should be public in some sense - that is, people should be ready to speak before the assembly. The idea here is that speaking to other people changes the way that we speak. When we speak to ourselves, we can skip over some steps of reasoning (whether on purpose or by accident), but when we talk to other people we are likely to be imagining what they will say and what questions they might ask (and if we don't, they are actually there to ask them). We are more likely to be honest, not just because whatever we say can be challenged, but because when we say it out loud we have to commit to it. One form of troubleshooting in programming is called "rubber duck debugging", where the programmer says, out loud to some pretend listener (such as a rubber duck), what each part of their code does. This is because people are more likely to be aware of what they are saying, to ensure they cover each step, to discover where they have fuzzed over some concept without thinking abou tit, when they say it out loud.

A second one is that when people get together and talk about things, such as what their policy interests are, they can collectively learn new information. It might be that a group of people, each with different interests, come together and talk and begin to realise that there is a more serious problem, or a more satisfying solution, than the ones they had walked into the room with. If people don't talk to each other and listen to each other - if they instead talk past each other and debate each other - these new ideas will be missed.

The force of reason

The logic of deliberative democracy is that if people go in with an open mind and being honest, they will change their mind if they hear a convincing argument. This is called the force of reason. In a modern competitive democracy, the assumption is that people are not likely to change their mind. One reason is that people are too loyal to their teams, and another is that representatives have made some sort of promise to their constituents about what they're going to do. Rather than changing their minds, these people are likely to change their votes, perhaps for some concession or compromise from another party.

If deliberation is truly going to find new answers that had not been considered before, it needs people who are willing to change their minds about what the problems and what the solutions are, and this means not clinging so tightly to their interests or their teams and being ready to listen to the arguments of others. Good deliberation isn't necessarily about people, but about ideas, and the good ideas should, to some extent, direct the people around.

Consensus

If the force of reason is powerful enough, then all the people in the deliberation should start to become convinced. If that happens, then the group will reach a consensus. Once a consensus is reached, the group no longer needs to make a decision. So deliberative democracy integrates the decision into the deliberation, rather than having it as a separate step at the end - a step that can frustrate and sabotage the quality of deliberation, because people know that the power is in the vote.

But when consensus is reached, it is superior to a decision-making procedure because all the parties involved are satisfied. A vote usually has a winning side and a losing side (or multiple losing sides), whereas a consensus only has winners. For deliberative theorists, the quality of deliberation doesn't just come up with new ideas, but it comes up with new ideas that are going to satisfy a larger group of people, including people who came together from places of disagreement.

Sortition

Now, people in parliaments can already have an open and honest discussion, where they are readt to change their minds, and they can already deliberate until they reach a consensus. But, typically, they don't. So what's getting in their way, and what different conditions are needed to get them to deliberate better?

One factor is party affiliation. Candidates are often loyal to parties because that's how they got their positions, so they are influenced by party structures and other party members. Another is the process of gaining office. Running for election is not a process of open-minded listening, but of trying to sell policy. Even when a representative is in parliament, they are thinking of their next campaign. Campaigns and parties interrupt the process of quality deliberation.

The solution, then, is to have neither of those things. These can be avoided by not having elections. The alternative process is that of sortition, or random selection. Members of the public would be selected randomly in the same way that a jury is selected, and they would be put into a room to talk about things. In fact, this sort of randomly selected group of deliberators is often called a "citizens' jury".

The idea is that people who do not have to campaign, who have not invested time and money into the process, who are less likely to be inner party members, who are not up for reelection, will have a better chance of being open-minded and honest and ready to change their minds. (And there is quite a bit of empirical evidence to suggest that this is true.)

No-power situations

The other condition that deliberative theorists aim for to create "ideal speech conditions" is to have a no-power situation. The idea is that if some people hold power over others, or if there is some power dynamic in play, then people will be incentivised to hold off on having an open and honest discussion because there is some other means to get their way. Or, if one group has a lot of power, others will put aside their openness and honestly in order to cooperate with them and at least get some concessions.

One thing I already noted was the vote - when the decision will be made with a vote at the end of the discussion, people can simply wait out the discussion and then use their power in the vote. So votes stop a deliberation from being a no-power situation. That's one of the reasons that deliberative theorists like consensus.

Another is any form of seniority, hierarchy, or social inequality. Parties have pretty clear hierarchies, and long-standing institutions (such as those where people are consistently re-elected) have forms of seniority. So, for deliberative theorists, these need to be chucked out as well. This is one of the reasons that deliberative theorists like sortition.

Given that a democratic body usually comes together to make binding decisions about things like laws, it can be pretty hard to make a deliberative body that has a no-power situation because the stakes are generally pretty high. There are some possible candidates, though, but these tend to be assemblies that don't make decisions, such as lifetime appointment houses of review whose job it is to scrutinise and report back on potential legislation rather than vote on the legislation itself.

Some difficulties

There are some pretty clear limitations about deliberative democracy, however. Consensus can take an exceptionally long time to achieve, if it's possible at all - and on some issues we can expect no consensus whatsoever. Or consensus could be fake; people could agree just so they can move on to the next thing.

It can also be hard to propose that it is genuinely representative, and that it is "the people" who are using the power. If the citizens' jury is selected by sortition, then to what extent do they represent the people? We could take some steps to ensure that people of different genders and ethnicities are included, but can we do a comprehensive enough survey to figure out that every interest and worldview is included? (By the way, theorists Dryzek and Niemeyer say yes.) And even if it is the case, will that ensure that people feel that they have been sufficiently involved? It could be quite paradoxical that people could feel more represented in a general election, where everyone votes but where the outcome doesn't reflect everyone's interests, than they do with a citizens' jury, where less people are involved by their interests are accounted for.

It's for these reasons that deliberative democracy is usually something that supplements modern democracy, rather than replaces it. Who sets the agenda, organises the sortition, formalises the results and gets them implemented? Deliberative democracy doesn't really forge a new path in this area, and instead it is left up to modern democracy to carry out these elements.

But is it democracy?

Just because it is called "deliberative democracy" doesn't mean it's actually democracy. We can name things anything we like. But does it fit the criteria for democracy, as much as they exist? It's missing a lot of elements: there are no votes or elections, candidates or campaigns. A democracy without elections can seem to some people to be absurd.

On the other hand, it does have several other features that a democracy should have: people coming to together to talk, people holding the power, collective decision-making, a principle of inclusion and equality. The core of the ideas are definitely democratic, even if the implementation is rather different.

At the very least, deliberative democracy provides an interesting challenge to what democracy is or what democracy can be, and it is an excellent starting point for thinking further about what other things could fall into the democratic category.