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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Political Profiles Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Today, deliberative democracy is the most widely discussed theory of democracy. Its proponents argue that important decisions of law and policy should ideally turn not on the force of numbers but on the force of the better argument. However, it continues to strike some as little more than wishful thinking.
In this new book, Ian O’Flynn examines how the concept has developed over recent decades, the family disagreements which have emerged, and the criticisms that have been levelled at it. Grappling with the familiar charge that ordinary people lack the motivation and capacity for meaningful deliberation, O’Flynn considers the example of deliberative polls and citizens’ assemblies and critically assesses how such forums can fit within a broader democratic system. He then considers the implications of deliberative democracy for multicultural and multi-ethnic societies before turning to the prospects for the most ambitious deliberative project of all: global deliberative democracy.
This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of democratic theory, as well as anyone who is curious about the prospects for more rational decision-making in an age of populist passion.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface and Acknowledgements
Dedication
1 Deliberative Democracy
Two basic criticisms
Normative theory and empirical research
Origins and revival
What is deliberative democracy?
2 Deliberative Differences
Freedom and equality
Reason-giving
Consensus
The common good
3 Deliberative Mini-Publics
Why mini-publics?
Design issues
Inclusion
Participation
Information
Decision-making
Agenda
And what else?
4 Deliberative Systems
Habermas’s two-track model
Systemic rights and wrongs
Warren’s problem-based approach
5 Pluralism and Deliberative Democracy
Pluralism
s
Public reason and its critics
Democracy in divided societies
6 Global Deliberative Democracy?
Political cosmopolitanism
Rawls’s law of peoples
Habermas’s postnational constellation
Dryzek’s contest of discourses
Some brief concluding thoughts
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: Three types of mini-public
Chapter 6
Table 6.1: Global deliberation or global deliberative democracy?
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Key Concepts in Political Theory series
Charles Jones and Richard Vernon,
Patriotism
Roger Griffin,
Fascism
Peter J. Steinberger,
Political Judgment
Fabian Wendt,
Authority
Eric Mack,
Libertarianism
Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh,
Citizenship
Peter Lamb,
Socialism
Benjamin Moffitt,
Populism
Mark Stephen Jendrysik,
Utopia
David D. Roberts,
Totalitarianism
Peter Lamb,
Property
Carissa Honeywell,
Anarchism
Matteo Bonotti and Jonathan Seglow,
Free Speech
Ian O’Flynn,
Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative Democracy
Ian O’Flynn
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Ian O’Flynn 2022
The right of Ian O’Flynn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2345-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2346-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Preface and Acknowledgements
When Polity’s George Owers asked me to write this book, I was both pleased and excited. Having worked on deliberative democracy for more than twenty years, I saw it as an ideal opportunity to set down on paper some of the many things that I had learned. It was a chance both to organize my own thinking and, I hoped, to lend some renewed clarity to the field. On the other hand, the thought of evaluating a field as large, diverse and, in many important respects, contentious as deliberative democracy struck me as a daunting prospect. Important new articles seem to be published on an almost daily basis, while major books appear with frightening regularity. Of course, this is simply a reflection of the richness of the field – the vibrancy of the topic, its capacity to excite and, deep down, the sense that the world would be a much better place if only it were more like deliberative democracy. The problem that I faced, however, was what to include and what to set aside.
In the first instance, this book is about the concept of deliberative democracy and the many different ways in which the concept has been understood. It is, more specifically, about deliberative democracy as a normative project – a project concerned with evaluating existing democratic institutions and practices and proposals for their reform. It almost goes without saying that normative claims imply empirical questions, some of which are discussed in this book. However, the book is principally located in the broader field of political theory (or, if one prefers, political philosophy).
Of course, political theorists disagree among themselves about the nature, scope and purpose of deliberative democracy. My view is that deliberative democracy is essentially concerned with the question of political legitimacy. It is concerned with the process or processes by which governments acquire the right or authority to make decisions that are binding on us all. On a deliberative view, what matters is not that people talk and argue with one another, but that they genuinely attempt to discuss with one another, seeking out reasons and considerations that are in principle acceptable to all. Granted, in modern mass democracies, the idea that elections should be free and fair is also an important part of the story. But ultimately what matters is meaningful public discussion about the important decisions of the day. Some deliberative democrats shy away from the emphasis on decision-making. Some are more concerned with democratic deliberation (even if that has little direct bearing on governmental decision-making or occurs in nondemocratic political settings) than with deliberative democracy as I have just described it. Yet while these alternative perspectives do appear at points throughout the book, they are not central to it. They are not central because, in my view, our guiding concern should be the legitimacy of the decisions that governments make in our name.
I should also say that, while the book is about the concept of deliberative democracy, it seemed to me essential to engage with the major figures in the field. No serious book on deliberative democracy could fail to engage with the works of both Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Nor could it fail to engage with the works of thinkers such as Joshua Cohen, John Dryzek, Robert Goodin, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, James Fishkin, Jane Mansbridge and Mark Warren. Certainly, there are many other important thinkers in the field, but the choice of these thinkers needed little or no justification.
In preparing this book, I have received a great deal of help and support. First and foremost, I must thank my colleague, Peter Jones, for many years of discussion on these and other related philosophical topics. I must also thank Albert Weale for all his years of generous mentorship and support. I am grateful to Jane Mansbridge for extensive comments on the original proposal. I also received helpful comments on the proposal from two anonymous referees. For comments on the entire manuscript, I must thank George Owers, whom I must also thank for commissioning the book in the first place, as well as Polity’s three anonymous readers. The readers were both insightful and encouraging, and the book is certainly all the better for having been put through the review process. For comments on individual chapters, I wish to thank André Bächtiger, Ron Levy, William Smith and Albert Weale. Directly or indirectly, the book has also benefitted from discussions at various points over the years with Emmanuel Ani, Richard Bellamy, Didier Caluwaerts, Manlio Cinalli, Nicole Curato, John Drzyek, Stephen Elstub, Selen Ercan, Oliver Escobar, Andrea Felicetti, James Fishkin, Matteo Gianni, Robert Goodin, Marco Guigni, Marit Hammond, Clodagh Harris, Hoi Kong, Ian Johnson, Andrew Knops, Jonathan Kuyper, Ruth Lightbody, Robert Luskin, Peter McLaverty, Michael Morrell, Simon Niemeyer, Tony O’Connor, Shane O’Neill, John Parkinson, Vijayendra Rao, Stefan Rummens, David Russell, Victor Sanchez-Mazas, Jensen Sass, Maija Setälä, Gaurav Sood, Ana Tanasoca, Paul Vittles, Mark Warren and Marta Wojciechowska.
I owe the biggest thanks of all to my family. Writing this book was an arduous task and it would not have been possible without their encouragement and support. All too often, I worked on the book when I really should have been with them. For that I am sorry. This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my wife Laura and our two wonderful children, Isla (aged six) and Tom (aged four).
Dedication
For Laura, Isla and Tom
1Deliberative 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.
Two basic criticisms
To 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 be read as a response to deliberative democracy’s critics – explicitly or implicitly, the two objections just discussed will reappear at multiple points throughout the text – there is one crucially important point to reinforce.
As already noted, deliberative democracy is a normative ideal. The term also refers to a range of theories about how this ideal might be pursued. There are some important differences between these theories – for example, as we will see in Chapter 2, there are different views on what should count as a genuine exchange of reasons. Yet, at bottom, they share the view that democracies can be legitimated by grounding the exercise of political power in the deliberation of their members. Or, as Cohen puts it, ‘outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals’ (1989, 22). The word ‘could’ is important here. Deliberative democrats accept that collective decisions are usually taken by legislative bodies. The crucial question or test, though, is whether those decisions are based on reasons that free and equal citizens could reasonably be expected to endorse (Rawls 1997). The actual world may fall short of the ideal. Legislators may fail to deliberate and ordinary people may fail to pay attention. Institutions may fail to provide the right incentives or impose the necessary sanctions. Nevertheless, the point of the ideal is to provide direction.
Although deliberative democracy is a normative ideal or theory, we do have some variable evidence that deliberative norms exist to some degree in some democratic systems. (They can also be found in nondemocratic systems, but since the concern in this book is with deliberative democracy, those cases can be set aside for now; see, e.g., He and Warren 2011). In recent years, scholars have spent a great deal of time and effort thinking about how deliberative democracy might be empirically measured and assessed, and have already produced an impressive body of findings. Arguably, the best-known measurement instrument is the ‘discourse quality index’ (Steenbergen et al. 2003; Steiner et al. 2004). This index is compiled or computed from a range of individual measures (e.g., questions about the degree to which a claim or statement is well reasoned, respectful or constructive, along with the degree to which it addresses the common good) and, in its original formulation, was used to analyse and compare levels of deliberation in different parliamentary systems. Evidence gathered in this way suggests that (overall) levels of deliberation are likely to be higher in consensus systems with low party discipline and credible veto points than in adversarial systems with high party discipline and no veto points (Steiner et al. 2004, 111–14). It is also likely to be higher in parliamentary settings that are open to the public than in parliamentary committee meetings that are held behind closed doors (Steiner et al. 2004, 128–31).
Empirical evidence is obviously important to any normative project. As Robert Goodin puts it, we ‘choose policies [or institutions] hoping to produce certain kinds of results, and we must know how the system is wired in order to know which lever to pull’ (1982, 4). In other words, if we want to improve our democracies, we must have some idea of what is likely to work in practice and what is not. Empirical research is pivotal in this respect. But that is not all. In an important essay on the relationship between deliberative democracy theory and empirical political science, Dennis Thompson (2008, 511–13) draws our attention to the ways in which empirical research can expose tensions within a normative democratic theory, and in particular between its core values, that otherwise might not be obvious. For instance, deliberative democracy supposes that everyone should have their say. This might lead one to ask: how can deliberative democracy exist in the real world? Usually, this question is framed as ‘the problem of scale’ (e.g., Parkinson 2003): how can modern mass democracies be deliberative without excluding most people from the deliberative arena? Even if it were possible for large numbers of people to gather together, the inevitable time constraints under which political decisions usually need to be made would surely make it impossible for everyone to speak.
Empirical research is particularly good at pointing out problems of this sort – in this case, the practical difficulty of reconciling values of deliberation and mass participation. The point is not that there are no solutions to problems of this sort – research into online deliberation, for example, suggests some intriguing answers (see, e.g., Neblo et al. 2018). Rather, the point is that empirical research can compel us to think harder about our normative commitments. At the same time, however, Thompson insists that, while empirical research may ‘pose some challenging questions, and even offer some provocative answers … it does not have the last word’ (2008, 513). On the contrary, if democratic values stand in conflict, ‘we still have to decide under what conditions which value should have priority, and which combination of the values is optimal. That decision depends partly on considerations that are not primarily empirical’ (2008, 513; cf. Graham Smith 2011, 898). In other words, decisions about how to reconcile conflicting values such as deliberation and participation are never just practical or pragmatic, but inevitably bring larger normative questions and concerns into play.
This last point is nicely captured by Goodin’s observation that, while the ‘case for some sort of empirical theory informing policy [or institutional] choices is intuitively obvious’, we ‘need to know not only which results follow from which policies [or institutions] but also which results we should prefer and strive to achieve’ in the first place (1982, 4, 7). There is, therefore, an important sense in which normative theory has priority. On the other hand, this also implies that normative theories must inevitably stand at some remove from the actual circumstances to which they are intended to apply. In the first instance, deliberative democracy is a political ideal; it is meant to guide us in our efforts to improve the political world in which we live and, in particular, to bolster its legitimacy. But if an ideal is worked out wholly in the abstract, it may well turn out to have little relevance to the actual circumstances to which it is intended to apply (cf. Mason 2004, 254).
Granted, abstraction plays a crucial role in (among other things) clarifying and differentiating concepts, which in turn is crucial to theory building. But on the whole, it is probably fair to say that deliberative democrats have eschewed highly abstract thinking. They typically assume that theories of deliberative democracy should take account of the normal circumstances of political life and they have sought to develop their accounts accordingly (see Rawls 2001, 4; cf. Mutz 2008). In fact, if anything, they may have been too attentive to those circumstances: in an effort to develop the concept in ways that demonstrate its practical relevance, some deliberative democrats may be guilty of concept stretching (Goodin 2018; Steiner 2008). Take, for instance, the goal of reaching an agreed judgement or consensus – people agreeing both on a course of action and on the reasons for it. For some, this notion sits uncomfortably with respect for social pluralism or diversity. Instead of consensus, we should instead aim for ‘workable agreements’ in which people agree on a course of action but for different reasons (Dryzek 2000, 170; Curato et al. 2017, 31). However, if workable agreement is made the goal, then ‘it is unclear what purpose is served by telling one another our reasons at all’ (Goodin 2018, 31; see also Neblo 2015, 106).
In Chapter 2, we will look at these and other related issues in more detail. Before we do so, there are two further introductory tasks to be completed. First, in terms of setting the scene for the rest of the book, it is important to get some sense of the intellectual origins of the ‘deliberative revival’ that began in the 1980s. Second, in order to pave the way for a closer examination of how the concept of deliberative democracy has changed since that time, it is important to see how it was originally defined. To this end, we will turn in just a moment to the extended definition presented by Joshua Cohen in his seminal essay, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’ (1989). But let us begin with origins and revival.
Origins and revival
There are many reasons to trace the origins of contemporary ideas about deliberative democracy. Of those reasons, one of the more interesting is that it shows us how deliberation, political equality and accountability came to be so central to democratic theory.
Theorists of deliberative democracy are wont to trace its origins back to ancient Athens (e.g., Fishkin 2018, 51–4). This tendency is perhaps understandable. As Josiah Ober explains, the ‘history of Athenian popular government shows that making good use of dispersed knowledge is the original source of democracy’s strength’ (2008, 2). The most famous institution in this respect was the Assembly (or ekklēsia) in which each citizen had the right to participate. However, because large public gatherings are not effective instruments of government, the Athenian system also relied on a 500-member governing Council (or boulē
