Deliberative democracy rests on the core notion of citizens and their representatives deliberating about public problems and solutions under conditions that are conducive to reasoned reflection and refined public judgment; a mutual willingness to understand the values, perspectives, and interests of others; and the possibility of reframing their interests and perspectives in light of a joint search for common interests and mutually acceptable solutions.
It is thus often referred to as an open discovery process, rather than a ratification of fixed positions, and as potentially transforming interests, rather than simply taking them as given. Unlike much liberal pluralist political theory, deliberative democracy does not assume that citizens have a fixed ordering of preferences when they enter the public sphere. Rather, it assumes that the public sphere can generate opportunities for forming, refining, and revising preferences through discourse that takes multiple perspectives into account and orients itself towards mutual understanding and common action. Deliberative democracy in its predominant usage today means expanding the opportunities of citizens themselves to deliberate. This is meant to respond to several kinds of problems:
direct plebiscitary democracy. Despite the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, a direct-majoritarian version of democracy has been in the ascendancy in the United States since the nineteenth century, and depletes our capacities for reasoned deliberation. In this version of democracy, those mechanisms that compel decisions to conform directly to existing majority opinion are seen as more democratic than those that filter decisions through representation. The ascendancy of opinion polls, talk show democracy, referendums, and primaries are manifestations of this. As a result, policy questions become oversimplified and stylized, and our capacity to solve increasingly complex public problems declines.
interest group representation. The increasing organization of citizens into interest groups has tended to turn politics into a competition of interests narrowly defined. The advocacy explosion of recent years has helped to democratize access to the halls of power, but has also generated a kind of "hyperpluralism" that makes it increasingly difficult to address questions of common purpose and revise programs that may have outlived their usefulness. This hinders our capacity to innovate to solve new problems.
professional political class. Citizens have become increasingly disengaged and cynical about politics because they see it as an exclusive game for professionals and experts, such as politicians, campaign managers, lobbyists, pollsters, journalists, talking heads. Technocratic approaches within public administration exacerbate this sense of the displaced citizen.
Deliberative democracy introduces a different kind of citizen voice into public affairs than that associated with raw public opinion, simple voting, narrow advocacy, or protest from the outside. It promises to cultivate a responsible citizen voice capable of appreciating complexity, recognizing the legitimate interests of other groups (including traditional adversaries), generating a sense of common ownership and action, and appreciating the need for difficult trade-offs. And one of the central arguments of deliberative democratic theory is that the process of deliberation itself is a key source of legitimacy, and hence an important resource for responding to our crisis of governance.
Forms and examples of deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy can exist in many forms and combinations, and can be complementary to various other mechanisms that ensure democratic representation and efficient administration. Thus, we can see deliberative democratic forms used not only for shaping an independent citizen dialogue, but for complementing deliberations by a city council, state legislature, or administrative agency. Indeed, the Madisonian tradition itself can be viewed as a deliberative democratic synthesis of classical republicanism and emerging pluralism that contains considerably more room for citizen deliberation than James Madison himself would have allowed. Some examples are the following:
state health reform. The Oregon Health Plan of 1990 was arrived at by combining a process of community deliberation on health values with several other forms of deliberation. An independent, nonpartisan grassroots group (Oregon Health Decisions) conducted 48 open community meetings around the state to discuss underlying health values that citizens might hold in common and that might guide the reform efforts. An appointed Health Services Commission, which included public interest group representatives, used the reports from these meetings to guide its own deliberations in establishing a treatment priorities list, and took further guidance from expert panels, public hearings, and a public opinion poll. The legislature framed its own deliberations accordingly, and passed the reform plan with overwhelming bipartisan political support. It also had broad support from affected constituencies and organized grassroots groups, including those whom national public interest groups claimed would be affected adversely. In the years prior to the passage of the bill, Oregon Health Decisions had held several hundred community meetings and two state-wide health care parliaments, and used these to educate legislators about health values deliberation in the reform process.
environmental dispute settlement. Environmental Dispute Settlement, or Alternative Dispute Resolution, relies on a stakeholder model for organizing deliberation, rather than on open community meetings. A limited number of representatives from affected interests agrees upon rules that are conducive to mutual understanding of each other's interests and perspectives, and seeks common ground for action. The internal rules of dialogue that structure negotiations are among the closest real-world approximations we have to the philosophically demanding conditions of "discursive democracy" and "communicative rationality" found in the influential writings of Juergen Habermas. The circle of deliberation can be extended considerably by communication of stakeholder representatives with their grassroots constituencies during the negotiations. This form of deliberative democracy has guided state legislatures in policy making and agency officials in rule making. It is often convened and facilitated by administrative officials in agencies such as EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Forest Service, leading some scholars to speak of "deliberative cultures" emerging within regulatory agencies. An increasing number of environmental officials, in fact, are aware not only of the practical techniques, but of the theoretical discussions of deliberative democracy. And policy analysts have begun to pay increasing attention to how policy designs can and should encourage citizen deliberation in confronting complex problems and tradeoffs.
National Issues Forums (NIF). Utilizing issue books prepared by the Kettering
and Public Agenda Foundations, citizens convene
within various institutional settings to deliberate about public problems,
the pros and cons of specific solutions, and to reflect on the underlying
values and deeper motivations at play. The goals of these forums are to enhance
learning of public issues through engaged discussion of options, to help
form a public with the skills needed for democratic dialogue and reasoned
judgment, and to help define the interests of the public. The range of issues
is broad, with three issues chosen per year, and groups can be formed in
virtually any setting: schools, churches, senior centers, libraries, literacy
programs. At the local level, some groups use NIF methodologies and materials
to address issues on the local agenda, and thus move from deliberation to
action. This is also the case with groups using materials of the Study Circles
Resource Center.
the deliberative poll. James Fishkin's deliberative opinion poll is based on the conviction that credible deliberative democracy requires a representative sample of the population, rather than self-selected citizen participation in community meetings and dialogue groups, or organized stakeholder participation in dispute resolution. It builds upon citizens juries and the ancient Athenian Council in design, but assembles a larger representative sample of several hundred in an effort to model what the electorate as a whole would think if, hypothetically, it could be immersed in intensive deliberative processes. It is designed especially to influence the selection of candidates at the beginning of the American presidential primary season, before the rush of early primaries. The deliberative poll was first conducted in Britain on national television in 1994 with a representative sample of three hundred voters considering the issue of crime, and they seem to have developed a more complex understanding of the issue than previously held.
public journalism. Public journalism, or civic journalism, engages the press in directly helping to revive civic life and public dialogue. It does this in various ways: by convening town meetings where citizens have the opportunity to discuss public problems, question candidates skillfully and in-depth, review policy options, discuss solutions at work in other communities, set an action agenda, and even to facilitate voluntary citizen action (e.g. on neighborhood crime). News and election coverage gives priority of place to citizens' own voices. Civic journalism interprets the public's right to know expansively and assumes the responsibility for enhancing those conditions that permit citizens to constitute themselves as a deliberative public. It also challenges citizens to deliberate responsibly, in view of conflicting views and interests of other citizens and even of themselves (e.g. a demand for more services, but an unwillingness to pay for them, or to cut other favored programs). In this way, it seeks to hold citizens themselves accountable to standards of complex and responsible deliberation, even as it assists citizens in holding their elected leaders accountable.
Some Relevant Issues
There are many issues that need to be addressed in refining and evaluating deliberative democracy as a source of democratic renewal. A few of the most important ones are the following:
complementarity of deliberative forms. No major theorist sees deliberative democracy as supplanting representative democracy. But there has been little systematic attention to the conditions under which "deliberative complementarities" could improve our democratic institutions and civic culture, and how various civic, political and administrative actors can develop the appropriate capacities. How can city councils, state legislatures, and administrative agencies include citizens in meaningful and innovative forms of deliberation? This is an important touchstone for renovating our Madisonian deliberative heritage, and a needed bulwark against the forms of plebiscitary democracy that are eroding it.
relation to action and ongoing, practical collaboration. In some forms of deliberative democracy, there is a tendency to divorce public debate from common action to solve problems. Thus, citizens engage in discourse, but public officials act. Or those who have a history of community problem solving through organized groups are excluded from deliberations that seek a statistically representative sample of unorganized, "ordinary" citizens. Or citizens are convened for a discrete event, but are not provided with ongoing opportunities to collaborate nor compelled to confront the action consequences of their deliberative work. Such forms of deliberation can certainly add something to a public discourse that is generally nondeliberative. But we need to be aware of their limits, and ask how we might embed deliberative forms in contexts of ongoing public work and practical action.
difference and inclusiveness. Deliberative theory can tend to privilege speech that is too narrowly rationalistic and argumentative, and hence marginalize those groups (women, minorities) whose styles of discourse might differ from this. In addition, it can presume too great an initial basis for commonalty, and downplay the degree of struggle for recognition that might need to occur before a more inclusive sense of common interest can be forged. Deliberative practice, by contrast, tends to be much more attuned to forms of speech (storytelling, expressions of hurt, anger and injustice) that situate participants in specific contexts and groups, and that reference inequalities in ways that can be productive of mutual understanding and common action.
Is deliberative democracy possible on complex national policy issues?
The failure of the Clinton health care reform has raised the issue of whether a more deliberative approach might have served as a sounder, albeit longer term foundation for reform. Such a deliberative approach to public discussion could have focused on health values and cultural expectations, and to underlying causes of increased health costs for which the public has had little realistic appreciation (aging population, high technology). The Kettering and Public Agenda Foundations, as well as the Hastings Center, American Health Decisions, and the American Civic Forum, presented elements of this alternative deliberative approach, both before and after the plan's defeat. Is it possible to learn from this failure in such a way that refines such an alternative, and convinces a significant enough segment of the American leadership class to go forward with it on a subsequent reform occasion? Or is such an approach simply unworkable in light of short political election cycles, deep ideological divisions within the leadership class, and the complexity of issues. And will deliberative democracy be enough to counteract the tendency of the public itself toward wishful thinking on health and its unwillingness to come to grips with the hard choices?