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
