Power in Deliberative Democracy: Norms, Forums, Systems

By Nicole Curato, Marit Hammond and John B. Min

Deliberative democracy is an embattled political project. It is accused of political naiveté for it only talks about power without taking power. Others, meanwhile, take issue with deliberative democracy’s dominance in the field of democratic theory and practice. An industry of consultants, facilitators, and experts of deliberative forums has grown over the past decades, suggesting that the field has benefited from a broken political system.

This book is inspired by these accusations. It argues that deliberative democracy’s tense relationship with power is not a pathology but constitutive of deliberative practice. Deliberative democracy gains relevance when it navigates complex relations of power in modern societies, learns from its mistakes, remains epistemically humble but not politically meek.  These arguments are situated in three facets of deliberative democracy—norms, forums, and systems—and concludes by applying these ideas to three of the most pressing issues in contemporary times—post-truth politics, populism, and illiberalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319955346

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© The Author(s) 2019

Nicole Curato, Marit Hammond and John B. MinPower in Deliberative DemocracyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95534-6_1

1. Introduction

Nicole Curato¹  , Marit Hammond²   and John B. Min³  

(1)

Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia

(2)

School of Politics, Philosophy, International Relations and Environment, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, UK

(3)

Department of Social Sciences – Philosophy Program, College of Southern Nevada, North Las Vegas, NV, USA

Nicole Curato (Corresponding author)

Marit Hammond

John B. Min

When we imagine people taking power, what often comes to mind are images of activists locked in arms demanding the possibility of another world, citizens inside a voting booth, or massive political rallies powered by larger-than-life charismatic leaders. Rarely do we think of people sitting at a roundtable, poring over documents, exchanging their views, and coming up with decisions justifiable to all.

And yet, in the past 20 years, the image of a deliberating citizen has been at the centre of political theory. Deliberative democracy, a theory and practice of politics that places reasoned discussion at the heart of political life, has often been critiqued for failing to place power at the centre of its analysis. Deliberation can talk about power, but it does not take power. Deliberation is too naïve, too detached from realpolitik. Deliberation is conservative. It has no radical vision for the future.

This book is motivated by these critiques. Our goal is to systematically map the criticisms against deliberation’s relationship with political power, offer conceptual clarifications that address misconceptions, and put forward proposals by which the concept of power can sharpen deliberative theory and practice.

The argument we offer in the book is this: deliberative democracy has an ambivalent relationship with power. While deliberative democracy can be a corrective to coercivepower, it also generates new forms of power. The challenge, we argue, is to understand the precise conditions that allow deliberative practice to confront oppressive social structures and agential practices and promote emancipatory goals. To do this, we situate deliberative democracy’s foundations and futures in critical theory—an intellectual approach and a political project that lays bare structures of domination that shape our political life.

The book is organised around three aspects of deliberative democracy—norms, forums, and systems—with each of these facets examining the debates and developments in the field. These chapters map how deliberative democracy surprisingly fosters both domination and emancipation. We argue that deliberative practice in an ‘imperfect speech situation’ straddles these two poles. The practical challenge is to design institutions and promote cultures that can manage the tensions of deliberative practice.

Why Deliberation and Power?

Why, one may ask, must we revive discussions on deliberation and power?

First, we think it is timely to take stock of the implications of democratic theory’s ‘deliberative turn’ (Dryzek 2000). Deliberative democracy has, for decades, been celebrated as the main game in democratic theory and practice. The field has achieved a lot in making sense of deeply divided societies and bureaucratic states, post-industrial democracies and highly unequal polities, local governance and international negotiations. Its legacy is to create a broad church—an inclusive epistemic community—that brings together many theoretical traditions, empirical methods, and practical applications (Curato et al. 2017).

In 1997, deliberation was described as the ‘standard for the accomplishment of democracy’ (Sanders 1997: 347). Twenty years later, deliberative democracy has become the ‘predominant framework in normative democratic theory’ such that one would be hard-pressed to find a democratic theorist who does not subscribe to the virtues of open exchange of reasons (Talisse 2017: 108). There has been, as Mark Pennington puts it, a ‘quasi-consensus in favour of deliberative democracy’ in Anglo-American political theory (Pennington 2010: 159).

These observations, however, are articulated as critiques of deliberative democracy’s far-reaching influence. For Lynn M. Sanders, the power of deliberation is inseparable from the power of ‘routines of hierarchy and deference’ that has marked American society (Sanders 1997: 362). For Robert Talisse, deliberative democracy takes place in a context where our aspirations ‘are systematically turned against themselves’ because of political polarisation and inequalities of information (Talisse 2017: 117). Finally, Pennington worries that pluralism of opinions takes a back seat once a collective decision reached by deliberation is imposed on all (Pennington 2010: 182). Deliberative democracy may draw our attention to possibilities to overcome certain pathologies of political life, but it is also possible that it obscures relations of power.

These critiques prompt us to reflect on what we miss when we examine politics primarily from a deliberative lens. What forms of power have become peripheral to our attention? In what ways can contemporary accounts of deliberation take them into serious consideration? A field that has gained mainstream, if not dominant, status shapes our intellectual priorities and political projects. In the same manner that deliberative democracy started as a critique of liberal democracy for its emphasis on individual rights and competitive elections (see Bohman 1998), it is worth taking a closer look at the implications of deliberative democracy’s influential vision of democracy as one that centres on inclusive reasoned discussion.

Second, emphasising the relationship between power and deliberation revisits key issues on the purpose of deliberative democracy. Some say deliberative democracy aims to give voice to ordinary citizens. Others find it useful for social learning. A growing number of scholars are making a case for its epistemic value.

We find merit in these claims, but we also argue that what brings these purposes together is deliberative democracy’s capacity to curb power. Deliberative democracy can confront state power, big media, and corporate propaganda by creating discursive environments that expose lies, spin, and manipulation. Deliberative democracy can redistribute political power by moving the centre of politics away from authorities to ordinary citizens. In the subsequent chapters of this book, we demonstrate how deliberative democracy’s capacity to humble power is not a lofty aspiration but an empirical reality, albeit one that faces limitations.

Finally, we consider it important for deliberative democracy to examine its relationship with contemporary articulations of power. The age of communicative abundance has reshaped the ways in which discourses are produced and exchanged. Politics has become more stylised. Attention has become today’s scarcest resource. The digital public sphere presents a complex environment by which discursive power is simultaneously democratised and stratified. We have also witnessed the commercialisation of deliberative democracy, where ‘public engagement’ has become an expertise bought and sold in a burgeoning consultancy market (Lee 2015; Hendriks and Carson 2008). By emphasising deliberative democracy’s foundations in critical theory, we hope to examine new ‘distortions’ in the public sphere and what can be done about them.

Defining Deliberation

We recognise that we are bringing two controversial themes together in this book—deliberative democracy and power—and so it is important to discuss what we mean when we refer to these concepts.

We view deliberative democracy as an aspiration that places reasoned discussion at the centre of political life.¹

Political Aspiration

As a political aspiration, deliberative democracy is inherently normative. It is not a testable theory that can be verified or disproven by empirical work (Dryzek 2010). Instead, it belongs to the tradition of critical theory, which diagnoses power imbalances, including the distortions of communication, in the public sphere. Deliberative theory proposes ways in which democracies can be enhanced and criticised when institutions do not live up to the standard (Chambers 2003: 308).

Deliberative democracy’s aspirational standards can be summarised in three dimensions: inclusiveness , authenticity , and consequentiality (Dryzek 2010).

1.

Inclusiveness refers to the all-affected principle: all those affected by collective decisions must have the opportunity to provide input. The all-affected principle has gained traction among deliberative democrats for its emphasis on the dynamic constitution of the public. Unlike the all-subjected principle which is grounded on static and territorialised definitions of the demos, the all-affected principle, as Sofia Näsström puts it, ‘serves to take normative command of a situation of plural and competing allegiances’ (Näsström 2011: 123). This presents a broad view of inclusion beyond the nation-state, allowing deliberative theorists to tackle issues of climate change, inter-generational justice, or global poverty. While Näsström is correct to point out that the all-affected principle suffers from issues of indeterminacy—who counts as affected and what counts as a decision—these issues, at least from a deliberative perspective, can be the subject of contestation and collective definition. Political communities are provisional constructs. They may emerge in response to a shared issue and dismantle when such issue loses its salience.

2.

Authenticity refers to the extent to which deliberations are governed by norms of openness and reciprocity. These norms involve what David Owen and Graham Smith refer to as the ‘deliberative stance’ or a relation towards each other ‘as equals engaged in the mutual exchange of reasons oriented as if to reaching a shared practical judgment’ (Owen and Smith 2015: 228). Authentic deliberation takes place when participants persuade each other by justifying each other’s views, instead of resorting to coercive or manipulative strategies to secure a political aim.

3.

Consequentiality refers to the outcomes of deliberation. Deliberative democracy is not a tokenistic enterprise but a normative commitment that participants’ inputs are considered when determining collective outcomes. At the heart of the concept of consequentiality, we argue, is legitimacy—that collective decisions are not justified as authoritative unless citizens have been so included, and participants in turn accept them because they were part of the process that determined those decisions. Consequences of deliberation vary. It may be the creation of laws or a shift in public discourse, a codification of rules or serious consideration of proposals when policymakers make decisions. Impacts can also be cultural. Deliberation has educative and community-generating power, which, in turn, shapes the character of the public sphere.

We describe these aspects of deliberative democracy as aspirations because empirical realities will always fall short of these expectations. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, complex societies inevitably face the dilemma of the demanding ‘ought’ facing the sobering ‘is’ (Habermas 2006: 411). Nevertheless, deliberative democracy’s normative ideals, as we hope to demonstrate in this book, present a meaningful ethical framework by which we can judge the character of political conversations today. They are powerful goals that shape real-world political projects aiming to redistribute power in complex polities.

Reasoned Discussion

There are two ways of interpreting the concept of reasoned discussion. The first one is anchored in the Habermasian model of the ‘ideal speech situation’. Rational discourse is organised around norms of respect, truthfulness, mutual justification, and sincerity. It is held in contrast to strategic action, which entails ‘exerting an influence upon others instead of understanding with them’ (Habermas 1984: 286). In this model, communicative power is conceived not as a zero-sum concept where one gains at the expense of the other. Communicative rationality derives currency from coordinating acts that forge consensus instead of egocentric calculations of success. André Bächtiger et al. (2010) refer to this as Type 1 deliberation.²

This view of reasoned discussion has been the subject of most critiques in the early days of deliberative democratic theory. The ideal of consensus without exclusion is suspect, agonistic democrats argue, for constructing a ‘we’ without a corollary ‘they’ obliterates the very concept of the political (Mouffe 2000). The emphasis on rational justification has also been questioned, particularly by feminist scholars, who find the celebration of gentlemanly rules of discourse as exclusionary towards speech styles that depart from the ideal of legal proceedings and scientific communities (Young 2001). Deliberative democracy, as the critique goes, valorises the speech of privileged, white males.

What Counts as Reason-Giving?

In response, deliberative theorists put forward a broader definition of reasoned discussion, which Bächtiger et al. (2010) refer to as Type 2 deliberation. This definition of reasoned discussion—the one we subscribe to in this book—accepts forms of discourse that ‘function as communicative influence under conditions of conflict’ (Warren 2007: 274). We find this broad definition of reason-giving a productive development in deliberative theory. Contemporary forms of deliberation take place in today’s mass-mediated public sphere, where text and voice are one of many influential ways in which reasons are communicated.

The move towards pluralising speech styles started in the early 2000s. In the book Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, following Iris Marion Young (2002), John Dryzek (2000) considered storytelling, greetings, humour, and rhetoric part of deliberation’s repertoire of speech. This recognition has had far-reaching consequences for the way reasoned discussion is conceived today. By pluralising speech styles, the dispassionate, logical, and systematic forms of speech are dislodged as the model of deliberative practice. Playful, colourful, tentative, and soft-spoken ways of language are recognised as valid if not more persuasive forms of reason-giving. Archon Fung (2005), similarly, advocates the use of protests, strikes, and occupations, when conditions of formal deliberations are stacked against marginalised groups. In both accounts, reason-giving takes shape in multi-vocal and culturally diverse ways, allowing for a pluralistic account of deliberative speech.

In recent years, deliberative democrats have further pushed the boundaries of what counts as reason-giving by going beyond voice and text. Embodiment and silence are two examples in which reasons are expressed, not articulated, and performed, not uttered. Toby Rollo’s work (2017), for example, advocates an expanded view of citizenship that is not tied to the ideal of an ‘independent, self-determining speaking agent’ (Rollo 2017: 601). Using the example of the Disability Arts Movement, he makes a case for communicative sites that recognise the ‘enactive agency’ of differently abled people. They may not be able to articulate reasons but they can nevertheless contribute to political interactions in the public sphere by promoting cognitive and physical diversity—both of which are resources in collective decision-making. This emphasis on physical presence or the embodied character of discourse pushes our understanding of the public sphere as a space not only to be heard but also to be seen, where the ‘publicity of ideas’ is linked to the ‘publicity of bodies’ (Clifford 2012: 217).

Silence, meanwhile, serves as a meaningful indicator of power in deliberative practice. While deliberative democracy equates having a voice to having power, refusing to speak also indicates one’s standing in the public sphere. Vincent Jungkunz (2012) uses the examples of President George W. Bush’s top advisers refusing to be interviewed in a film about the invasion of Iraq, to illustrate ‘the silence of the powerful’. This is held in contrast to the ‘silence of the powerless’ or subordinate groups who have no access to platforms for speech or are purposefully gagged from speaking up. Silence, however, can also serve an insubordinate function. Embracing silence can be ‘a refuge’ or a mechanism by which individuals reject oppressive configurations of truth (Jungkunz 2012: 147). The March for Our Lives Protest is an example of how insubordinate silence was used as part of high school student Emma Gonzalez’s speech against gun violence. Gonzalez called out the absurdity of how the right to own a gun outweighs students’ right to live and made demands for the US House of Representatives to take action. Punctuating her speech were six minutes and twenty seconds of silence, representing the length of time the gunman took to kill seventeen people in her school. ‘How would you feel if you had to hide during that silence,’ Gonzalez tweeted. This example demonstrates how the repertoire of silence can be featured as part of reason-giving. The absence of voice evokes emotional responses which give weight to an argument put forward.

Broadening the definition of what counts as reason-giving is not without its problems. The corollary of deliberative theory’s pluralistic account of reasons is the blunting of its normative bite. There is a risk that the concept of reason-giving becomes so broad that deliberative theory loses its capacity to spot communicative distortions. If reason-giving can be anything, then it means nothing (Bächtiger and Parkinson forthcoming).

One solution to the threat of concept-stretching is to recognise that deliberative democracy’s normative project is a constant work in progress. The goal, as Bächtiger and colleagues suggest, is to ‘identify theoretically promising standards that can be achieved in the real world’ (Bächtiger et al. 2010: 42). And, if we may add, this ‘real world’ is changing quickly. The age of communicative plenty posits new issues as well as opportunities to deepen deliberative politics (Ercan et al. 2018). We will focus on this issue in Chap. 5, where we propose deliberative responses to post-truth politics, populism, and illiberalism.

Dryzek and others’ recognition of plural ways of reason-giving is accompanied by normative standards by which these communicative acts can be assessed and distinguished from coercive forms of political action. The distinction of bridging and bonding rhetoric is one example where communication styles that contribute to polarisation and reinforcement of prejudices are judged as normatively inferior to rhetoric that forges connections among differently situated and reflective actors (Dryzek 2010). For Fung, the use of confrontational political action must work within principles of fidelity to deliberation, charity to would-be interlocutors, exhaustion of all possibilities for discussion before engaging in non-deliberative action, and proportionality of confrontation to the scale of disagreement (Fung 2005: 402–403). We will revisit these normative propositions in the subsequent chapters of the book, as we emphasise the tensions deliberative democracy has with the nuts and bolts of everyday democracies. For now, it suffices to emphasise that deliberative democrats, for the most part, have a pluralised understanding of reason-giving, and have long moved away from the rationalist ideal often associated with Habermas.

What Are the Components of Deliberation?

A corollary of the pluralised understanding of reason-giving is the broadening of actions required in deliberation. It is typical for deliberative democracy to be described as a ‘talk-centric’ view of democracy, to contrast it to aggregative democracy’s ‘vote-centric’ view (Chambers 2009). While talk is indeed central to deliberative practice, it is by no means its only component. The previous section’s emphasis on embodiment and silence suggests that expression beyond talk constitutes reason-giving.

Moreover, expression is meaningless if interlocutors in the public sphere are not responsive. One may have the right to speech, but how meaningful is this right if the powerful are not paying attention?

Listening and reflection are equally critical components of deliberative democracy. To have the power to express one’s opinion is half the battle. To secure a responsive audience posits another challenge. Often, power is manifest in terms of who has the capacity to bestow attention or practise wilful disregard. Our view of deliberative democracy, therefore, places equal weight on expression and responsiveness.

Listening is the most developed aspect of responsiveness in deliberative democracy. Several deliberative democrats emphasise listening in their definitions of deliberation. Pamela Conover and David Searing define deliberation as ‘listening very carefully to the views of others, explaining to them one’s own voices, and taking time to think over a matter thoroughly’ (Conover and Searing 2005: 271). Listening is constitutive of the deliberative virtue of reciprocity. Mutual justifications could only be exchanged if interlocutors discovered, understood, and respected the other’s views. Deliberative theory is not about speaking up but also about hearing the other side or, to use Young’s term, ‘listening across difference’ so we can understand the claims of differently situated others (Young 1996: 128).

Listening is also crucial in bringing in the perspective of non-human others that are unable to speak for themselves. In his work on green democracy, Dryzek (2000) builds on Susan Bickford’s (1996) concept of ‘effective listening’. Deliberative democracy can take an ecological direction by carefully tuning in to nature’s signals, in the same respect that we listen to the voices of human subjects.

While the importance of listening has been central to the definitions of deliberative practice, the ethical conditions for good listening still need further work in the literature. David M. Levin correctly points out that Habermas’ account of communicative action unwittingly postulates an unproblematic hearing:

a listener who always hears all there is to be heard; a listening which is invariably accurate and complete. There is no theoretical recognition of auditory distortion, ideological deafness, institutional noise, the specific ways in which power channels hearing and listening channels power. (Levin 1989: 111)

James Bohman hints at this gap when he argued that ‘deliberative democracy must also consider the quality of listening or the uptake given to others’ but does not go as far as characterising the conditions that make this possible (Bohman 1998: 410). We argue that using power as a lens for deliberative democracy allows for a critical interrogation of structures and practices that constitute an uneven economy of attention, which makes some voices worth listening to over others. The chapters on deliberative forums and systems suggest design features and institutional reforms that can foster conditions for ethical and effective listening.

Reflection is also a key aspect of deliberation. Simone Chambers places emphasis on reflection in her definition of ‘deliberative rhetoric’ which should promote ‘considered reflection about future action’ (Chambers 2009: 335). Christian Rostbøll highlights the importance of taking part in deliberation to facilitate self-reflection to examine the factors that make citizens deceive themselves about the true causes of their political opinions (Rostbøll 2008: 183). For Dryzek (2017), justification and reflection hold equal importance in democratic