Deliberation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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A number of political theorists, notably Joshua Cohen, Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson, and Jürgen Haber mas, have sought to define the nature and purposes of deliberation, identify prerequisites for its existence, and construct models of “ideal deliberation.” Central to most definitions of deliberation is giving reasons and weighing arguments and information in favor of, or against, public policies. Most models of deliberation also assume that citizens share a basic level of agreement on issues before they can deliberate effectively. Because deliberation includes a variety of dimensions, however, no consensus exists about the precise definition of deliberation. In The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (1994), government scholar Joseph M. Bessette provides a common definition as “reasoning on the merits of public policy.” Some definitions of deliberation, however, do not require public-spiritedness or other motivations as requisites for deliberation. Individuals deliberate as long as they acquire and use substantive information related to public policy, even if their goals are narrowly self-interested. Scholars have put forward a variety of criteria to judge deliberation, including fairness, inclusiveness of participation, the breadth of viewpoints considered, responsiveness to popular desires, the logical and empirical validity of arguments, and contributions to democratic legitimacy.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Deliberation

Political theorists argue that deliberation provides a number of benefits and advantages. Deliberation should improve the effectiveness of policy. If policy makers seriously consider arguments bearing upon policy decisions and weigh evidence carefully, their decisions should be more consistent with their values, and they should make fewer mistakes, than they would otherwise. Notorious policy debacles like the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Iraq War (2003–), the collapse of the U.S. savings and loan industry in the 1980s and 1990s, and persistently large budget deficits appear to arise, in part, from faulty deliberation. Deliberation has intrinsic, not just instrumental, value. In a properly functioning democratic system, deliberation encourages citizens to seek common ground, provide reasons for their positions, and give due consideration to the arguments of others. Deliberation thus promotes mutual self-respect and legitimacy and minimizes disagreement.

Deliberation has potential drawbacks, however. It may reduce democratic participation. Because deliberation stresses logically sound and empirically grounded arguments, it may discourage or discount the participation of less educated and less economically well-off individuals who may lack deliberative capabilities. Deliberation disfavors emotional appeals that are useful in activating citizen involvement in politics. Some observers discount the relevance of deliberation altogether by denying that policy makers deliberate in any meaningful way or by assuming that deliberative activity has no impact on their decisions. What matters are interests and power, not ideas and evidence. According to this view, policy making is a nondeliberative process of bargaining and compromise driven by self-interest.

Elite Deliberation

Literature on the subject of deliberation identifies legislative bodies as quintessential deliberative institutions. In his review of over two dozen case studies of policy making in Congress and the careers of several key congressional leaders, Bessette (1994) interpreted much of what goes on in the U.S. Congress as deliberative activity and contended that bargaining plays only a limited role in legislation. In Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress (2006), Gary Mucciaroni and Paul J. Quirk studied the empirical claims about the effects of existing and proposed policies that members of Congress make when they debate public policy issues. Analyzing debates over welfare reform, estate tax repeal, and telecommunications deregulation, they found that debate was more realistic and informative in the Senate than the House, under bipartisanship, when interest groups were active on both sides of the debate, and when legislators spent more time debating issues.

The focus of much of the empirical literature on deliberation is on the United States, perhaps because of alleged shortcomings with liberalism or because explanations of policy outcomes in the United States have emphasized nondeliberative forms of political behavior, such as the exercise of power and bargaining. However, in 2005, political scientist Jürg Steiner and colleagues examined floor debate in four nations using political philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics as a theoretical framework. Steiner and colleagues noted that students of consociational democracies in Europe—polities characterized by elite consensus despite deep social divisions—alluded to a “spirit of accommodation” among elites as essential to such systems, but they did not make clear the key role of deliberation in those systems. Steiner et al. found variation in the quality of deliberation across institutions and issues. Deliberation was better in polities with more consensual than competitive political institutions (such as broader cabinet coalitions and multiparty systems), second (upper) chambers, more veto players, and with nonpublic deliberative arenas.

Deliberation takes place in other institutions as well. Benjamin I. Page, in Who Deliberates? Mass Media in American Democracy (1996), found that the quality of deliberation through the mass media varied according to the issue on the agenda, but that overall, the diversity and decentralization of media sources of information approximate a well-functioning “marketplace of ideas.” John Burke and Fred I. Greenstein compared decision making over the Vietnam War during the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations in their 1989 study of how well presidents “test reality.” Eisenhower’s deliberation was more disciplined and realistic, because his leadership style and advisory system encouraged more rigorous and careful discussion of a broader range of alternatives. Public policy scholar R. Shep Melnick (1983) and others find that courts have limited institutional capacity for policy deliberation. The judiciary’s adversarial process, case-based decision making, decentralized structure, access determined by litigants’ interests rather than the questions about the merits of policy, and judges’ training as generalists detract from deliberation. In 1990, political scientist Marc K. Landy and his colleagues examined the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and found that the agency oversimplifies environmental issues and fails to educate the public about the difficulties inherent in their resolution. The EPA’s mission as an advocate for environmental interests makes it impossible for it to search for common ground and engage in persuasion. As a result, it fails to orchestrate effective deliberation on the technical, political, and ethical merits of environmental policy.

Citizen Deliberation

Before the advent of mass democracy, theorists viewed deliberation as an elite endeavor. James Madison and other framers of the U.S. Constitution saw elite deliberation as a bulwark against the public’s impulses and uninformed opinions. Legislators were responsible for filtering and refining public opinion in such a way that they would discover their constituents’ true opinions—what the public would think if citizens had the same capabilities to deliberate as their leaders. Today, many observers consider citizen deliberation a vital component of democratic participation and a mechanism for maintaining democratic accountability. Citizens cannot limit their participation to voting, leaving policy deliberation to their leaders.

The quality of citizen participation may improve with deliberation. In a study of individuals who attended a forum on Social Security reform, individuals who attended the forum gained more knowledge about the program than similar individuals who did not attend. Second, deliberation produced opinion change over policy options for which there was already some consensus. For policy options on which citizens had little consensus at the outset, opinions changed only among citizens who held their opinions weakly, according to a 2004 study by public opinion and policy scholar Jason Barabas. Properly designed institutions may help to develop citizens’ capacities for deliberation without sacrificing the political equality and legitimacy that are the hallmarks of modern mass democracy. Among the ideas for building citizens’ capacity for deliberation are “deliberative opinion polls” and holding “deliberation days” just before elections.

Whatever the potential drawbacks to deliberation, few people seem to be concerned that we run the risk of having an excess of it. Given the proliferation of economic and foreign policy calamities of recent decades, it may be more plausible that governments suffer from too little careful deliberation than too much of it.

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Burke, John, and Fred I. Greenstein. How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989.
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