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Deliberative democracy denotes a normative model of democracy that rests on the belief in the persuasive power of systematic argumentations and resolutions reached in public debates and in the central role of understanding-oriented communicative action. Thus, this model of democracy is intimately connected with the discourse theory of philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

On an ideal level, Habermas defines deliberative democracy as a third kind of democracy, different from the liberal and republican models but integrating aspects of both. The main distinction among these three types of democracy bears on the role assigned to the democratic process. The deliberative model of democracy draws on the conditions of communication, under which it is assumed the political process tends to generate reasonable results, because the process takes place in a deliberative manner. Like the republican model, the deliberative model places emphasis on the process of forming the political opinion and will but does not consider a collectively acting citizenry as a condition for the realization of deliberative politics. This kind of politics depends instead on the institutionalization of the required procedures.

Discourse theory stresses the intersubjectivity of the understanding processes, which take place in parliamentary consultations and within the communication network of political publics. The informal process of opinion formation flows into institutionalized decision making and legislative resolutions, which transform the communicatively generated power into administrative power. Like the liberal model, deliberative democracy respects the demarcation between state and society. However, society is not considered to be a market-based plurality of private interests that the political process aggregates. Civil society is a base for autonomous publics and in this sense differs both from the economic handling system and the public administration. As in the republican model, solidarity plays a central role as a social integrative power, which should develop through autonomous publics and constitutional procedures of democratic opinion formation, and which should be able to withstand the influences of money (economic system) and the administrative power (political system).

According to discourse theory, the communicative conditions for the democratic formation of opinion and political will function as an important channel for the wide-ranging rationalization of decisions, which are made by the law-bound government and administration. Rationalization is more than just legitimization, as in the liberal model, but also less than constitution of power, as in the republican model. It is only the political system that can “act,” not the society as a collective subject.

Though the society cannot govern by itself, it can direct the administrative power into specific channels. The political public is a differentiated arena in which the decentered society detects, identifies, and deals with social problems. In this sense, there is no need to concretely define the subject of sovereignty. The interpretation of the sovereignty of the people is intersubjective: It continues to exist, but it becomes anonymous and retreats to the democratic procedures and legal implementation of its ambitious communication requirements in order to assert itself as a communicatively generated power. From this discourse-theoretical perspective, the political system is not the society’s summit, nor its center, nor its structure-giving model, but it is instead only one of many handling systems.

Related to Habermas’s approach, many conceptualizations and some concretizations of deliberative democracy have been developed. They all refer to an “ideal . . . association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members,” as noted by Joshua Cohen in his 1989 article “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” and they share some characteristics: Deliberative democracy is a normative and procedural model. It describes how democracy should be based upon a specific communicative procedure. Although public deliberation requires some necessary conditions (e.g., equality among free citizens) and is oriented to specific ends (common good), the deliberative dimension is the theory’s pivotal point. Free deliberation is conceived as a communicative process that disposes of a transformative character. It stresses neither the importance of giving due weight to each individual’s distinct preferences (as in the liberal model), nor the ethical validity of the outcomes. As David Miller notes in his 1993 article “Deliberative

Democracy and Social Choice,” it rather “relies upon a person’s capacity to be swayed by rational arguments and to lay aside particular interests and opinions in deference to overall fairness and the common interest of the collectivity” (77).

As a normative model, deliberative democracy is situated on a high level of abstraction and lacks depth to give the concept concrete form. It is based on a communicative and cooperative conception of human nature. As for its implementation, even when given the ambitious conditions for a widely open and free deliberation over “rational arguments,” it is difficult to imagine how the influence of “nonrational” aspects, such as emotions and status, on this process can be avoided. Moreover, the model delivers no clear criteria for the “rationality” and “reasonability” of arguments. Its emphasis on the desirability of a genuine understanding in the context of a free and open communication in which all citizens are involved are its main merits.

Bibliography:

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