Deliberative Democracy

Question 1

What is the difference between deliberative and agonistic democracy?

Answer 1

Agonistic democracy rejects the need to reach consensus.

Question 2

What is the different between deliberative democracy and representative democracy?

Answer 2

Deliberative democracy focuses on process rather than on institutions, requires people to try to reach consensus and encourages compromise.

Question 3

What is deliberative democracy?

Answer 3

Democracy as a process of collective deliberation among free and equal individuals rather than a particular set of institutions or constitutional structures.

Question 4

What is agonistic democracy?

Answer 4

Rejects the idea that reason can transcend or resolve deep disagreements about moral/political matters in order to provide consensus.

Question 5

Why might deliberative democracy be better than aggregative democracy?

Answer 5

Aggregating preferences might produce odd results that don’t seem to be true collective decisions. Moreover, there are problems with majority rule. Do the people really rule themselves if we’re only trying to aggregate isolated, individual preferences, rather than collective will?

Question 6

What is the problem of adversarial politics?

Answer 6

Sometimes, democracies are presented as a fight between competing sides/parties who are battling it out for the people’s votes. They’re not trying to come to any sort of agreement; they’re basically opposing each other.

Question 7

Who is deliberative democracy primarily associated with?

Answer 7

Habermas

Question 8

What is deliberative democracy?

Answer 8

A model whereby people govern together as people through dialogue, deliberation, discourse and conversation. It’s not simply about registering our preferences, but having some sort of dialogue about the options. Through the model, people will get more information about the options, will have more opportunity to be engaged in popular government, and there will be more role for people in government.

Question 9

What do Ackerman and Fishkin suggest?

Answer 9

Deliberation Day: a national holiday held a week before major national elections. Registered voters come together in neighbourhood meeting places in small groups (15) and larger groups (500) to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign. Each deliberator is paid for the day’s work on the condition that they show up at the polls the next week. All other work, except the most essential, is prohibited by law.

Question 10

Why is deliberative democracy an ideal?

Answer 10

It combats rational ignorance: democracy is supposed to give everybody a voice, regardless of how much they know about what they’re voting. Thus, people may think there’s no need to spend time finding out about politics. Moreover, representatives may be able to give us lots of useful information about what they’d actually do, because they need the vote first. Deliberative democracy would combat this.

Question 11

What are the strengths of deliberative democracy?

Answer 11

It incentivises us. We’ll have access to certain information and campaigners will be incentivised to give us good information. It’s inviting us to participate and engage. We’re incentivised because they’re really small groups so each person can speak. We don’t think of ourselves as one vote in however many million here.

Question 12

What is the benefit of the model of discussion?

Answer 12

You’re trying to get people to understand your perspective, so you offer reasons why they should agree with you. Thus, you have to be responsive to the reasons of others, too. It should help understand each other, through active listening.

Question 13

How would the people be grouped?

Answer 13

In fairly representative groupings. Rather than just grouping people from the same street together, who likely have similar life experiences, there’ll be an incentive to have different people participating together. We’ll get a microcosm of the larger society. We’ll be exposed to different decision-making.

Question 14

What might be a problem with diverse groups?

Answer 14

It’s harder to find common ground. The ideal is that they see themselves as citizens trying to make a collective decision. But this is unlikely.

Question 15

Why might deliberative democracy develop our beliefs?

Answer 15

Rather than being set in our ways, because we never have to test our thinking, deliberative democracy gives us an opportunity to share and listen to others, and then reflect. It allows us to change our minds.

Question 16

Why is time a good thing in deliberative democracy?

Answer 16

Rather than voting being a 2 second process, we come to realise that we must give our time to invest in the process and think seriously about what it is to be a citizen. Everybody has the time to participate.

Question 17

What challenge to deliberative democracy does Iris M. Young draw attention to?

Answer 17

She notes that ‘Many rights have been won in democratic societies by means of courageous activism - the eight-hour day, votes for women’. She says that contemporary democratic societies don’t reflect deliberative democracies ideals. A challenge for deliberative democrats will be to explain why activism, which confronts rather than engages in discussion, is has produced results.

Question 18

What are some examples of activism that confronts political parties?

Answer 18

Street marches, boycotts, sit-ins

Question 19

What does Young aim to do?

Answer 19

Explore where there’s common ground between the activist and the deliberative democrat, and where they diverge. She wants to bring out the limitations of deliberatively democratic norms, and explore whether they acknowledge that existing democracies have structural inequalities that underlie significant injustices and social harms. Moreover, she wants to explore the virtues of nondeliberative political practices.

Question 20

How does Young characterise the deliberative democrat?

Answer 20

As somebody who ‘claims that parties to political conflict ought to deliberate with one another and through reasonable argument try to come to an agreement on policy satisfactory to all.’

Question 21

How does Young characterise the activist?

Answer 21

As somebody who is ‘suspicious of exhortations to deliberate because he believes that in the real world of politics, where structural inequalities influence both procedures and outcomes, democratic processes that appear to conform to norms of deliberation are usually biased toward more powerful agents.’

Question 22

What does the activist recommend, according to Young?

Answer 22

That those who care about promoting greater justice should engage primarily in critical oppositional activity, rather than attempt to come to agreement with those who support or benefit from existing power structure.

Question 23

What is Young’s main criticism for deliberative democrats?

Answer 23

She notes that deliberative democrats develop a political philosophy that’s based on idealised version of the world, and hypothetical situations in which people can deliberate as equals. But political philosophy should take seriously the injustices of our world, and not gloss over them or develop philosophies that have idealised assumptions that are then not applicable.

Question 24

What kind of account(s) is deliberative democracy for Young?

Answer 24

She sees deliberative democracy as both a normative account of the bases of democratic legitimacy, and a prescription for how citizens ought to be political engaged. Deliberative democracy holds that the best way to conduct political action is through public deliberation where people offer reasons for their opinions and listen to others to reach an agreement.

Question 25

What is the position of the activist, for Young?

Answer 25

‘The activist is committed to social justice and normative value and the idea that politically responsible persons ought to take positive action to promote these. He also believes that the normal workings of social economic and political institutions…enact or reproduce deep wrongs…Since the ordinary rules and practises of these institutions tend to perpetuate these wrongs, we cannot redress them within those rules.’

Question 26

Why might anger be justified?

Answer 26

Young comments that the deliberative democrat’s model of the reasonable, calm, civil person doesn’t take seriously enough the structural inequalities that legitimate certain kinds of political anger. If you feel the injustice, you feel anger and it fuels your activism, and it motivates others to act.

Question 27

Toward what is the activist’s anger directed?

Answer 27

The activist’s anger is targeted at the ‘intransigence of people in power in existing institutions, who behave with arrogance and indifference toward the injustices the activist finds they perpetuate or flatly deny…’

Question 28

Why might the activist eschew deliberation?

Answer 28

Young suggests that the activist would resist deliberating with people who wield political or economic power and official representatives of institutions he believes perpetuate injustice because they would not reach agreement and even if they did agree to deliberate, the powerful officials would have the power to steer the course of the discussion. Essentially, the activist worries that sitting down to talk to his opponents would confer legitimacy on those institutions.

Question 29

What might the deliberative democrat claim in response to the activist’s proposal?

Answer 29

She might claim that the stance of the activist is unreasonable. ‘Reasonable political engagement on this account consists of the willingness to listen to those whom one believes is wrong, to demand reasons from them, and to give arguments aimed at persuading them to change their views.’ Thus, the activist is unreasonable because he declines to engage in discussion with those he disagrees with.

Question 30

What is the problem with the deliberative democrats response to the activist?

Answer 30

Their idea of reasonableness removes the sense of us as impassioned people, who have existing connections and who do feel anger when there’s injustice. The deliberative democrat does not take seriously the effective emotional aspect of injustice.

Question 31

Why might the activist be successful?

Answer 31

The activist does engage the public and manages to communicate specific ideas to them through slogans, humour and irony. You often don’t get people to change their minds through reasoned arguments.

Question 32

Why are deliberative procedures exclusive?

Answer 32

They have the veneer of inclusion, but often those invited to deliberate are in no way representative of the different views on offer.

Question 33

What is the objection from Hegemonic Discourse against deliberative democracy?

Answer 33

The way we think about what the options are, the way we think about ourselves, are all constrained by a given discourse that makes it difficult for radical ideas or radical dissent to make itself understood, or even to seem like possibilities are out there. It’s not the case that our deliberations in politics overlap with the ideals of reasoned, egalitarian forms of communication.

Question 34

Why might deliberation constrain alternatives?

Answer 34

Problems and disagreements in the real world of democratic politics appear and are addressed against the background of a given history and sedimentation of unjust structural inequality, says the activist, which helps set agenda priorities and constrains the alternatives that political activists may consider in their deliberation.’