Deliberation, Democracy and the Systemic Turn (co-authored with Graham Smith, JPP final) (original) (raw)
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Deliberation, Democracy and the Systemic Turn (with David Owen)
Deliberative democracy as a theoretical enterprise has gone through a series of phases or 'turns'. 3 The most recent manifestation of this dynamic is the idea of the 'deliberative system', of which a variety of formulations have been proposed. An important initial attempt to offer a reflective synthesis of work on deliberative systems is the recent essay, 'A systemic approach to deliberative democracy'. 4 Co--authored by an impressive range of deliberative theorists (
Our aim in this essay is to offer a provisional critique of the current trajectory of work on the 'deliberative system' and to propose a more cogent approach to thinking through the relationship between deliberative practices and the broader social, political and economic systems focused on the cultivation of what we term a 'deliberative stance'. To this end, we engage primarily with two essays authored by Jane Mansbridge generally considered the cornerstone of the development of the deliberative system approach: the 1999 essay 'Everyday talk and the deliberative system' and the more recent 2012 piece 'A systemic approach to deliberative democracy', which can be reasonably seen as a manifesto for the deliberative system approach given its wide range of co--authors well--known within deliberative circles:
Democratic Theory
Normative democratic theory with a focus on civic engagement is increasingly interested in how participatory instances connect into democratic systems (Dean, Rinne, et al. 2019; Elstub et al. 2018). The deliberative perspective has pioneered this debate and proposes a systemic view that observes how everyday talk and media discourses connect deliberative forums including parliaments, mini-publics, and protest formations (Mansbridge 1999; Mansbridge et al. 2012). While various approaches within the deliberative systems debate can be differentiated (Owen and Smith 2015), they commonly understand deliberative qualities as distributed within a broader system and focus on scaling up democratic deliberation through the transmission from the public to state institutions (Chambers 2012; Dryzek 2009).
Introducing Deliberative Democracy: A Goal, a Tool, or Just a Context?1
Human Affairs, 2008
Introducing Deliberative Democracy: A Goal, a Tool, or Just a Context?The concept of deliberative democracy is presented within a wide spectrum of variety of its operationalizations. Since the applicability of the principle of deliberation to the functioning of human society is of the author's primary interest, dilemmas of deliberative democracy related to different problems associated with deliberation in practice are described in some detail. The key questions raised aiming at elucidating the "ontology" of deliberativeness are as follows: is it only a tool for solving the problems of society and politics? Is it a context within which other processes decide on the running of society? Or does it embody a goal of democracy?
The Deliberative Turn in Democratic Theory
2024
Thirty years of developments in deliberative democracy (DD) have consolidated another subfield of democratic theory. Building on the conceptual innovations introduced by the academic debate in DD, a growing number of deliberative experiments have been carried out around world, yielding a flourishing empirical literature. The acquired disciplinary prestige has made theorists and practitioners very confident about the ability of DD to address the legitimacy crisis currently affecting liberal democracies the world over. This book advances a critical analysis of these developments, and casts doubts on this confidence. It claims that current theoretical debates are reproposing old methodological divisions, and struggle to overcome the minimalist conception of democracy employed in the second postwar period. Moreover, deliberative experiments at the micro level seem to have no impact at the macro level, and remain sets of isolated experiences with controversial political value. The book indicates that those defects are mainly due to the liberal frame of reference within which reflection in democratic theory and practice takes place within the deliberative camp. Consequently, it suggests the need to move beyond liberal understandings of democracy as a series of disjointed games for which external rules have to be devised in advance. By contrast, it advocates a vision of democracy as a self-correcting ‘metagame’ capable of establishing and revising its own criteria of validity. An outline of this alternative vision of democracy as a metagame is proposed in chapter 6, setting the research framework for my future work in the field.
The Third Generation of Deliberative Democracy
Political Studies Review, 2010
The article argues that deliberative democracy has now entered a third generation, which the three recent books considered here contribute to. The first generation included the normative assertions of Habermas and Rawls. The second generation involved the fusing of these two first generationalists, and reconciling them with features of social complexity. The second generation has rendered deliberative democracy more practically achievable, and the three books here seize this opportunity to provide considerable institutional innovation about how to achieve the reformed deliberative theory in practice. In doing this the third generation of deliberative democracy is emerging. In the main, a more practically relevant version of deliberative democracy is welcomed, but we must also guard against jettisoning its normative ideals in the process.