Can deliberation neutralise power?
| Author | Samuel Bagg |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115610542 |
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(3) 257–279
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885115610542
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Article
Can deliberation neutralise
power?
Samuel Bagg
Duke University, USA
Abstract
Most democratic theorists agree that concentrations of wealth and power tend to
distort the functioning of democracy and ought to be countered wherever possible.
Deliberative democrats are no exception: though not its only potential value, the
capacity of deliberation to ‘neutralise power’ is often regarded as ‘fundamental’ to
deliberative theory. Power may be neutralised, according to many deliberative demo-
crats, if citizens can be induced to commit more fully to the deliberative resolution of
common problems. If they do, they will be unable to get away with inconsistencies and
bad or private reasons, thereby mitigating the illegitimate influence of power. I argue,
however, that the means by which power inflects political disagreement is far more
subtle than this model suggests and cannot be countered so simply. As a wealth of
recent research in political psychology demonstrates, human beings persistently exhibit
‘motivated reasoning’, meaning that even when we are sincerely committed to the
deliberative resolution of common problems, and even when we are exposed to the
same reasons and evidence, we still disagree strongly about what ‘fair cooperation’
entails. Motivated reasoning can be counteracted, but only under exceptional circum-
stances such as those that enable modern science, which cannot be reliably replicated in
our society at large. My analysis suggests that in democratic politics – which rules out
the kind of anti-democratic practices available to scientists – we should not expect
deliberation to reliably neutralise power.
Keywords
Power, deliberation, motivated reasoning, norms, reason
It may be true that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. But can
the same be said of deliberation? Many of the widely acknowledged ailments of
contemporary democratic deliberation, of course, are attributable to the underlying
distribution of power (Knight and Johnson, 1997). Like nearly all democratic
Corresponding author:
Samuel Bagg, Political Science Department, 140 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Email: samuel.bagg@gmail.com
theorists, therefore, deliberative democrats advocate concrete measures to ‘neutra-
lise’ concentrated power – such as reducing the outsized influence of money in
politics and increasing the participation of under-represented groups – sometimes
even by non-deliberative means (Fung, 2005; Mansbridge et al., 2010; Young,
2001). The innovation of deliberative democracy over competing theories of democ-
racy such as elite competition, populism, or interest-group pluralism, however, was
to propose reasonable deliberation itself as a potentially effective weapon against
power. For most deliberative democrats, therefore, ‘the idea that deliberation helps
to neutralise power is fundamental’ to the project of deliberative democracy (Cohen
and Rogers, 2003: 242). Deliberative democrats view high-quality deliberation not
merely as a symptom ofahealthydemocracy–aby-productofdeeperstructural
changes – but as a distinct agent of change and a strategic political priority; not only
as the theoret ical, idealised end of the fight against concentrated power, but also as a
primary means of waging that war (Chambers, 2009; Fung and Wright, 2003a).
The practical intuition motivating deliberative democracy is that when people
are induced to engage in the practice of reasonable deliberation – defined here as
exchanges of argument and evidence adhering to specific norms of reasonable
discourse such as consistency, publicity, evidence, explicitness, and justification –
many of them will come to renounce selfish concerns and bad arguments. As a
result, either those with concentrated power will decide spontaneously to give it up,
or their self-justifying arguments will be exposed to others as flawed, weakening the
political alliances which sustain their power. Though they are rare, of course,
individuals do experience such ‘deliberative conversions’ from time to time. It is
widely supposed, therefore, that if citizens in general were more committed to
reasonable deliberation, we would witness such power-neutralising conversions
more often. Thus, despite their disagreements on questions such as whether citizen
‘commitment’ to deliberation must be sincere (Markovits, 2006), and whether our
primary focus should be crafting especially reasonable ‘mini-publics’ or improving
deliberation in the broader public sphere (Lafont, 2014), most deliberative demo-
crats agree that strengthening deliberative norms in some capacity should be a
central political priority.
In what follows, however, I argue that we should be sceptical of this intuitive
picture which mistakes the reason for the relative rarity of deliberative conversions.
The problem is not primarily that citizens are insufficiently committed to delibera-
tion, either in spirit or in practice; rather, the problem is what psychologists call
‘motivated reasoning’ – the fact that we humans perceive and assimilate new
information in ways that are unintentionally biased to protect our prior commit-
ments and social identities. Most deliberative theorists would likely accept the
‘motivated’ character of reasoning in theory, of course, but few appreciate its
significance. Even when citizens are committed to deliberative norms, it turns
out they are still highly unlikely to change their minds as a result of deliberation.
Accordingly, strengthening the enforcement of deliberative norms is unlikely to be
a particularly effective weapon against concentrated power. Whatever the value of
deliberation as an idealised end, in other words, we should cease prioritising it as a
means in the struggle for justice.
258 European Journal of Political Theory 17(3)
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