Deliberative Bureaucracy: Reconciling Democracy’s Trade-off Between Inclusion and Economy
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Author | Jack Corbett,John Boswell |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717723512 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717723512
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(3) 618 –634
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717723512
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Deliberative Bureaucracy:
Reconciling Democracy’s
Trade-off Between Inclusion
and Economy
John Boswell and Jack Corbett
Abstract
Deliberative democrats have long considered the trade-off between norms of inclusion and
efficiency. The latest attempt at reconciliation is the deliberative systems model, which situates
and links individual sites of deliberation in their macro context. Yet, critics argue that this move
to scale up leaves inclusive practices of citizen deliberation vulnerable. Here, we seek to mitigate
these concerns via an unlikely source: bureaucracy. Drawing on the notion of policy feedback,
with its attendant focus on how policies (re)make democratic politics, we envision a deliberative
bureaucracy where implementation and service delivery are imbued with norms of justification,
publicity and, most radically, inclusion. Looking at promising contemporary governance practices,
we argue that a deliberative bureaucracy, with the rich public encounters it might foster, can
reconcile the desire to scale up deliberative democracy to whole systems with the desire to hold
on to the benefits of scaled-down citizen deliberation.
Keywords
deliberative systems, deliberative democracy, bureaucracy, public administration, policy feedback
Accepted: 6 July 2017
Introduction
The issue of scale is again front and centre in deliberative democracy. Where a decade or
so ago deliberative democrats sought to reinvigorate democratic theory and practice by
scaling down democratic arenas to enable authentic deliberation among citizens free from
the coercive influences of the macro-political context, the general emphasis in this school
of thought is now on scaling back up (see Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012). Most propo-
nents of this ideal now embrace a ‘systemic’ view, seeing deliberation as an activity
occurring across a range of interconnected but differentiated democratic arenas that
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Corresponding author:
John Boswell, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton, Hampshire SO17 1BJ, UK.
Email: j.c.boswell@soton.ac.uk
723512PSX0010.1177/0032321717723512Political StudiesBoswell and Corbett
research-article2017
Article
Boswell and Corbett 619
collectively make up a deliberative system. Driven in large part by a desire to reconcile
the micro and macro tendencies in deliberative democratic theory and research, delibera-
tive systems are emerging as the new orthodoxy.
Yet, just as some within the broad deliberative democratic church were always wary
about the limitations of a scaled-down view (see Chambers, 2009), so too are others
beginning to express scepticism about the systemic view (see Owen and Smith, 2015).
The worry is that, on closer inspection, a systemic view begins to look vulnerable to elite
domination, marginalising the ‘free and equal citizens’ long at the centre of the classical
account of deliberative democracy. Democracy’s long-standing tension between norms of
inclusion and governing economy is rearing its head again. And so, as the systemic turn
gathers momentum, will the participatory potential of deliberative democratic theory be
left behind? Should the role of the citizen diminish in the move to conceptualising and
striving for deliberative democracy at the large scale?
In this article, we seek to reconcile the seemingly divergent demands of economy and
inclusion in the deliberative systems approach. To do so, we look to an unlikely source:
bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be seen as unlikely not so much in the sense that it is anti-
thetical to deliberative democratic ideals – although it has long been associated with pre-
cisely the sort of elitism that worries sceptics of the deliberative systems approach – but
that it seems beside the point. In stylised accounts of how democratic politics does and
should work, deliberation is about will formation, whereas bureaucracy is largely about
what occurs after that: deliberation is about input and bureaucracy about output. However,
in this article, we argue deliberative democrats have under-recognised the potential of
public deliberation after an official decision is made, as decisions are turned into concrete
policies on the ground. We argue that an emphasis on processes of policy feedback, with
an attendant focus on how bureaucratic modes of administration and delivery affect inter-
action between citizens and the state, has potential to help resolve the inherent democratic
tensions between inclusion and economy. Bureaucracy emerged, after all, as a solution to
the problem of governing at large scales. It has far greater reach and engenders more sus-
tained, deeper interaction with ordinary citizens than any mechanism of input into execu-
tive or legislative decision-making can realistically hope to achieve.
Yet, of course, if bureaucracy matters for deliberative systems, then the aforemen-
tioned concern about elitist technocracy becomes more pressing. Intuitively, the faceless
bureaucrat does not appeal as a likely champion of the face-to-face deliberation that scep-
tics worry will drop away in the move to deliberative systems. What little attention has
been paid to this area in the deliberative democracy literature tends to present a more
complex picture than this common stereotype, but it is generally no more optimistic
(Papadopoulos, 2012; Parkinson, 2004). Here, contemporary trends in public manage-
ment are seen to depoliticise and decouple bureaucratic processes from decision-making
inputs. We argue, however, that existing accounts present these reforms in overly mono-
lithic and static form (see Bevir and Rhodes, 2010). For one, they overlook the develop-
ment of bureaucratic practices which enable greater inclusion in deliberative systems. But
they also overlook the potential for these practices to be further reformed – indeed, in
much the same way that deliberative democratic innovations have iteratively changed
processes of decision-making input. Building on these more promising precedents, we
envision a deliberative bureaucracy.
Although we will develop the idea in much more detail in later sections, we define
it here for clarity. Drawing on and adapting norms and ideals expressed in deliberative
democratic theory more broadly, we argue that deliberative bureaucracy should be
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