Deliberative Democracy, More than Deliberation
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211032624 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211032624
Political Studies
2023, Vol. 71(1) 238 –255
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00323217211032624
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Deliberative Democracy, More
than Deliberation
Mary F Scudder
Abstract
What is the relationship between deliberation and democracy? Despite the volumes dedicated to
this question, recent admissions by prominent deliberative democrats—that we need not pursue
a necessarily deliberative political system, but merely a democratic one—suggest that this remains
an open question. Here, I defend the deliberative model’s staying power against those who argue
that it has been set normatively adrift. Addressing concerns of “concept-stretching,” I show that
the deliberative model provides much more than a defense of the practice of deliberation. Indeed,
its key contribution is the answer it provides to the question of what democracy itself means
in large pluralistic societies. Moreover, I show that by de-centering the practice of deliberation
from deliberative theories of democracy, we can acknowledge the weakness of deliberation and
the strengths of non-deliberative practices, while retaining the model’s normative commitments.
Keywords
deliberative democracy, de-centered deliberation, problem-based approach, models of
democracy
Accepted: 28 June 2021
What is the relationship between deliberation and democracy? Given the decades and
volumes dedicated to the study of deliberative democracy it would seem that this is a
more or less settled question. But recent trends in democratic theory, specifically the
admission by prominent deliberative democrats that we need not pursue a necessarily
deliberative political system, but merely a democratic one, suggest that there is more to
be said on this question (Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019: 19; Owen and Smith, 2015: 232;
Warren, 2017: 41).
If by 2010 deliberative democracy had “entered a kind of adolescence,” it would
appear that it is now squarely in adulthood (Neblo et al., 2010: 566). Gone are the awk-
ward and tiresome years of trying to be all things to all people. As it has matured, delib-
erative democracy has come to terms with what it can and cannot do. For example, the
Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Corresponding author:
Mary F Scudder, Department of Political Science, Purdue University, 100 N University, West Lafayette, IN
47907, USA.
Email: scudder@purdue.edu
1032624PSX0010.1177/00323217211032624Political StudiesScudder
research-article2021
Article
Scudder 239
recent emphasis on systems-level analysis has relaxed the expectation that all elements of
a deliberative system be, themselves, deliberative (Mansbridge et al., 2012).1 According
to this view, the deliberativeness of a political system is greater than the sum of its parts.
The systems approach recognizes the possibility of non-deliberative actions, including
protest or partisanship, contributing to the overall deliberativeness of a political system.
David Owen and Graham Smith (2015: 218), however, have expressed suspicion
toward these “dominant articulations of the deliberative system.” The problem with these
approaches is that we could come to judge a political system as deliberative even if it has
“little, or even nothing, in the way of actual democratic deliberation between citizens tak-
ing place” (Owen and Smith, 2015: 218). Just as concerning in their view has been the
tendency to stretch the concept of deliberation itself to the point where now “almost every
communicative act may qualify as ‘deliberative’” (Bächtiger et al., 2010: 48; Owen and
Smith, 2015: 227).
More recently Mark Warren (2017), himself an engineer of the deliberative turn, has
made the case for abandoning model-based approaches to democratic theory in favor of
what he calls a “problem-based approach.” He extends this critique even to the delibera-
tive model he helped popularize. According to Warren, model-based strategies for devis-
ing democratic theory focus too much on one practice, for example, voting or deliberation.
Such an approach has led democratic theorists to make untenable claims about the demo-
cratic power of their preferred practice and to miss the important ways that other political
practices enhance democracy. Meanwhile, deliberativists wanting to acknowledge the
democratic value of non-deliberative practices find themselves performing intellectual
gymnastics to show that these acts somehow contribute to the overall deliberativeness of
a political system.
Perhaps it is time we let democratic theory off the deliberative hook, so to speak.
Reinterpreting the systemic question, Warren and others now call for investigating “the
role of deliberation within democratic systems” instead of asking “whether democratic
systems are deliberative in nature” (Owen and Smith, 2015: 232; Warren, 2017: 41).
Breaking with the deliberative model, Warren differentiates a system’s deliberativeness
from its democratic-ness. According to his problem-based approach, it matters more that
a political system solves certain problems than how it solves them, whether through delib-
eration or some other political practice.
This article draws out the normative stakes of these trends in the literature. What are
the implications of recent calls to move past model-based approaches to democratic the-
ory? And what do they mean for understanding the relationship between deliberation and
democracy? In pursuing a democratic system instead of a necessarily deliberative one, is
deliberative democratic theory simply growing up and coming to terms with the inherent
limitations of deliberation? Or is it selling out, making compromises that go against its
core commitments?
In what follows, I show that the deliberative model provides much more than an
account of the democratic value of deliberation. Instead, its key contribution is its answer
to the question of how to achieve democracy in large pluralistic societies. In short, the
deliberative model provides the normative criteria that define what constitutes democracy
in the first place. According to this interpretation of the deliberative model, we are not
betraying its key normative commitments by acknowledging either the limitations of
deliberation or the value of non-deliberative practices.
Part 1, ‘The Deliberative System and Its Problems,’ provides an account of the state of
deliberative democratic theory. Here, I pay special attention to the high-profile criticisms
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