Designing Democratic Institutions: Nomos XLII

3. Instituting Deliberative Democracy

3 INSTITUTING DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY JOHN FEREJOHN Introduction I1 take it for granted that we live in an imperfectly deliberative democracy. We recognize, in many of our public decision-making practices, the norm that statutes and administrative actions ought to be the result of deliberative consideration of alternatives according to public values. We also believe that public decisions ought to be responsive in some way to the diverse views of the common good held by citizens. We also believe that everyone , directly or indirectly, is equally entitled to enter into the discussions that produce such decisions and to have has views respected and taken seriously into account in whatever public decision is reached. We lament that people don’t take much part in public life and don’t seem to feel obligated to do so. In this sense, there seems a widespread commitment to deliberative norms, even if there is less agreement as to what such norms require of us. Some theorists go further than this to suggest that democratic deliberation entails a commitment to public reasoning whereby participants “regard one another as equals; they aim to defend and criticize institutions and programs in terms of considerations that others have reason to accept, given . . . that those others are reasonable; and they are prepared to cooperate in accordance 75 with the results of such discussion.”2 The attraction of this understanding of deliberative democracy is that it promises to produce policies that are based on a wide range of information and perspectives within society and to offer a reasonable account to every person, which that person would be willing to accept after suitable deliberation, as to why it is that some action of hers is to be constrained by the coercive force of the state. In this respect, deliberation over public action is expected both to produce policies that reflect public views and to encourage citizens—at least those who involve themselves in deliberation—to refine and enlarge their views of what policies should be pursued. But whether or not deliberative democracy requires a full commitment to public reasoning of this kind, it surely requires at least some minimal procedural assurances of the kind outlined above. I would think that the more demanding requirements of public reasoning might need to be embodied in deliberative norms rather than imposed as institutional requirements, whereas many of the procedural assurances can be made by designing and deploying suitable institutions. Thus, the question in this paper is how much of the full-blown deliberative ideal can be accomplished or encouraged by suitably designed institutions. None of this is intended to disparage the idea that there may be a need as well for the development of a deliberative ethics. But just what shape that ethical system would need to take will depend on what it is that institutions cannot reliably do. Part of the reason that the deliberative ideal is often honored in the breach rather than in the observance is that there is little agreement as to what it entails. No modern proponent of deliberative democracy believes that full and adequate deliberation requires that each person is entitled to have her views satisfied as a precondition for any collective decision. Instead, deliberative theorists ask only that decision making “aim” for consensus in the sense of trying to take everyone’s views into account. For these theorists, however, consensus is not a precondition for social decision but is, instead, an aspiration or “regulative” aim. If, for whatever reason, an actual consensus cannot be found for some urgent decision, most theorists recognize the need to resort to some form of majority rule or, perhaps, to some other kind of authoritative decision process. The resort to authority in john ferejohn 76 the absence of agreement is, however, seen as a failure of deliberation and there would be an ensuing need to justify the both the decision taken and the appropriateness of the particular decision procedure that was employed.3 Put this way, deliberative democracy might seem a pretty tepid ideal since it requires only that we sincerely try to reach consensus among all citizens but settles for the use of authoritative procedures in the event a consensus cannot be found. More stringent deliberative requirements have taken three forms. Some theorists have suggested that much public discussion and deliberation can take place outside formal governmental processes in groups and associations of people with presumably relatively homogeneous preferences.4...