Exercising Deliberative Agency in Deliberative Systems

Abstract

At the heart of the ideal of deliberative democracy lies an emphasis on the political autonomy of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has moved so far away from this ideal that it relegates the deliberations of citizens to a secondary matter, legitimising forms of rule that may even undermine the normative impulses central to the project of deliberative democracy. We critically discuss this theoretical development and show how deliberative agency can effectively be exercised in complex political systems. We argue, in particular, that political parties play a central role in facilitating the exercise of deliberative agency, fostering deliberation among citizens and linking their deliberations to decisions. Instead of giving up on the possibility that citizens participate in procedures of public justification, deliberative democrats should look to parties’ unique ability to enable deliberation.

Keywords

deliberative systems systemic turn deliberative agency political parties participation

The classic ideal of deliberative democracy is wedded to the idea of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. Deliberative democracy’s pioneers envisaged a society whose citizens share ‘a commitment to coordinating their activities within institutions that make deliberation possible and according to norms that they arrive at through their deliberation’ (Cohen, 1989: 21). Cohen’s words encapsulate the distinctive conception of political autonomy deliberative democrats endorse. At the heart of the classical ideal of deliberative democracy accordingly lies the deliberative agency of citizens, or, to put it differently, a conception of citizens as deliberative agents.

Political agents, we take it, are deliberative agents when they engage in public deliberation with the aim of influencing the exercise of political power in accordance with their conception of the common good, which, in turn, is constitutive of their deliberative agency. This definition differs from other ways of conceiving deliberative agency in the relevant literature. Curato and Ong (2015: 581), for instance, define deliberative agents in terms of an agent’s capabilities of articulating, defending and revising her views. Our focus on political autonomy entails an emphasis on the exercise of deliberative agency rather than the mere capability of doing so. Erman (2012) critiques the recent debate on deliberative governance based on the related, yet more global, concept of democratic agency. She argues that the norms of accountability, authorisation, deliberation and participation jointly constitute democratic agency, an idea rooted in the democratic ideals of political equality and political bindingness (Erman, 2012: 10). The notion of deliberative agency is narrower in scope.

Given the manifold challenges to realising the ideal of deliberative democracy that arise from the complexities of both contemporary political systems and the social world more generally, the conception of political autonomy underpinning it can seem, and has seemed to many observers, hopelessly utopian. Prominent theorists have therefore revised this ideal several times (for an overview, see Mansbridge et al., 2010), which culminated in the recent ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative democracy (Dryzek, 2012; Hendriks, 2016; Kuyper, 2015; Mansbridge et al., 2012; Owen and Smith, 2015). The systemic turn occurred after a long period in which deliberative scholarship focused almost exclusively on designed deliberative ‘mini-publics’ without paying sufficient attention to large-scale societal deliberation (Bohman, 1998; Goodin, 2008). It tries to think deliberative democracy big again by applying the ideal of deliberative democracy to complex political systems.

Well-intentioned though the systemic approach to deliberative democracy is, it risks losing sight of the important connection between deliberative agency and autonomy, opening the door to a vision of deliberative democracy in which the deliberative engagement of citizens is no longer a central concern (Owen and Smith, 2015). Reacting to this, we aim to show how deliberative agency can make itself visible and felt in complex political systems, rendering those systems genuinely ‘deliberative’ systems. While we accept that contemporary democracies are a much less fertile ground for citizens’ exercise of deliberative agency than early theorists of deliberative democracy believed, we argue that there remains room for the exercise of deliberative agency and that the prima facie attractive normative commitment to political autonomy is not completely unworldly.

Our suggestion is that the ideal of deliberative democracy needs to be refashioned with other deliberative agents in mind than only individual citizens. We argue, in particular, that political parties play a key role in facilitating the exercise of deliberative agency. Drawing on the nascent political theory of parties and partisanship (Muirhead, 2006, 2014; Rosenblum, 2008; White and Ypi, 2010, 2011), as well as on empirical party scholarship, we show that parties can be unique enablers of citizen deliberation, both structuring and facilitating citizens’ own deliberations and implicating citizens in meaningful and consequential internal deliberations. In short, parties are indispensable if political power is to be exercised in accordance with the ideal of deliberative agency.

The next section that follows sets out what deliberative agency is and why it is such a vital component of the original ideal of deliberative democracy. The second section critically discusses different versions of the deliberative systems approach, highlighting their most troublesome shortcomings. The third section details our own approach. In the final section, we discuss possible objections to the argument advanced.

Deliberative Agency and the Original Ideal of Deliberative Democracy

Although the normative foundations of deliberative democracy have been hotly debated from the outset, there is also ‘considerable consensus among theorists on many of the regulative ideals of deliberative democracy’ (Mansbridge et al., 2010: 65; compare Freeman, 2000). Many of these regulative ideals are rooted in what we call the ‘original ideal of deliberative democracy’. Our presentation of the ideal in this section is stylistic, bracketing for now many differences internal to the conceptions of deliberative democracy different authors employ, in order to identify what is distinctive about the original deliberative ideal.

The first thing to note is that the original ideal of deliberative democracy is a normative ideal that is grounded in a commitment to political equality and the political autonomy of citizens. The fundamental normative concern has been with political legitimacy (Manin, 1987). Traditionally, theorists have conceived legitimacy as requiring the public justification of the exercise of political power (Benhabib, 1996; Cohen, 1989; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, 2004; Habermas, 1996; Manin, 1987 for an overview, see Freeman, 2000). One aspect of public justification is that it makes intelligible to citizens what the exercise of power aims at and that it is guided by a principled interpretation of the common good (Christiano, 2008). Only if this criterion is met can people conceive their social world as governed by their shared reason and themselves as politically autonomous.

The idea that the justification of the exercise of political power ought to be public implies that it has to be accessible from all (reasonable) points of view (Richardson, 2002; compare Christiano, 2004). Importantly, the idea that the exercise of political power has to be justified to all citizens over time underwent a major transformation: as the theory of deliberative democracy matured, the emphasis gradually shifted from mere ‘justifiability’ to real-world procedures of justification. This appears, for example, in Habermas’s critique of Rawls’s Political Liberalism, which objected that the latter disables citizens from reigniting ‘the radical democratic embers of the original position in the civic life of their society’ (Habermas, 1995: 128; compare Chambers, 2010; Erman, 2007; Forst, 2011; Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). Public deliberation must accordingly be understood as a process carried out by a mobilised and suitably motivated citizenry. In this sense, the public sphere is a space of deliberative agency. Deliberative agents engage in collective reason-giving and, in so doing, shape a shared perspective on their society.

This process of reason-giving gives expression to the twin ideals of political equality and autonomy. Citizens can regard the exercise of political power as legitimate because it is justified to them in a way that is accessible from their own viewpoints, thus respecting their equal standing; and because it is an outcome of their engagement with deliberative agency, it also instantiates the ideal of political autonomy. Cohen (1989: 21) describes this two-pronged publicity condition as follows:

Because the members of a democratic association regard deliberative procedures as the source of legitimacy, it is important to them that the terms of their association not merely be the results of their deliberation, but also be manifest to them as such. They prefer institutions in which the connections between deliberation and outcomes are evident to ones in which the connections are less clear (compare Benhabib, 1996: 70; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, 2004; Habermas, 1996).

It is worth underlining that this foundational commitment to political equality and autonomy includes a supervening epistemic dimension. For deliberative democrats, democracy ought not be the brute aggregation of given preferences, but a process of shaping preferences in the process of collective reason-giving. The outcomes of public deliberation are, moreover, supposed to aim at what may be called a cognitive standard of legitimacy. Decisions should be rational or reasonable, and public deliberation is a means to achieve that end. In other words, the process of public deliberation, carried out by a cognitively engaged citizenry, is a process of discovering and/or constructing reasons – to use a widely cited expression, ‘the forceless force of the better argument’ was to rule supreme in democratic decision-making. However, the better argument is also the outcome of that very process – a point familiar from the well-known critique that Rawls’s original position constitutes a monological device of reasoning (Habermas, 1990: 67; see also Habermas, 1995).

Importantly, the epistemic dimension of the ideal of deliberative democracy does not involve a claim about democracy’s ability to produce better outcomes, or outcomes closer to a presumed process-independent truth, than alternative decision procedures (on such a view, see Estlund, 2008; Landemore, 2012). What is correct, however, is that deliberation is a prerequisite to arriving at adequately informed decisions in the sense of taking into account a plurality of perspectives and the local knowledge of citizens.

The two dimensions, the fundamental normative one and the supervening epistemic one, come together in the following deliberative conception of political legitimacy that is based on the normative commitment to political equality and autonomy: (1) if the exercise of political power to the benefit of the common good is to satisfy the publicity condition, it has be justified in a public process of reason-giving, and (2) if promoting the common good requires public deliberation as a cognitive exercise, to engage in this process is itself (necessary, not sufficient) evidence that one’s actions aim at the common good.

Citizens and other political actors can gain confidence that their intended exercise of political power tracks the common good only if they expose their beliefs about the common good and about the consequences of their actions to public scrutiny. Because of that, it might be said that the epistemic dimension overlaps with the normative one: in order to make the aiming-at-the-common-good of one’s intended exercise of political power intelligible, one has to justify it in public deliberation. And because one has to make a sincere effort to harvest the epistemic benefits of public deliberation in order for one’s reasoning to reliably track one’s conception of common good, part of the evidence that one’s actions aim at the common good is to engage in public deliberation. Ideally, all citizens engage in this exercise in one form or another (e.g. Gutmann and Thompson, 1996).

In sum, we take the original ideal of deliberative democracy to be a participatory ideal that emphasises the active participation of citizens in public deliberation with the aim of influencing the exercise of political power in accordance with their conception of the common good. In order to achieve autonomy in the sense described above, citizens ought to engage in deliberation, exercising what we have called deliberative agency. We take it as axiomatic here that this is in principle a normatively attractive vision. But how can deliberative agency be exercised in the complex social and institutional landscape of modern societies?

Decentring Deliberative Agency: The Systemic Turn

The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has sought to provide an answer to this question. It looks to deliberation in society at large, asking how the myriad different sites of deliberation that exist across society interact with one another, and how these sites could be connected productively. Welcome though this novel approach is, existing theories of deliberative systems have a major limitation: by focusing mostly on the institutional features of deliberative systems and the political outcomes systems generate, they risk losing sight of the central role of deliberative agency in producing legitimate collective decisions.

One way of reading the nascent literature on deliberative systems is to interpret it as making the point that, given the complexities of modern political systems and the social world, there is no longer a principled way of combining a deliberative conception of legitimacy with a focus on citizen participation. Consider Mansbridge et al.’s (2012) programmatic statement ‘A systemic approach to deliberative democracy’. Mansbridge and her colleagues assume that ‘most democracies are complex entities in which a wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 2), and see such systems as functioning according to a logic of their own, with individual and collective agents enjoying very limited, and often contingent, influence over the system at large (see also Dryzek, 2012; Kuyper, 2015). Ideally, the different components of the system correct for each other’s deliberative deficiencies and promote normatively desirable system-level outcomes like more informed preferences or a greater inclusivity in decision-making – but whether and under what circumstances that actually happens remains unclear. Some even take this to imply that ‘deliberative’ outcomes could in principle be the result of a political process devoid of deliberation (Owen and Smith, 2015: 227).

The logic at work mirrors what Habermas, in his critique of Luhmann’s influential theory of social systems, described in terms of ‘subject-centred reason’ being ‘superseded by system-rationality’ (Habermas, 1988: 444). Autonomy, however, is a property of deliberating agents who shape their lives according to their ends and goals (compare Korsgaard, 1996). ‘Deliberative’ outcomes produced by system-rationality thus cannot count as an expression of the political autonomy of citizens, and cannot replace their input as deliberative agents. This is a dead-end if we care about citizens’ political autonomy as envisaged by the classic ideal of deliberative democracy. Without denying that it is important to remain alert to the diversity of communicative practices that are found in contemporary societies, a normative theory of deliberative systems requires an account of how deliberative agency can make itself visible, and how it can be politically consequential.

Note that a number of scholars of deliberative systems offer a potential solution to this problem. They propose to conceive deliberative systems not so much as an amorphous space in which numerous deliberative entities interact with each other in broadly unpredictable ways, but in terms of a functional division of labour between citizens, on the one hand, and representatives, experts and policy-makers, on the other. Accordingly citizens’ task is to ‘choose the basic aims’ a state should pursue while ‘experts in economics, sociology, law, political science, and the natural sciences’ decide on the means, discussing with ‘policy-makers, and administrators as well as interest group associations the extent to which the various aims of citizens can be met and what kinds of tradeoffs are necessary and how to achieve the aims’ (Christiano, 2012: 33 and 35; compare Chambers, 2012; Goodin, 2008; Habermas, 2006). This way of thinking about deliberative systems certainly offers a conception of politically autonomous citizens, albeit a limited one: it assigns to them the role of ‘ends-choosers’.

Does choosing the basic ends a state should pursue involve the exercise of deliberative agency as defined in the previous section? It certainly does not exclude it. Citizens may well participate in intense deliberations prior to choosing collective aims and goals, such that those aims and goals reflect what is sometimes called ‘considered public opinions’ (Chambers, 2012; Habermas, 2006). But deliberation is arguably not a normative requirement when it comes to choosing ends, either. Even scholars who think that genuine public deliberation among citizens is in principle desirable make abundantly clear that the main role of citizens – that is, choosing ends – relates to voting in the election campaign in which competing party platforms are presented. In an article that proved very influential for the systemic turn in deliberative theory, for example, Habermas (2006: 418, emphasis in original) emphasises that ‘the peripheral flows of political communication in civil society and the public sphere’ are connected to ‘the deliberative decision-making of political institutions at the centre’ only via ‘the formal vote and the actual opinion and will formation of individual voters’ (see also Chambers, 2012). This amounts to saying that a deliberative system can achieve its goals without the deliberative agency of citizens being linked to empowered sites of decision-making in a more systematic and continuous fashion. Instead of identifying a connecting tissue, the act of voting creates a preliminary division between citizens as deliberative agents and their representatives with public opinion serving only as a weak and contingent feedback mechanism that may or may not influence decision makers. This powerfully manifests that the deliberative systems literature dispenses with the idea that a deliberative conception of legitimacy is rooted in the commitments to political equality and a deliberative conception of political autonomy that extends beyond the act of voting – which is problematic if the argument of the previous section is endorsed.

Readers might wonder whether an approach to deliberative systems that reduces citizens to the role of ‘ends-choosers’ could still satisfactorily capture a commitment to political autonomy if citizens did actively engage in collective deliberation before choosing the aims and goals they want the state to pursue? It could not, for reasons to do with the way in which the division of labour between citizens and elites is conceived. The standard argument for why the deliberations of citizens and those of experts, policy-makers, administrators and so on should proceed on two separate tracks is that citizens simply lack the expertise (and time) to deliberate about what are adequate policy strategies for achieving their preferred goals (Christiano, 2012, 2015). Granted that there is some truth to this, one should be cautious with inferring from it that deliberation about means should exclude ordinary citizens altogether. We see two problems with this view. First, at a general level, it is doubtful whether deliberation about ends can meaningfully be separated from deliberation about means in the first place, for the desirability of a particular goal is always closely bound up with its practical feasibility and the potential costs that might arise in bringing it about (compare Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012: 816–817). Second, and even more pertinently, to bar citizens from deliberations about policy strategies is to risk designing policies that are insufficiently responsive to citizens’ demands and concerns, and one opens the door to giving powerful interests who have access to policy deliberations disproportional influence on decisions affecting the common good (which is a very real danger in the democracies of our age, see (Fung, 2006; Mair, 2013). To be truly the authors of their shared norms, citizens must therefore possess more immediate channels for exercising deliberative agency and to control elites. As we will argue in the next section, granting citizens more immediate deliberative control requires thoroughly participatory political parties.

An Alternative View: Systems Driven by Deliberative Agents

The conclusion to take from examining these arguments is that deliberative systems must be theorised with an eye to possible ways in which deliberative agency can make itself visible and be consequential in complex societies. How might citizens exercise deliberative agency in the messy democracies of our age? To what agents and institutional sites should one look? The response we offer here turns upon a political agent that is widely familiar from everyday politics but often met with scepticism and distrust. That agent is the political party, a wrongfully neglected one in deliberative theory. To be sure, some theorists of deliberative systems acknowledge that parties can make a positive contribution in a deliberative polity (e.g. Mansbridge et al., 2012: 6–7). But this is still a far cry from taking note of their unique role in facilitating the exercise of deliberative agency, fostering deliberation among citizens and linking their deliberations to binding decisions.

An adequate treatment of parties in deliberative systems must start by recognising that they were traditionally seen as the primary vehicles through which citizens can exercise political agency in a democracy. Earlier democratic theorists like Kelsen, Sartori, Schattschneider or Duverger believed that only parties can connect citizens to political power, providing what is sometimes called a ‘linkage’ (Lawson, 1988) between the wider public and empowered sites of decision-making. These scholars saw parties mainly as aggregators of shared preferences who bring those preferences to bear on policy. However, parties are not only preference aggregators; in what follows, we demonstrate (a) that parties can and do exercise deliberative agency themselves, (b) that their doing so is indispensable in a deliberative system that is not devoid of actual deliberation between citizens and (c) that they provide distinctive partisan fora that allow citizens to engage in deliberation with (like-minded) others. Making this crucial function of parties explicit, we are able to achieve what existing approaches to deliberative systems fail at: acknowledging the social and political complexities of contemporary societies while retaining the principled link between the deliberative political systems worthy of the name and the ideal of politically autonomous citizens.

Political Parties as Deliberative Agents

Let us begin by looking more closely at the claim that political parties are more than mere ‘preference-aggregators’.

It is often overlooked that parties perform a cognitively more demanding function than might at first appear: rather than ‘adding up’ the considered judgements of its members and supporters, they use their members’ judgements as building blocks in the construction of a coherent set of propositions reflecting distinct party ideologies. This point has been acknowledged already in Kelsen’s ([1929] 2013: 38–39, emphasis added) early treatise On the Essence and Value of Democracy, where much emphasis was laid on the ‘integration’ of citizens’ individual wills and values into ‘associations based on their various political goals’ (compare Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, 2017).

Importantly, integration is not mere addition; it involves trying to find ways in which potentially conflicting judgements can be combined into a larger whole. In the course of integrating individual judgements into coherent programmatic platforms, parties also integrate the technical expertise pertinent to the task of governing in policy proposals reflecting their general ideological outlook. This is not least so for practical reasons, for in order effectively to bring the political proposals parties advance to bear on the process of parliamentary law-making, those proposals must be more than general ideological claims: they must involve concrete plans as to how shared goals can be achieved. The outcome of such a process of integration is what may be described as a sufficiently coherent and specific conception of the common good (Ebeling, 2016, 2017).

To understand how all of this works in practice, consider the case of the British Labour Party. In the Labour Party, the wider party platform is usually determined in a process governed by the National Policy Forum (NPF), which is made up of representatives from the constituency parties, trade unions, the parliamentary party, the cabinet or shadow cabinet, several affiliated socialist societies, a number of councillors and representatives from the National Executive Committee. At the beginning of the process the NPF creates a number of Policy Commissions (PCs), each of which oversees a particular area of policy, reviewing the existing policy context and ‘consulting widely both inside and outside the party on the priorities for policy development’ (Labour Party, 1997: 14). In the next step, PCs report on the policy proposals they have received and on their internal deliberations about those proposals to the NPF. Once approved by the NPF, the proposals are sent to the party conference for further discussion and approval (Pettit, 2016). The final policy documents form the basis of the actual party manifesto. It is easy to see how this process promotes and facilitates the integration of a wide range of judgements and expertise from across the political system into a platform that represents a sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conception of the common good suitable for governing modern societies.

Reflecting on the process by way of which parties produce platforms also allows us to see how they facilitate the division of epistemic labour in democratic politics. Recall first that the main reason for why some exponents of the deliberative systems approach wish to separate the deliberations of citizens concerning the ends the state should pursue from the deliberations of experts concerning the appropriate means to pursue these ends is that the task of governing modern societies is incredibly complex. It requires a wealth of expert knowledge that ordinary citizens do not have at their disposal; or so the argument goes. However, to rely on experts only is to overlook two things: first that complexity is not limited to technical questions but extends to the normative domain, and second that groups of experts, however competent, will find it difficult to deal with the full range of issues at stake. Parties then appear better placed to deliver on citizens’ concerns than clusters of experts, first because they combine technical and normative deliberation, and second because they integrate a wide range of differently situated knowledge into their agendas.

Let us elaborate this point a bit more. When we reflect on the demands of justice on our political actions, we quickly realise that they are legion, and that the interrelations between single demands are very complex. Consider the task of responding to the demands of health care justice, the justice of education systems, of tax laws, justice towards minorities, future generations, and so on, with a coherent basic normative outlook. Given this normative complexity (with which even specialised philosophers struggle), it appears short-sighted simply to delegate the choosing of basic aims to epistemic communities of experts. The problem is compounded by the fact that, in order to gain a grip on the political regulation of society, the coherent basic normative outlook we are looking for has to take into account complexities in various fields of governance and engender policy coherence across the whole range of governmental action (Ebeling, 2016, 2017; Weinstock, 2015). Systems theorists are probably correct to assume that the task of generating such a coherent basic normative outlook is likely to overburden ordinary citizens – but it is also likely to overburden political elites and experts, who tend to be competent in one or a small number of fields (e.g. economics) but are hardly capable of connecting their practical or scientific expertise with relevant normative considerations in such a way as to generate a sufficiently coherent basic normative outlook that can be translated into a sufficiently specific set of policy proposals. One important reason for why parties manage so well to link normative and technical questions is that they can efficiently harvest the cognitive resources of both citizens and experts, and because they can do so across different policy fields and regional constituencies. As we shall explain more shortly, they achieve this by implicating citizens in their internal deliberations.

This important role in the division of epistemic labour in politics, however, is only one part of what makes parties deliberative agents which extend the deliberative agency of citizens to empowered sites of decision-making. That parties are not simply an agglomeration of citizens as individual deliberative agents but deliberative agents in their own right follows from the fact that the agent advocating sufficiently coherent and specific conceptions of the common good is usually the political party as a whole, or officials who speak in the name of the entire party, rather than in their capacity as individual party members. Indeed, parties often screen out candidates who refuse to speak for the party as a whole so as to present a coherent collective position to the citizenry, as the empirical literature on ‘partisan cues’ attests (Snyder and Ting, 2001; compare Druckman, 2001).

With respect to the central role party platforms assume in this conception of parties as deliberative agents, we should also note that multi-party electoral competition is a crucial instrument in meeting the publicity condition inherent in the original ideal of deliberative democracy. For it compels parties to publicly justify their platforms in a non-particularist and accessible fashion (White and Ypi, 2011). ‘Compel’ may here seem like a strong term, but it is certainly the case that multi-party competition creates constraints that pressure parties to engage in public justification, and indeed to advance public reasons in support of their proposals. As one prominent author observes, ‘[e]ven if the party politician is motivated by crude self-interest, his behavior must depart – if the constraints of the system [of electoral competition] are operative – from the motivation’ (Sartori, [1976] 2005: 22). The public sphere in other words creates an environment in which parties are constrained to present their political proposals as capable of serving the whole rather than a part.

Parties and Citizens’ Deliberations

From the point of view of citizens, parties are privileged sites of deliberation within deliberative systems because it is almost exclusively through them that their deliberative agency reaches into empowered spaces of decision-making. When citizens vote, they ordinarily vote for parties and their candidates (Gallagher et al., 2005: 72–73), and it is only through parties’ unique ‘executive function’ (White and Ypi, 2010) that the deliberation of citizens can become consequential across the various parts of a political system (Erman, 2012). Recall that some theorists of deliberative systems contend that there is no straightforward or obvious way in which citizens can render their deliberations consequential; systemic outcomes are largely contingent. Parties effectively reduce, if not eliminate, this contingency, for, as two party scholars note, ‘only parties are in a position to demonstrate in full the capacities of government for implementing public policies responsive to the democratic process’ (White and Ypi, 2010: 816).

Parties in fact exercise political power across the various arenas and agencies of political systems, even when they do so only indirectly through delegating responsibilities to and nominating the personnel in charge of ‘mandated decision-making bodies’, such as boards, committees and agencies (Erman, 2016: 17). Although parties exercise no direct control over the day-to-day affairs of these political actors and entities, the latter nevertheless remain accountable to governmental institutions, which are typically dominated by parties. This point often appears in the empirical literature on party transformation and organisational change: there, it is argued (sometimes with critical undertones) that parties increasingly tend to build functional networks with a wide range of bodies in order to exercise political power more effectively (Katz and Mair, 2009; Kopecky et al., 2012).

Importantly, political parties also provide resources for citizens to justify their exercise of political power to one another, thus supporting both their public and private deliberations. While citizens cannot reasonably be expected to have informed views on the full range of issues affecting the polity, they can point to parties as carriers of political expertise deserving of their epistemic trust, as well as draw on more particular judgements parties advance in order to support their own position in argumentative exchanges with others (Christiano, 2012; Druckman, 2001: 50; Ebeling, 2016). Empirical studies show that parties can act as reliable information proxies when they cultivate strong and recognisable party platforms that communicate their aims in a way that citizens find trustworthy (Lupia and McCubbins, 1998: 207). So again, much depends on the internal process of platform-building that we have already sketched. But there can be no doubt that, insofar as parties succeed at creating principled and coherent platforms, and justify these platforms publicly, they significantly aid and enrich citizens’ deliberations.

In this sense, parties may also be said to support a form of ‘epistemic egalitarianism’ that is conducive to equal respect in public deliberation. To explain, when citizens refer to party programmes as reflecting their principled stance on a given issue, this lends the considerations they put forth intellectual credibility qua being informed by the special expertise of parties: as Disch (2011: 101) puts it, relying on the judgements of parties, citizens ‘avoid basing their preferences on arbitrary information.’ This in turn allows citizens to regard each other as ‘epistemic peers’, at least with respect to the judgements informing their vote for a party (Ebeling, 2016, 2017). These epistemic grounds for respecting the judgements of others can help increase political equality among citizens. And since the realisation of equal respect is a core aim of deliberative democracy in general as well as one of the normative goals of deliberative systems (at least according to Mansbridge et al., 2010: 11), it provides another reason for valuing parties.

Parties not only assist the public political deliberation of citizens but also provide arenas of deliberation internally. Most importantly, they allow citizens to actively participate in the formation of the platforms we have mentioned at several stages of the article. Citizens can join parties as members or supporters and engage in internal deliberative procedures which shape the content of party platforms (e.g. party conventions, branch meetings, assemblies and protests). As empirical work on intra-party deliberation shows, these procedures are genuinely deliberative (although certainly not always sufficiently empowered within the party): they require weighing conflicting positions against each other and finding compromises that can be endorsed by all (Wolkenstein, in press). Party members are in other words ‘involved in a process of integration, wherein they think hard about how to fold the concerns of the party’s constituent groupings into a coherent set of policies’ (Weinstock, 2015). Kelsen’s integration argument resurfaces here: integrating individual preferences and normative commitments into larger agendas aimed at influencing the common will is in and of itself a deliberative exercise (compare Ebeling, 2016).

By offering manifold fora of intra-party deliberation, political parties provide an institutional frame that allows citizens to engage in the continuous shaping of a shared perspectives on the issues facing them in politics. These partisan fora invite citizens to work continuously on a shared interpretation of the common good in concert with like-minded others. This temporal perspective is important because unlike isolated deliberative events like mini-publics and other forms of participatory governance (Fung, 2003), partisan fora engage their members in ongoing public deliberation about a wide range of political issues and the tradeoffs between them over an extended period of time. They encourage citizens to think hard about long-term political strategies in a changing political environment, taking into account previously made decisions and their impacts on society.

One way of looking at all of this is to say that parties promote an internal ‘deliberative cycle’, in which citizens (1) produce political platforms through the party’s internal deliberations which in turn (2) orient and inform public and inter-party deliberation and (3) can be returned to and revised in the next instance of internal deliberation over the party’s policy stances and general direction. (Recall the procedure used by the British Labour party to shape its manifesto that we have outlined above: this is an ongoing process in which positions are formulated, discussed, tested, discussed again, reformulated and so on in a cyclical fashion.) These ongoing internal deliberations serve three normatively important functions that directly connect to the broader picture of parties we are painting here. Let us take them in turn.

First, as already indicated, internal deliberations give party platforms coherence. The point to note here is simply that party platforms acquire the ‘sufficient coherence’ we have singled out as one of their key characteristics in internal deliberative procedures where the potentially conflicting positions of party members (and of the members of party-affiliated organisations) are balanced against each other with the aim of finding a jointly acceptable position. Empirical research on this process indicates that finding compromises of this sort can be challenging, since there is often plenty of internal disagreement over policy priorities and the appropriate means of achieving collective goals, but insofar as the party’s capacity effectively to act as a political agent hinges on its ability to articulate a shared platform, all participants to deliberation in principle have an incentive to compromise (Pettit, 2016).

Second, internal deliberations allow parties to efficiently make use of the cognitive resources of citizens and experts alike. Recall our claim that parties are key carriers of political expertise in modern democracies. To fully understand why, we need to look to parties’ internal deliberative procedures. The process of integration that gives rise to party platforms is not only about achieving compromise between conflicting value judgements, but also about pooling the differently situated knowledge of a wide range of party members (transmitted by delegates), policy-making elites and experts (who work for the party on in party-affiliated organisations), and deliberating how that knowledge can be used in order for the party to realise jointly defined ends. As mentioned earlier, this involves bundling the relevant political expertise and translating it into concrete policy proposals that do not conflict with one another. What we also have here is the convergence of deliberation about ends and means in the same deliberative agent.

Third and relatedly, by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in their internal deliberations, parties connect citizens to political elites and experts. Intra-party deliberations can prevent the troubling separation of citizens and elites which some deliberative systems theorists envision (see above). For they convene citizens (who have joined the party or are consulted by it in some way), policy-making elites (e.g. party executives) and experts, allowing them to engage in a give and take of reasons aimed at a collective decision. In party conferences, for example, party members can directly deliberate with the party leadership, exercise voice, and indeed give ‘the leadership a run for their money’, as Pettitt’s (2007: 246) study of deliberation in party conferences in Great Britain and Denmark demonstrates. While in practice these internal deliberative bodies are of course susceptible to domination by elites, in principle they can link ordinary citizens to empowered sites of decision-making in important ways (compare Teorell, 1999; Wolkenstein, 2016). This is why they were established in the first place.

Objections

It has been our argument that political parties can make possible the consequential exercise of deliberative agency in complex deliberative systems. In these final paragraphs, let us consider three important challenges to that argument. The first objection is addressed to our emphasis on the classic ideal of deliberative democracy. Before the turn to deliberative systems, the classic ideal has undergone major revisions. There was widespread agreement that the classic ideal is ‘insufficient for a polity ideally based on diversity in opinions and interests’, and most theorists have come to endorse expanded accounts of deliberation which depart from many of the presumptions underpinning traditional accounts of deliberative democracy (e.g. Mansbridge et al., 2010: 66). In light of this, one might wonder whether our account rests on an outdated vision of deliberative democracy?

This worry is plausible given recent theoretical developments. But even though contemporary deliberative theorists have largely moved away from the language of ‘the common good’ and ‘reason’ that was so central in many classic accounts of deliberative democracy, prior to the systemic turn they have certainly not relinquished the notion of deliberative agency (Mansbridge et al., 2010). Before the shift to systems, scholars have focused mainly on the question of how theories of deliberative democracy can accommodate a plurality of ways of exercising deliberative agency; the theoretical innovations that followed involved admitting different forms of speech and accepting that the ‘very goal of the common good admits of several meanings’ (Mansbridge et al., 2010: 68). The multiple revisions the deliberative ideal has undergone before the systemic turn may therefore be seen as a variation on the theme of deliberative agency, which was originally introduced and defended in classic accounts of deliberative democracy. And since these revisions are not directly relevant for the argument of this paper, it makes sense to concentrate on the classic ideal.

A second objection states that there are other agents who are more effective than parties at enabling citizens’ exercise of deliberative agency. Deliberative mini-publics and other forms of ‘democratic innovations’ (Smith, 2009), for example, are the most reliable institutions for promoting the participation of citizens in genuinely deliberative procedures, and research shows that they can be fruitfully coupled with various sites of elite deliberation (e.g. legislative committees) (Hendriks, 2016). Similarly, social movements can be sites of deliberation in their own right and exert an important influence on the public sphere (Della Porta, 2005). Why should we think parties are special?

It is possible to temper this objection by pointing out that while mini-publics and social movements are able to promote citizens’ exercise of deliberative agency in a number of important ways, they are unable to do so in all the ways that parties do. For instance, mini-publics may well provide the best settings for thoroughly deliberative encounters among citizens and even influence decisions if they are designed accordingly, but they cannot provide comprehensive political platforms that allow citizens to confront each other as epistemic equals in their public and private deliberations. Likewise, social movements may effectively reduce the cognitive burden on ordinary citizens and give structure to public debates, but they lack the executive capacity of parties, that is, the capacity to implement public policies responsive to citizens’ deliberations in a continuous and coordinated fashion. As two scholars note, ‘[t]he most they [i.e. social movements] will be able to project […] is the capacity to influence the governmental agenda – not the capacity to design it and execute it independently’ (White and Ypi, 2010: 818, emphasis in original). So without denying that deliberative mini-publics and social movements can be important enablers of deliberative agency, they lack many of the enabling functions unique to parties and their ability to render its exercise consequential.

Granted that parties are better enablers of deliberative agency than social movements or deliberative mini-publics, a final objection asks, is the reality of parties in established democracies not completely out of sync with the ideal we have just been alluding to? Are parties not a mere shadow of their former or ideal selves, of the parties Kelsen, Sartori, Schattschneider and others so enthusiastically wrote about? And if this is the case, how could parties possibly exercise deliberative agency?

This concern is critical in light of the wealth of empirical literature documenting the failure of current parties to perform the democratically important functions that were traditionally attributed to them. Scholars have highlighted parties inability to stand up for principled alternatives as well as party elites’ suppression of the kind of intra-party deliberation that we treat as one of the hallmarks of political parties as enablers of deliberative agency (Katz and Mair, 2009; Mair, 2013). Yet the argument we are trying to make here is a normative one. Of course, contemporary parties have many failures and reflect parties as we have conceived them only imperfectly. But we know of no other agent that is capable of forming an institutionalised and lasting linkage between the public and empowered sites of decision-making. We know of no other agent who has the potential of promoting political platforms that represent sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conceptions of the common good, and of implicating citizens in the construction of these platforms. With this in mind, our argument should be read not so much as an assessment of the status quo, but as an attempt to reclaim what is valuable about parties in relation to deliberative systems. Indeed, if our argument is endorsed, the state of political parties in a particular political system may be a key indicator of the ‘deliberativeness’ of that system.

Conclusion

Our ambition in this article has been to show how deliberative agency can make itself visible in deliberative systems, and how it can be consequential. The argument we have advanced is that political parties provide can facilitate the exercise of deliberative agency, cultivating and structuring deliberation among citizens and linking their deliberations to norms and policies in a participatory fashion. The distinctive normative conception of parties we have defended goes considerably beyond the understanding of parties that is typically found in the literature on deliberative systems and deliberative democracy more generally, conceiving parties both as connectors of normative and technical expertise, and as participatory channels that allow citizens to give collective shape to their individual political commitments. This refined normative understanding of parties is arguably demanding – but it is by no means hopelessly idealistic, being as it is grounded in a plethora of empirical observations indicating that well-functioning parties can indeed perform the different functions we have ascribed to them. Nor is there anything in and of itself wrong with being demanding: after all, the notion of deliberative agency that is so central to the project of deliberative democracy is itself a very demanding ideal. And if we have reason to care about citizens’ capacity to exercise deliberative agency, we also have reason to invest our efforts in ensuring that parties are able to do the deliberative work we have described here.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Martin Ebeling studied philosophy and political science at the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Potsdam and at New York University. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt. His research encompasses the normative significance and epistemology of political disagreement, the role of political parties, contemporary democratic theory more broadly, and its forerunners in the history of ideas. He is the author of Conciliatory Democracy. From Deliberation Toward a New Politics of Disagreement (Palgrave, 2017), which advocates a novel conception of democracy with the idea of epistemic conciliation at its centre.

Fabio Wolkenstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Justitia Amplificata, a research centre for political theory and philosophy associated with the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Freie Universität (FU) Berlin. He works on several themes in democratic theory, including political parties, representation, and the democratisation of the EU. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Political Science Review, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Common Market Studies, European Journal of Political Theory, and Party Politics, and he is currently working on a book manuscript on the reform of party democracy.

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