Deliberative Systems Theory and Citizens’ Use of Online Media: Testing a Critical Theory of Democracy on a High Achiever

Introduction

Deliberative systems theory has recently attracted substantial scholarly attention. The theory, developed to assess real world democracies ‘at the large scale’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012), introduces a new phase in the evolution of theories of deliberative democracy, and is initially promising. Based on some of the central moral intuitions that underlie democratic commitments, deliberative systems theory seems to formulate normative demands on a democratic rule of government suitable for societies characterized by a ‘reasonable pluralism’ of values (Christensen and Holst, 2017; Rawls, 1993). At the same time, this theory seemingly fares well in striking a balance between ideal requirements and feasibility. Normative political theories are frequently accused of setting up unfeasible ideals; unrealizable for any actually existing political community, even under the most favourable conditions (List and Valentini, 2018). However, deliberative systems theory is neither obviously idealized, nor so ‘concessive’ (Estlund, 2008), that it fails to provide a corrective to the actual institutions and practices of democratic politics. The theory seems thus to be a good candidate for a critical theory of democracy that could guide us in pinpointing democratic problems based on sound and non-utopian assessment standards.

The systems turn needs, however, to be scrutinized more closely. Based on recent debates on ‘feasibility’ in normative political theory (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012), and with a focus on the normative role of the public sphere and how to assess citizens’ online media use from a democratic perspective, this article contributes to a refinement of deliberative systems theory. Online media use is a democratic practice with increasing salience, and it is a fair expectation to any normative democratic theory that it also helps us to conceptualize and assess political behaviour in digital domains. The article reviews recent contributions on the role of the public sphere and online democracy from a deliberative systems perspective, and identifies four limitations: (1) an incomplete account of the public sphere’s epistemic function, (2) too rough interpretations of participatory levels, (3) shortcomings in the understanding of online media, and (4) a context-insensitive approach to policy reform. Addressing these weaknesses, the article argues for a revised version of deliberative systems theory, and highlights how this revised version is not only more in line with our intuitions of good democratic practice, but also makes the theory more feasible.

However, to be fully convincing, revisions of a theory intended for the evaluation of real-world cases should also matter in practice: It should make a difference for assessments of concrete political behaviour and organization whether deliberative systems theory are applied with or without our amendments. In addition, such concrete assessments can make us aware of over- or under-idealized assessment standards. This article concentrates on testing for over-idealization, relying on online media use in Norway as a test case.

The analysis of the Norwegian case shows not only that the revisions have practical significance, but also that they contribute to make deliberative systems theory and the implications of this theory more compatible with existing democracy research and assessments of democratic quality. We take such compatibility to be a prima facie indicator of appropriate feasibility. Specifically, applying our revised criteria, we find the online sphere in Norway to have a range of democratic credentials, in accordance with what we would expect in a country ranked as number one on international democracy indexes. Still, central challenges remain, such as significant social stratifications in media use and how to ensure online media’s informational function, reminding us that even ‘best practice’ may depart substantively from our ideals, even in their feasible version. This calls for democratic reforms that work with existing path-dependencies, and we exemplify what this can imply in the Norwegian setting.

The next part of the article briefly presents the debate on feasibility in normative political theory, and introduces the theory of deliberative systems as a promising candidate of a theory that is at the same time critical and feasible. Still, this theory has some blind spots in its approach to the role of the public sphere, and to online democratic practice in particular. The third part of the article elaborates on the four identified shortcomings, and spells out the corresponding elements of a revised systems approach. Against this background, in the fourth section we review studies of the use of online media in Norway, focusing especially on the role of social media (for a definition, see Moe, 2016). We show that our theoretical revisions make a difference compared to a un-amended version, and that our revised version is likely to have made deliberative systems theory more relevant and applicable. A final section concludes and highlights some limitations of our endeavour.

Between Idealism and Realism: The Deliberative Systems Approach

Normative political theory has a mixed reputation among social scientists. Many would agree that this branch of theorizing offers stringent conceptualizations of ideal requirements. Yet, empirically oriented scholars often complain that normative theories disregard feasibility constraints and lack a proper understanding of the prerequisites for institution building, consolidation, and political reform (e.g. Rothstein, 1998). Accordingly, when social scientists assess institutional developments and policies, they often sidestep discussions in normative political theory, and instead consult alternative approaches to evaluation and policy recommendation, such as ‘evidence-based policy-making’ (see Cairney, 2016 for an overview), ‘best practice’ approaches, or incremental theories of ‘appropriate’ reform (see Olsen, 2017 for a recent example). The resulting analyses and proposals may have many merits, but a general problem is that normative standards often remain implicit or unaccounted for.

We take it that attempts to develop and improve on normative political theory as ‘non-ideal theory’ are more promising. Non-ideal theory provides explicit accounts of normative standards, but is at the same time adapted to be relevant and applicable under real world conditions (Swift and White, 2008). ¹ Specifically, our point of departure is the theory of deliberative systems, suitable for our purposes with its focus on democratic institutions and practices. Arguably, providing an at the same time ‘normative and empirical account of the democratic process as a whole’ has been the point for deliberative democratic theory all along (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 24). However, in their influential manifesto for a systemic approach to deliberative democracy, Mansbridge et al. (2012: 25f) describe three phases in the development of deliberative democracy theory. A first, more ‘ideal theory’ phase was concerned with elaborating and justifying the general principles of deliberation. The second phase introduced empirical studies (see Carpini et al., 2004 for an overview). Political scientists searched for traces of deliberation in political institutions, and tested deliberative potentials in experimental settings (e.g. Fishkin and Luskin, 2005). Attention was also given to the role of citizens in the public sphere. In the early 2000s, political communication researchers turned to online discussion forums. Their studies tended to focus on the deliberative qualities of such discussions (e.g. Albrecht, 2006; Graham and Witschge, 2003), and on how other forms of communication besides deliberation matter (e.g. Black, 2009). Communication scholars also studied forum designs, considering features that could heighten deliberative performance (e.g. Wright and Street, 2007). Later, interest turned to social media – overwhelmingly to Facebook (Stoycheff et al., 2017), and Twitter (e.g. Moe and Larsson, 2013). The idea was to study the extent to which citizens actively participated in public deliberation through new means of mediated communication. Interesting findings aside, an overall limitation of empirical studies of the second phase was its focus on deliberation in more or less isolated instances, whereas insights into the effects for the overall performance of democracy remained underexplored. Moreover, to the extent that findings from these studies informed policy recommendations, they were bound to be limited to a concern for maximizing the deliberative potential of each case.

The systemic approach, then, represents a third phase, aiming to re-connect the field to questions of large-scale societies. As a whole, a deliberative system is defined to ‘[encompass] a talk-based approach to political conflict and problem-solving – through arguing, demonstrating, expressing, and persuading’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 4–5). Such systems should furthermore fulfil three functions: the ethical function of promoting ‘mutual respect among citizens’, the participatory function of promoting ‘an inclusive process of collective choice’, and the epistemic function of ensuring ‘reasonably sound decisions’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 11–12). Moreover, all functions are considered equally decisive for system-level legitimacy, but individual processes or institutions need not fulfil all three functions equally well. The idea is rather to develop an adequate division of labour where deficits in one part of the system can be compensated for in other parts of the system. Conflicts can, however, occur between the deliberative system’s different functions, not least between the participatory and the epistemic functions (e.g. Chambers, 2017): In concrete cases, there can be tensions between including all affected and ensuring decision making maximally based on ‘facts and logic’ (Christiano, 2012).

The systems turn has inspired a range of studies, including of practices in the public sphere. Several studies look at civil society groups, analysing how social change organizations use different communication strategies when interacting with the government (Dodge, 2009), or discussing phenomena along the boundaries of the deliberative system such as civil disobedience and other types of disruptive protests (Smith, 2016). The role of non-deliberative modes of communication, such as toxic and vilifying narratives, has also received attention (e.g. Boswell, 2015). Case studies have scrutinized how public discourse on specific policy issues link together with formal parts of the system through processes of meaning or information transmittance from the citizens to the core (e.g. Boswell et al., 2016; Engelken-Jorge, 2018). Further attention has also been given to the role of ‘mini publics’ as intermediaries between the general citizenry and formalized policy-making (e.g. Bohman, 2012; Lafont, 2015). Theoretically, the emphasis has been on how the public sphere best contributes to a deliberative system when left as a sphere of ‘unrestricted communication’ with substantial independence from the spaces of decision making, broad participatory credentials, and freed from undue influences from elite and expert biases and framing power (Chambers, 2017; Erman, 2016: 78; Landwehr, 2015).

Citizens’ Role in the Online Public Sphere: Improving on a Promising Approach

There can be no doubt that the third phase of scholarship on deliberative democracy generally improves on some of the shortcomings of the previous phases. It continues the valuable turn to empirical studies of the second phase and the focus on developing deliberative democracy as non-ideal theory. As promised, scholarship of the third phase also concentrates more committedly on implications for democracies at ‘the large scale’, instead of approaching cases of deliberative democratic practice in isolation from its system surroundings. Valuable empirical insights have been provided, and theoretical interrogations have explicated and discussed normative assumptions and implications that were underspecified and under-problematized in the initial formulation of the systems perspective.

Still, when we look at the third phase’s analyses of the public sphere, and of online media use in particular, some shortcomings remain. First, the theoretical elaborations of the public sphere tend to have a certain participatory bias especially vis-à-vis epistemic dimensions. Contributors have rightly directed our attention to how technocratic orientations and elites’ framing power can compromise the democratic qualities of public sphere deliberations (Erman, 2016; Landwehr, 2015). However, surprisingly, given phase 1’s emphasis on the twin participatory and epistemic justification of deliberative democracy (for a classical formulation, see Habermas, 1996), and how empirical studies of deliberation in different public spheres and civil society contexts include a range of epistemic parameters (for overviews, see Bächtiger et al., 2018: 273–460), theoretical accounts have tended to underplay the decisive epistemic function of the public sphere to ensure sufficiently ‘truth-sensitive’ political processes, and the need for a cognitive division of labour, and the active role of experts, ² not only in government or as government advisors (Christiano, 2012), but also in the public sphere. Arguably, this underplaying goes against the spirit of the Habermasian public sphere model, where problems are sluiced from citizens at the periphery of society towards the decision-making entities in the centre, and where experts play a key role in the process from the initial problem-identification among citizens, towards a justifiable political issue (Chambers, 2017: 274).

Second, not only is there a bias in favour of the participatory function, relative to the epistemic function, several of the third phase’s analyses of public sphere deliberations fail to consider how participatory features of the public sphere must be seen in the context of participatory features elsewhere in the deliberative system. Here, the mainstream appears to contradict one of the key tenets of deliberative systems theory. Surely, from a systems perspective, scores on particular indicators, measuring, for example, the inclusiveness and representativeness of online deliberations, must take into account the actual participatory levels on other arenas (in civil society, governance structures, the mass media etc.), and the fact that participatory patterns vary immensely between countries and regions. Measures should moreover be sensitive to the specificities of institutional features. This requires an ‘emic approach’ that considers ‘culture and system specific indicators’ (e.g. Wessler, 2008: 9), ³ and that evaluates scores on media participation indicators, for example, low online participation, while looking at participation in other channels. However, despite an impressive state of the art in studies of deliberative democracy (Bächtiger et al., 2018), the overall impression is still that such ‘emic’ concerns and a consistent systemic point of view that considers participation in one sub-system in relation to participation in other sub-systems, are underdeveloped, or play a secondary role, for example, in studies of online deliberations (see the overview in Strandberg and Grönlund, 2018).

A further problem is how the participatory function of the public sphere is to connect to mass-mediated public communication. While the identification of a problem might come from an individual in the periphery, the sluicing towards the centre, as well as the input from experts, tends in existing contributions to be interpreted as something to be handled primarily if not exclusively by mediated communication aimed at the public at large (see even Chambers, 2017). Certainly, in order to amass a legitimate public opinion in a large, complex society, such mass mediation is needed. Yet, at the same time, such a model risks downplaying the political communication among citizens, in private and public settings, where they interpret, discuss, argue over, ridicule or praise the mediated messages they are exposed to. If we are to properly assess the role of citizens in a public sphere according to a Habermasian sluice-model, we should also acknowledge the participatory practices that are interwoven in people’s everyday lives, be it simply informal political talk, or different kinds of civil society involvement (Verba and Nie, 1972). Ignoring the different civic engagements that often happen in parallel with the reception of mass-mediated public communication can easily lead us to exaggerate the role of elites and experts in the formation of opinions and will.

Third, as for the mediated public communication, including the use of online media, the third phase has inadequately acknowledged how such media is used for multiple purposes, and prematurely ranked ‘speaking’ above ‘listening’, and participation above information-seeking. As we have argued, empirical research in earlier as well as later work on deliberative democracy, has aptly highlighted the varied shapes of actors’ communication. Yet, there is still an over-emphasis on the speakers – those partaking in more or less deliberative communication. Facing the digital age, researchers have tended to spend energy on conceptualizing the new ‘active’ modes of using media – the making, participating, playing, remixing, and producing. The result has been creative terms such as ‘produser’ (Bruns, 2008), while those using online media to read and watch are still labelled ‘lurkers’ (e.g. Baker, 2018). However, we would argue that listening is an equally important part of deliberation. Not only is communication meaningless without a recipient; any process towards better understanding and building of opinions requires listening. Listening is also needed for the ‘internal-reflective’ aspects of deliberation, the ‘weighing of reasons for and against a course of action [. . .] within the head of each individual’ (Goodin, 2000: 81). Importantly, the value of listening depends on the quality of the information – whether it is freely accessible and based on sound arguments and facts.

To get at a more nuanced view of how citizens partake in the formation of collective agendas and public opinion, we should thus distinguish between those communicating a message and those listening, or acting as an audience. In practice, and especially in online media, these two aspects can take many forms and be somewhat challenging to discern, but we can generally distinguish between political expression or participation, on the one hand, and informational use, on the other. The former includes comments to political actors’ websites, expressions of support (such as ‘liking’ in social media), or the sharing of political information. The latter contains news consumption, and exposure to other forms of more or less explicitly political information.

Moreover, even early studies found connections between information seeking online and political participation (e.g. Shah et al., 2005). More recent studies have focused on social media, and meta-analyses conclude that there is a positive and significant relationship between informational use of social media and political participation (Boulianne, 2009; Skoric et al., 2016). Boulianne (2015) studied Canadian youth and found consumption of news in social and other online media to increase civic awareness, which in turn affected political participation, including voting. A study using British survey data from 2001, 2005 and 2010 found similar patterns, highlighting that informational use of online media ‘is positively and consistently associated with political talk for those lower in political interest’ (Bimber et al., 2015). Gil de Zúñiga et al. (2014) analysed U.S. national panel data to look for effects of social media news consumption for political participation. Their findings concerning offline participation (including attending rallies, talking to public official in person and attending town hall meetings) indicate direct effects from such social media news use. Recent studies have also focused on a particular aspect of informational use of social media, namely the accidental or incidental kind. A survey-based study from Germany, Italy and the UK found accidental exposure to political information in social media to be positively correlated to political participation online, and that this correlation is stronger among the less interested (Valeriani and Vaccari, 2016). ⁴ Such studies tell us that a nuanced concept of the role of the citizen in the public sphere needs to pay attention to the informational uses of online media.

Fourth, even if the systems approach clearly encourages scholarship to formulate reform initiatives and policy recommendations to improve on democratic credentials, prescriptions tend to be general and disregard existing institutional prerequisites and path-dependencies in the system to be reformed. The literature on online deliberation specifically, have tended to focus on general features of online participants’ ‘motivations’ in combination with rather abstract inputs to deliberation-inducing ‘design of deliberative settings’ (Strandberg and Grönlund, 2018: 366–370, see also Dryzek et al., 2019). This underplays how not only participants’ ‘motivations’ but also the proper ‘design’ of deliberative bodies and procedures will often vary across polities and over time. Studies that work comparatively, and that interestingly rely on institutional and contextual variables when accounting for participatory patterns online, have so far engaged less with implications of such comparisons for policy recommendations (e.g. Engelken-Jorge, 2018). Arguably, this state of affairs can be connected to a more long-standing lack of attention to the role of feasibility constraints in discussions of viable policies. Theorists who have given this issue proper systematic treatment, emphasize, however, the importance of taking into account the availability and stability of different ‘institutional schemes’, and propose reforms based on the comparative merits of these schemes, rather than introducing blueprints of design solutions (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012; see also Lindvall, 2017; Rothstein, 1998; Sen, 2009; Waldron, 2016). The systems turn in deliberative democracy has yet to fully integrate such insights.

From these four critiques, we can derive a revised version of deliberative systems theory that

Arguably, this revised version of the theory is more in line with our intuitions of good democratic practice as a practice that does not disregard ‘facts and logic’, and that requires of citizens that they ‘listen’ and seek information and not only ‘speak’ their opinions. Highlighting the epistemic demands on a well-functioning public sphere, our amendments also seem to bring the systems turn more in touch with acute challenges connected to ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth politics’ (see also Dahlgren, 2018). Furthermore, the revised version is more consistent with the systems impetus, and with features of the theory of deliberative democracy in its original formulation. As such, it remains a normative democratic theory that is critical and pluralism-sensitive, but, importantly, increased consistency in this case also contributes to increased feasibility. That practices of the public sphere are interwoven, and participation in different political sub-system interrelated, are among the basic contentions of the deliberative democracy approach, accentuated by the systems turn, and contentions like these were what made this approach attractive from a feasibility perspective in the first place. Finally, our theory version is better attuned with research findings about what facilitates democratic practice, including how online information seeking might induce political participation, and our knowledge of effective policy reform. This increases the real-world relevance of our amended theory, and brings it more in line with feasibility considerations.

Online Media Use in Norway: Testing Practical Significance and Feasibility

However, revisions of a theory intended for scrutiny of real-world cases should also have practical significance. In what follows, we show that our amendments make a difference for the assessment of a concrete case. We argue moreover that the changes in assessments that our theoretical revisions result in, are sound. Generally, a normative theory is strengthened if it turns out that assessments of a particular case derived from the theory are compatible with our broader set of moral intuitions, ⁵ but concrete assessments can also make us aware of over- or under-idealized assessment standards. Here, we concentrate on the latter, and on testing for feasibility or over-idealization. In this endeavour, we take it that assessments derived from a valid normative, but non-ideal democratic theory that deviates largely and in ways that are hard to account for from available qualified empirical evaluations of democratic quality and from general knowledge of conditions that likely facilitate democratization, is prima facie over-idealized.

Our testing case is online media use in Norway, a case well suited for our purpose. Norway is a rich country with a long popular democratic tradition and a comparatively educated electorate, few major social conflicts, and a well-functioning civil service (Engelstad et al., 2018; Knutsen, 2017). It ranks at the top of international human development and gender equality indexes, corruption levels are low, and levels of social trust relatively high (Rothstein, 2011). As for the Norwegian media system, it is characterized by early development of editorial freedom, active state regulation based on the arm’s length principle, and relatively low levels of political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). These are all factors generally conducive to democratization and to the development of a relatively well-functioning sphere of mediatized political communication, and unsurprisingly, Norway is a consistent high achiever on international democracy rankings. ⁶ This does not imply that the Norwegian political sphere is unlikely to suffer from non-trivial democratic deficits. Still, univocal negative assessments of the quality of Norwegian democracy are assessments that depart largely and in ways that are hard to explain from reasonable expectations, and we assume that theoretical approaches producing such assessments are prima facie questionable.

Below we present research findings relevant for assessing the practical significance and feasibility of the revised version of the deliberative systems approach. The presentation is organized around our four points of theoretical critique, and mainly based on our own recent and ongoing studies based on original data. A primary source is a survey conducted among a representative sample of the Norwegian adult population, undertaken in December 2017 (N = 2050) ⁷ . The survey covers use of different media, but has a particular focus on the role of social media (see Hovden, in press; Kantar TNS, 2017; Moe et al., in press for details). The survey provides us with basic descriptive statistics on social media use and attitudes towards the role of online and social media for public debate. When relevant, we also draw on other recent empirical work on social media use and developments in different spheres of Norwegian democracy.

Conclusion

With a focus on the normative role of the public sphere, and how to assess citizens’ online media use from a democratic perspective, this article has scrutinized deliberative systems theory with an emphasis on feasibility considerations. We have argued that recent contributions to the development of this theory (1) underplay the epistemic features of the public sphere and the role of expert media users, (2) paradoxically fall short of interpreting participatory levels from a systems perspective, (3) have a limited conception of the role of social and online media, and (4) take an over-abstract approach to policy reform that is unlikely to be effective. The article has on the basis of these four theoretical critiques offered a revised version of the deliberative systems theory, and we have argued that this version seems to strike a better balance between ideal requirements and feasibility. This contention, however, needs better grounding. Relying on a concrete case – online democracy in Norway – the article has shown that our critical points have practical significance, but it also tested for over-idealization with and without our theory revisions. It turns out that the amended version of the deliberative systems approach produces a diagnosis of Norwegian online democracy more in line with sensible expectations to a known high achiever. We take this to prima facie indicate feasibility.

Our endeavour has limitations. First, we have taken the deliberative systems approach to be promising, and suggested a way to refine it further. Yet, our article does not offer a full theoretical assessment of this approach, its pros and cons, and its merits relative to other contributions to normative, non-ideal democratic theory. There is also an ongoing debate on the merits of democratic and ‘political realism’ (for the most recent round, see Maynard and Worsnip, 2018, with a reply by Jubb, 2019; for a recent overview, see Rossi and Sleat, 2014) a programme for doing normative political theory with the stated aim of developing a way of doing ‘empirically informed critique of social and political phenomena’ (Prinz and Rossi, 2017: 348) that better addresses ‘the issue of feasibility’, but that at the same time take political theorizing beyond the confines of non-ideal theory as standardly conceived (Rossi and Sleat, 2014: 692). Given our concerns in this article, a review of this debate would be worthwhile, but has to be left for another time.

Second, we have argued that our theoretical amendments make the systems approach more feasible, and that the approach in its un-amended version seems to have built in over-idealized assessment standards. Yet, the question of how to strike a proper balance between ideal requirements and feasibility considerations, needs closer theoretical scrutiny and to be considered on the basis of more empirical cases. Third, the provided assessment of Norwegian online democracy is tentative. The analysis of our survey data is at an early stage, and we need more studies of central issues, for example on the epistemic quality of the contributions of expert online users.

Still, we believe our article contributes to highlighting the promises of the deliberative systems approach as a non-concessive, yet applicable branch of non-ideal normative theorizing. However, we have also argued that the approach needs non-trivial revisions for it to reach its fuller potential. The provided theoretical critique is particular tailored towards the challenge of assessing online media use, a democratic practice with increasing salience. Our critical points on the need to include both participatory and epistemic criteria, analyse participatory patterns in context, on the role of information seeking and ‘deliberation within’, and so on, have, however, also relevance for assessments of democratic quality more broadly. Our article furthermore gives feasibility considerations, an issue often disregarded in discussions of normative political theory, a consistent focus, and offers an example of a case based testing of feasibility, where we systematically utilize the features of a high achiever. Our endeavour on this point, suggests a more general method for feasibility testing that deserves to be tried out more and further developed.

Finally, our article does not intend to offer anything close to a full assessment of Norwegian online democracy, but to provide sufficient information to illustrate our theoretical discussions’ practical significance and substantiate our prima facie assessment of feasibility. On the way, we have also indicated issues where our knowledge is scattered; this suggests paths for further research. Generally, we have tried with this article to make normative political theory and social science research fronts come together. Such cross-disciplinary cooperation is still too scarce, but in the spirit of deliberative systems theory and needed for its further development, testing and application.