Deliberative democracy in the age of serial crisis

Introduction

When polarized opinion turns democratic norms into a source of paralysis, too many voters are driven to strongmen who have no use for such principles other than as a veneer to decorate their grab for power. But democracy is not helpless. Institutions struggling with polarization must innovate. To stay true to their democratic justification, they should adapt by better exercising reasoned disagreement, never by silencing it.

Deliberative democracy has now made it into the mainstream. This statement was not taken from the pages of a book on normative political theory. It was published in the opinion pages of the Financial Times (11 August 2019) in a statement by the editorial board entitled ‘Deliberative democracy is just what politics needs’. When once it would have been remarkable for a broadsheet to advance the case for deliberative democracy, opinion pieces proffering similar conclusions now appear regularly in major publications. ‘Deliberative democracy may help to break the deadlock’, said the editorial of The Guardian (21 December 2018) in reference to Brexit. A former MP wrote an op-ed in The Hindu declaring the enrichment of the country’s deliberative democracy as the essence of the mandate in the 2019 Indian elections (28 January 2019). The South China Morning Post published letters to the editor calling for a citizens’ assembly as Hong Kong’s last best hope in its standoff against China (2 and 10 August 2019).

These developments signal the momentum behind deliberative democracy as its core ideas enter and reshape contemporary political vocabulary. Today, deliberative democracy – an ideal in which ‘people come together, on the basis of equal status and mutual respect, to discuss political issues they face and, on the basis of those discussions, decide on the policies that will affect their lives’ (Bächtiger et al., 2018: 2) – is being put to the test on multiple fronts. As a theoretical approach, deliberative democracy is faced with the challenge of diagnosing problems faced by liberal democracies, including the rise of incivility, political polarization, the normalization of disinformation and the growing appeal of finding simplistic solutions to complex problems. Some scholars have interpreted the crisis of democracy as a crisis of communication (Dryzek et al., 2019), in the absence of norms such as listening, reflection and justification, which are essential to the proper functioning of democratic institutions (Ercan et al., 2019).

Meanwhile, as an empirical endeavour, deliberative democracy is increasingly under pressure to investigate how micro-political deliberative forums and macro-institutional reforms can build capacity for citizens and decision-makers to engage in inclusive, authentic and consequential communication. Although scholarly research has demonstrated how small-scale, carefully designed deliberative forums can alter citizens’ political behaviour, questions remain about what exactly deliberative democracy can offer to the broader challenges that define our time – from the rise of illiberal populism through the realities of climate change to the unmitigated power of Big Tech to public health emergencies with a global reach.

In this survey article, we take stock of recent developments in the field to assess how deliberative democracy has evolved to respond to some of these challenges. Our approach is both descriptive and reflective. We describe deliberative democracy as a field of research that has evolved to become (a) assertive in practice, (b) precise in theory, (c) global in reach and (d) ambitious in empirical research. Although some of these features are evident in earlier iterations of deliberative democracy, we argue that the intersection of these four qualities defines the character of the field today. For each of these facets of deliberative democracy, we reflect on the extent to which the field has responded to conceptual and empirical challenges, and identify its shortcomings, which warrant further attention. We conclude by drawing attention to research imperatives that will shape the field in years to come.

Assertive in practice

Deliberative democracy is long said to have ‘come of age’ as a practical instead of a counterfactual ideal (Bohman, 1998). Responding to critiques that have declared deliberative democracy reflects a naïve vision of politics, the field has embraced realism without surrendering its normative commitments. It emphasizes the value of public justification without demanding consensus, acknowledges that citizens may be ‘good group problem solvers even if we are poor solitary truth seekers’ (Chambers, 2018a: 36) and recognizes the challenges of promoting deliberation in a macro-political environment constrained by hyper-partisanship, a trust deficit, cognitive bias and profit-driven media. Deliberative practice in the past decade has taken on the challenge of proposing wide-reaching reforms in an imperfect world.

The assertiveness of the reform agenda of deliberative democracy can be seen mainly in the surge in popularity of deliberative mini-publics as mechanisms for collective decision-making and problem-solving. Mini-publics are carefully designed forums in which a group of citizens, who have been selected by lottery to represent the microcosm of society, are charged to learn about an issue, weigh the evidence, exchange viewpoints and reflect on the reasons for thinking as they do, with the aim of putting forward a recommendation or common statement about the topic at hand (see Setälä and Smith, 2018). A mini-public can be a group as small as 14 people, as in the case of citizens’ juries, or contain over 100 people, as in the case of citizens’ assemblies.

The practice of deliberation at different levels of governance has provided robust responses to various criticisms levelled at deliberation. It has found that large-scale deliberative forums, when properly designed, build capacity for argumentation and reflective judgement among a diverse group of citizens (see Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019), contrasting with scepticism about citizen competence (e.g. Achen and Bartels, 2017; Brennan, 2017). One of the key studies in this area is Paromita Sanyal and Vijayendra Rao’s (2018) recent work on India, home of the world’s largest deliberative assemblies. Using surveys, direct observations and ethnography, Sanyal and Rao demonstrate that even impoverished and illiterate communities can take part in deliberation on a range of topics from taxes to water supply. This research demonstrates that citizens, even in a caste society, can break the constraints of social hierarchies, albeit temporarily, when procedures for voice and accountability are in place. In other words, citizens are capable group deliberators when there are opportunities for them to learn, reflect and express their views.

Evidence of the transformative power of deliberation has inspired what the OECD refers to as a ‘deliberative wave’ taking place in Europe, where the number of deliberative processes recorded in their database surged from 6 mini-publics linked to public decision-making recorded between 2006 and 2010 to 25 between 2016 and 2019 among member countries (OECD, 2020). These mini-publics are under no illusion that deliberation is a panacea for solving intractable conflict or complex policy issues, yet there is growing confidence in the power of innovations like these to mitigate the aforementioned issues of unequal citizen competence, partisanship and status inequality, among others.

The Irish Citizens’ Assembly is often regarded as a game changer in this regard. In the middle of heated debates on moral issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, it served as a circuit breaker in which a representative sample of citizens listened to testimonies and expert evidence, and deliberated with their peers, including representatives of political parties, to create recommendations that could influence a referendum on these issues. The Irish case is not the first to link a citizens’ assembly to a referendum. British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform predates it by a decade (Warren and Pearse, 2008), whereas the Citizens’ Initiative Review has been going on for over 30 years (Gastil and Knobloch, 2020). What is groundbreaking about the Irish case, however, is that it demonstrates how a citizens’ assembly can feed into parliamentary deliberations, shape the character of public discourse and influence collective decision-making with regard to deeply divisive issues (Farrell and Suiter, 2019). Elsewhere in Europe, citizens’ assemblies are being convened at an incredible pace. Citizens’ assemblies on climate change are unfolding in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The Polish city of Gdansk assembled citizens to deliberate over four weekends to provide recommendations on flood mitigation. This citizens’ assembly was an assertive exercise of democratic participation amid the popularity of the conservative right-wing Law and Justice Party, which has undermined the rule of law, media freedom and checks and balances. Meanwhile, 100 people in Scotland were charged with deliberating for six days about the country they are seeking to build at a time when discussions on Scottish independence are gathering pace. In Belgium, a permanent citizens’ assembly was institutionalized in the German-speaking region to propose an agenda for legislation and serve as a resource for the parliament by deliberating on divisive political issues. The institutionalization of a citizens’ assembly in deeply divided Belgium is no easy feat, and political parties transcended their ideological differences to endorse this policy.

These examples, among many others, demonstrate the confidence of deliberative democracy in creating spaces for meaningful discourse despite moral disagreements, status inequality and the return of illiberalism. Accompanying the rise of populism are large-scale experiments in deliberation that give voice to ordinary citizens who have otherwise felt left behind by traditional forms of participation such as elections and party membership (see Chwalisz, 2015). The appeal of these initiatives rests on empirical claims of what deliberation can achieve, but also on a recognition that many of their design features are themselves products of deliberation. The growing community of deliberative practitioners around the world have now formed a network called Democracy R&D, in which issues about sampling and random selection and integrity of deliberative processes, as well as the complexities of impact and evaluation are discussed critically in online discussion boards, Zoom learning calls and annual meetings (see https://democracyrd.org/). Knowledge about deliberative democracy is no longer just produced in the confines of academic research but generated by organizations that are commissioned to run deliberative events and who, consequently, reflect on their practical experiences (see newDemocracy, 2019).

Although there have been many developments in the field of deliberative practice, new debates are still emerging. One of the more contentious of these concerns the reach of mini-publics beyond the confines of the forum. Should mini-publics be given decision-making powers or should their reasoned recommendations serve as one of the many considerations that need to be taken into account in collective decision-making (see Lafont, 2019)? As the demand for deliberative mini-publics grows, how can the industry of consultants and practitioners be held accountable to the highest standards of integrity (see Lee, 2014)? What about the instrumental use of mini-publics by the state for non-deliberative forms of legitimation? How about the links between deliberative democracy and the institutions of representative democracy? What is the role of deliberation in political parties (Wolkenstein, 2019) with regard to enhancing the relationship between elected representatives and their constituencies (Neblo et al., 2018)? Is deliberative democracy a replacement for institutions of representative democracy or are mini-publics tools whereby these institutions may regain their legitimacy (see Sintomer, 2018)? These, to date, are open questions, and they will shape the character of deliberative practice in the years to come.

Precise in theory

Over recent years, a lively set of debates has emerged among deliberative theorists concerning the precise nature of deliberation. Early normative political theory took a restrictive view of deliberation, defining it as a process of reason-giving that culminated in political decision (Cohen, 1989). Numerous scholars – deliberative as well as difference democrats – pointed out that deliberation understood in this way was exclusionary. Progressively, more forms of speech and communication were admitted to deliberation. Deliberation could, thus, be emotional; it could involve the use of rhetoric, storytelling, humour, testimony, greetings and so on (Gormley, 2019). Goodman (2018) even advocated ‘unruly and excessive’ speech in cases in which it had the capacity to disrupt the negative effects of the norms of civility. However, all this produced a backlash. The concern was that if all forms of communication were admitted to deliberation, then the concept would lose its meaning. As Goodin (2018) puts it, if deliberation is everything, perhaps it is nothing.

Deliberative theorists have responded to this challenge, reworking deliberative theory to integrate these critiques, while still maintaining its core feature. For example, Mansbridge (2015) has sought to address concept-stretching by proposing a minimalist concept of deliberation. Deliberation, she argues, should be defined in such a way that its constitutive features are separated from the normative demands we might make of it. On these terms, communication is deliberative in cases in which it is characterized by mutuality between speakers, generates reflection among them and is oriented towards matters of common concern. From this, we can identify particular kinds of deliberation, depending on the normative standards we might assign to them, and in the light of the institutional contexts in which they are undertaken. There is, for example, authoritarian deliberation, in which the state tightly controls the deliberative process while providing citizens some space for democratic expression (He and Wagenaar, 2018), or ritual deliberation, in which participants cannot be seen to be changing their minds, as in the case of parliamentary debates (Tanasoca and Sass, 2019). Recently, Chung and Duggan (2020) proposed a formal theory of deliberation, distinguishing between three modes of deliberation as follows: (a) myopic discussion in which positions on an issue are examined and weighed in a free-flowing manner; (b) constructive discussion in which deliberation unfolds in an ‘argument-climbing dynamic’; and (c) debate between opposing parties, in which each participant employs rhetorical tactics to advance his/her position. Such formal analysis identifies how different forms of democratic deliberation can fail or succeed and the extent to which democratic legitimacy can be conferred on their outcomes.

A consequence of recognizing the many forms of deliberation is the establishment of different standards by which they should be evaluated, depending on their functions and the constraints they face. Bächtiger and Parkinson (2019), for example, describe deliberation and deliberativeness as contingent on goals and contexts, performative in the sense that deliberation can be mixed with various forms of communication and distributed, in which deliberative qualities ‘are not concentrated at one location or in one moment but dispersed over space and time’ (Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019: 15). This kind of argument finds resonance in the work of theorists such as Laydet (2015), who proposes that parliaments – often thought of as defining deliberative institutions – should be evaluated not according to the quality of their own deliberation, but in terms of their contribution to a wider process of public deliberation. Parliaments should frame debates, set out key positions and subject these positions to scrutiny. We should expect only that arguments made therein are well justified and that respect is shown to the opposition. In another piece arguing for the relaxation of familiar demands placed on deliberation, Moore (2018) shows that in many kinds of deliberative forums, participants should be granted anonymity for both epistemic and normative reasons. A crucial contribution made by this specification of deliberation is that it distinguishes deliberative acts from other kinds of communication, which serve important non-deliberative functions within a democracy, and which are often intermingled with deliberation in complex ways. As such, the study of all political communication should be undertaken in the light of the specific goals it is directed towards, and not merely according to certain normative standards assigned to it by political theory.

Important theoretical debates around what deliberation is, how it works and what it yields at different scales and in different institutional contexts continue to rage. As deliberative democracy attempts to be more precise in relation to its theoretical categories, questions emerge about its core normative commitments and its constitutive features. There is also work to be done to develop a link between how the process of public deliberation can generate substantive outcomes that can respond to the crisis of liberal democracy and whether deliberative democracy needs to be bolder in its demands for institutional reform and instead advocate for a radical overhaul of the representative system of democracy (see Landemore, 2020). If deliberative democracy is to respond to the crisis of democracy, conceptual refinement and debates about institutional reform must continue.

Global in reach

Deliberative theory has also developed in response to critiques maintaining that its application may be limited because it emerged from the particularistic experience of Western European modernity or, to put it another way, from the greater western tradition (see Min, 2009). Indeed, deliberative democrats sometimes trace their intellectual heritage through the western canon, beginning with Aristotle and passing through a chain of luminaries, including Mill, Rousseau, Kant, Dewey and others (Chambers, 2018b). Self-descriptions of this kind are hardly unique in political theory, although often spurious. There is certainly no single continuous lineage of deliberative theory. Rather, prominent thinkers have been enrolled into deliberative theory wherever they have provided philosophical insight into the themes and problems that define the field. In this regard, the criticism of deliberative democracy being ethnocentric seems lacking in imagination. There is nothing to stop deliberative theory from treating non-western political thought as a source of insight when fashioning deliberative ideals, practices and institutions – in point of fact, this very undertaking is now well underway. Deliberative democracy, in other words, is global in reach. There are plural centres in which its knowledge production and political practice take place.

There are many well-established sources of deliberative principles and ideals outside ‘the West’. Sen (2005) suggests there are deliberative practices that are pervasive in South Asia and whose roots are found in diverse religious traditions. Sass and Dryzek (2014) take this argument a step further. They suggest that collective deliberation is intrinsic to all human groups, and aids their survival, but that deliberation manifests itself in very different ways depending on the cultural and normative meaning afforded to it in specific contexts. Who can deliberate, on what terms, by what means, to what ends – these are all matters of considerable variation. Given the pervasiveness of deliberation, it should not be surprising that there are alternative sources of deliberative ideals. In South Asia, Gandhi, Amdedkar, Ashoka and others have provided normative resources for those who wish to promote a deliberative politics (Mantena, 2012). Across Africa (Ani, 2014), there are diverse forms of group organization and conceptualizations of the place of voice therein. In China and Japan, which are typically characterized as hierarchical societies, there are principles and practices that could form the basis of a civilizationally distinctive public sphere (Tan, 2014). Scholars, too, have begun to reflect on indigenous cultures, past and present, in relation to their use of deliberative practices in conflict resolution and group decision-making (Hébert, 2018; Urfalino, 2014). Much of this work has been undertaken in the context of comparative political theory, and this has enabled the exchange between deliberative theory and other traditions (Williams and Warren, 2014).

Although the citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative forums discussed thus far have been concentrated in Europe and the European settler states, there has been experimentation and, indeed, institutionalization of deliberative forums in other national contexts. In the earlier section, we identified gram sabhas (village assemblies) in India, which have affected the lives of nearly 900 million people. In Mongolia, the parliament called for its first-ever deliberative poll, in which 669 citizens selected at random convened in Ulaanbaatar to discuss the future of the constitution (Fishkin, 2018). Deliberation has also been incorporated systematically into local governance structures in numerous Chinese provinces (He and Warren, 2011). This may signal a recognition of China’s own tragic failure to listen to the voices of ordinary people while pursuing vast development projects or it may represent a mechanism that provides the Chinese Communist Party with stronger control over restive groups. Indeed, it may perform both these functions. Across South America too, new forms of participatory governance prioritize inclusive deliberation (Avritzer, 2005). Here also, however, there is reason for concern. Brazil, by way of example, may be among the most deliberative of democracies, but this provided little resistance to the state’s lurch towards authoritarianism. In this regard, the study of deliberation in fragile democracies and authoritarian contexts demands that deliberative democrats evaluate the promise, scope and effects of deliberation in the hard light of day (see Shaffer and Black, 2018).

The reach of deliberation has grown markedly in recent years in a number of ways. In the first instance, this has occurred because deliberative democrats have taken a growing interest in the practice of deliberation as seen across an ever-wider variety of societies, both historical and contemporary. This expansive orientation represents a marked shift from earlier scholarship that for the most part limited its empirical focus to established western democracies and the western philosophical tradition. In this respect, the criticism of deliberation as being ethnocentric and bourgeois has been productive. It has provoked a wider discussion across national and civilizational contexts concerning both the normative justification of deliberation and the design of contextually sensitive institutions that could facilitate empowered and inclusive discourse. Indeed, no tradition of normative political thought is truly global, or universal. However, recent deliberative theory displays a global and universal ambition, one that is approached through engaging with ever-wider circles of difference in a process of learning that enlarges the tradition itself and, ideally, the traditions with which it engages.

Ambitious in empirical research

It is a manifestation of deliberative democracy’s intellectually ambitious disposition towards empirical research that it has become assertive in practice, precise in theory and global in reach Although scholars including Habermas (2006) himself were initially worried about the application of a normative theory to empirical research, empirical scholars have shown a variety of ways in which normative theory can interact with and guide empirical work on deliberation both within micro-deliberative forums and the macro-political deliberative system.

The high ambition of the empirical research agenda is manifested in two key ways. First, it is reflected in the way deliberative democracy has embraced methodological pluralism to offer multilayered characterizations of deliberation. As well as drawing on social science methods such as surveys, experiments and discourse analysis, empirical researchers have developed new methods for understanding the deliberative quality of structured forums. Take the case of Jürg Steiner and colleagues’ updated work on the Discourse Quality Index. Developed in 2004 to operationalize Habermas’ discourse ethics for assessing parliamentary debates (Steiner et al., 2004), this approach has now been updated to incorporate storytelling and its role in transforming the quality of deliberation (Steiner et al., 2017). Meanwhile, there have also been methodological attempts to decentre talk as the main indicator of deliberation and instead examine how listening or uptake of information/knowledge unfolds in deliberation so that participants consider new perspectives and modes of communication (Curato, 2019; Scudder, 2019).

Second, empirical research on deliberative democracy has been ambitious in its scope. Experimental research on deliberation has provided scholarly credibility in relation to how carefully designed forums can correct the pathologies of political communication, which, in turn, serve as the basis for promoting deliberative practice at various levels of democratic governance. For example, experimental studies on like-minded group discussion, whether online or face to face, illustrate how discursive spaces can be designed to activate deliberative norms and overcome group polarization (Strandberg et al., 2019). James Fishkin’s latest experiment, America in One Room, speaks to this line of thinking, albeit from a different angle. America in One Room demonstrated how deliberation could overcome partisan politics, with Republicans becoming less punitive in their attitudes towards illegal migrants after taking part in focused deliberations with a statistically representative sample of Americans over a long weekend (Fishkin and Diamond, 2019). There is also increasing empirical research on the so-called ‘gender gap in deliberation’ that has used experimental methods. Feminist critiques have been some of the earliest to challenge deliberation; women are assumed to be less willing to speak up compared with their male counterparts. There is evidence to suggest that women are willing to deliberate, although men’s poor deliberative behaviour undermines women’s capacity to be effective deliberators (Afsahi, 2020a). Another experimental study found that participants are more willing to change their views after hearing a male deliberator’s counterargument, indicating the persistence of gendered inequalities in discourse (Beauvais, 2019). These ambitious empirical studies, among others, provide a credible stock of knowledge for deliberative democracy to draw on, enabling it to be assertive in practice. This empowers scholars and practitioners of deliberative democracy to identify design aspects of mini-publics through which power differentials can be reduced, whether through facilitation or incorporation of implicit bias training in deliberative processes, among other things.

The ambitious scope of research is also manifested in the growing body of empirical work that investigates deliberation beyond structured forums. Taking the empirical focus beyond the controlled environment of deliberative mini-publics, scholars have been studying the role of media (Wessler, 2019), social movements (Felicetti, 2016) and schools (Nishiyama, 2017) in shaping the character of public deliberation. Empirical researchers have also studied deliberation in political contexts such as deeply divided societies (O’Flynn, 2017), the aftermath of a tragedy (Curato, 2019) and wars (De Waal, 2017). Previously, it was deemed impossible to do this. More recently, scholars have characterized how deliberative democracy can be achieved on a large scale by linking the virtues of small-scale deliberation to the larger-scale process of opinion formation and decision-making (Barvosa, 2018; Parry, 2019).

This expansive empirical focus, which is also associated with the systemic turn in the field of deliberative democracy, has yielded insights into the conditions under which large-scale deliberation is possible. However, at the same time, it has raised new empirical questions about where to draw the boundaries of a deliberative system (Owen and Smith, 2015) and what methods would be suitable for studying deliberative systems as a whole. One key challenge in this context has been to develop methods for measuring deliberativeness at the systems level (Ercan et al., 2017; Fleuss and Helbig, 2020).

As a growing research field, deliberative democracy recognizes that more work needs to be done in sharpening ways of assessing deliberative practice. Is the field better off with a problem-based approach to democracy, in which the focus is not on the boundaries of a particular model of democracy but on the different kinds of problems that democracy should resolve (Warren, 2017)? How can empirical research on the micro-politics of deliberation speak to the conceptual precision that deliberative theorists advocate? In addition, how can deliberative research be more sensitive to exclusions, such as ableism and ageism (Afsahi, 2020b; Nishiyama, 2017)? Empirical work on deliberation is likely to engage with these questions in more depth in the coming years.

Conclusion

In this review article, we characterized the state of deliberative democracy and described the field as one that has become assertive in practice, precise in theory, global in reach and ambitious in empirical research. These field-defining characteristics provide reason to think that deliberative democracy can offer innovative solutions to democracy’s enduring and emerging challenges. As deliberative democracy continues to evolve, long-standing questions remain unanswered and new criticisms emerge. We wrote this article during the early stages of a global pandemic, when citizens were discouraged from assembling in large groups. This is yet another crisis that deliberative democracy needs to face, because it brings into question the role of embodied deliberation in democratic practice, the relevance of reflective reason-giving at a time when fast decisions are made by experts and the future of democracy when society’s vulnerabilities are constantly exposed. For deliberative democracy to go on flourishing, the field needs to continue to be true to its normative core while finding innovative ways for meaningful democratic reform in a highly unequal, climate-challenged and increasingly fragile global public sphere.