John S. Dryzek

Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance

Preface PART I INTRODUCTION 1. Deliberative Turns PART II FOUNDATIONS 2. Legitimacy 3. Representation 4. Communication And Rhetoric 5. Pluralism And Meta-Consensus 6. Governance Networks 7. The Democratization of Authoritarian States 8. Mini-Publics and Their Macro Consequences 9. Global Politics PART IV CONCLUSION 10. Integrated Foundations and Long Frontiers Bibliography Index

Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics

Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as citizens panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, and deliberative polls at the center of their hopes for deliberative democratization. In light of experience to date, the authors chart the ways in which such mini-publics may have an impact in the “macro” world of politics. Impact may come in the form of actually making policy, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debates, market-testing of proposals, legitimation of public policies, building confidence and constituencies for policies, popular oversight, and resisting co-option. Exposing problems and failures is all too easy. The authors highlight cases of success on each of these dimensions.

Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that one demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the other. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect.

Deliberative democracy in divided societies: alternatives to agonism and analgesia

For contemporary democratic theorists, democracy is largely a matter of deliberation. But the recent rise of deliberative democracy (in practice as well as theory) coincided with ever more prominent identity politics, sometimes in murderous form in deeply divided societies. This essay considers how deliberative democracy can process the toughest issues concerning mutually contradictory assertions of identity. After considering the alternative answers provided by agonists and consociational democrats, the author makes the case for a power-sharing state with attenuated sovereignty and a more engaged deliberative politics in a public sphere that is semidetached from the state and situated transnationally.

RECONSTRUCTIVE DEMOCRATIC THEORY

While the idea of democracy has never been more universal or more popular, both democratic theory and the empirical study of democratic possibilities are in some disarray. We seek a productive reconnection of these two endeavors with democratic discourse through close attention to the language of democracy as used by ordinary people and political actors. Reconstructive inquiry determines how the individuals who are the potential constituents of any democratic order themselves conceptualize democracy and their own political roles and competences. We deploy an intensive method—Q methodology—for the study of individual characteristics, capabilities, and dispositions in combination with political discourse analysis. Four discourses are discovered in an analysis of selected U.S. subjects: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. These results can be used to relate democratic theory to live possibilities in democratic discourse.

Political Inclusion and the Dynamics of Democratization

Once universal adult citizenship rights have been secured in a society, democratization is mostly a matter of the more authentic political inclusion of different groups and categories, for which formal political equality can hide continued exclusion or oppression. It is important, however, to distinguish between inclusion in the state and inclusion in the polity more generally. Democratic theorists who advocate a strategy of progressive inclusion of as many groups as possible in the state fail to recognize that the conditions for authentic as opposed to symbolic inclusion are quite demanding. History shows that benign inclusion in the state is possible only when (a) a groups defining concern can be assimilated to an established or emerging state imperative, and (b) civil society is not unduly depleted by the groups entry into the state. Absent such conditions, oppositional civil society may be a better focus for democratization than is the state. A flourishing oppositional sphere, and therefore the conditions for democratization itself, may actually be facilitated by a passively exclusive state, the main contemporary form of which is corporatism. Benign inclusion in the state can sometimes occur, but any such move should also produce exclusions that both facilitate future democratization and guard against any reversal of democratic commitment in state and society. These considerations have substantial implications for the strategic choices of social movements.

Democratization as Deliberative Capacity Building

Effective deliberation is central to democracy and so should enter any definition of democratization. However, the deliberative aspect now ubiquitous in the theory, practice, and promotion of democracy is generally missing in comparative studies of democratization. Deliberation capacity can be distributed in variable ways in the deliberative systems of states and other polities. A framework is described for locating and analyzing the contributions of its components and so evaluating the degree to which a polity’s deliberative system is authentic, inclusive, and consequential. An emphasis on deliberation reveals important determinants of democratic transition and consolidation, thereby providing substantial explanatory as well as evaluative and normative purchase.

Rational Ecology: Environment and Political Economy.

The book describes the variety of institutional arrangements through which collective decisions can be achieved and makes special reference to decision-making on ecology. According to the author, the means employed by societies to make collective choices have far-reaching ramifications for the kind of world which exists or develops. He assesses those means in connection with various forms of rationality used to make decisions and to act: markets, bureaucracies, and polyarchies are among the institutional arrangements evaluated. He examines their capacity for intelligent decision-making, based on notions of justice, individual liberty or economic efficiency, and measures these against the yardstick of environmental concerns, a pressing set of problems which transcend particular political and institutional arrangements. The analysis extends beyond the realm of environmental choice to elucidate more fully the characteristics of the worlds social choice mechanisms and proposes innovations for improving these forms.

Policy Analysis as a Hermeneutic Activity

Any piece of policy analysis must be appropriate to the context of its intended use. Social science often fails as policy analysis due to insensitivity to context. This paper explores a number of different modes of policy analysis to determine the circumstances in which the application of each is appropriate. It is argued that each mode is appropriate only under a fairly limited set of conditions; many of the problems policy analysis encounters are a result of attempts to apply a mode outside its niche. Greater use should be made of what is developed here as a hermeneutic model of policy analysis, appropriate in a residual set of conditions which none of the traditional models of policy analysis copes with adequately.

Rational Participation: The Politics of Relative Power

Survey researchers have been reporting, for two decades or more, that a citizens decision to participate in politics is most strongly influenced by his subjective sense of efficacy. Those who feel able to make a great impact tend to participate vigorously, while those who feel impotent tend to withdraw. According to the conventional wisdom all this is mostly inside ones head, with few objective – much less rational – referents. For example, social psychologists, and political researchers under their spell, see subjective efficacy as a mere reflection of ‘ego strength’. The more sociologically-inclined see psycho-cultural values (such as ‘civic orientation’) producing a sense of efficacy which, once again, bears little relationship to ones real influence.