Mark E. Warren

Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation.

Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the self as prepolitically constituted and narrowly self-interested. The importance of the social and discursive view of the self is that it highlights how standard assumptions about the self help to justify limits to democratic participation. As now conceptualized, however, the transformational assumption does not meet standard objections to expanding democracy. I sketch an approach that distinguishes classes of interests according to their potentials for democratic transformation, and strengthens—by qualifying—transformative expectations in democratic theory.

Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Political Development

Authoritarian rule in China is now permeated by a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian concentrations of power with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation is usually associated with democracy, they are distinct phenomena. Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments such as votes and rights. Deliberation is a mode of communication involving persuasion-based influence. Combinations of non-inclusive power and deliberative influence — authoritarian deliberation — are readily identifiable in China, probably reflecting failures of command authoritarianism under the conditions of complexity and pluralism produced by market-oriented development. The concept of authoritarian deliberation frames two possible trajectories of political development in China: the increasing use of deliberative practices stabilizes and strengthens authoritarian rule, or deliberative practices serve as a leading edge of democratization.

Deliberative Democracy and Authority

The topic of authority only rarely figures into theories of deliberative democracy, no doubt owing to the widely held view that authority is inherently undemocratic. But deliberative democrats need a concept of authoritative decision making, not least because the scale and complexity of contemporary societies radically limit the numbers of decisions that can be made by deliberatively democratic means. I argue for an inherently democratic conception of authority, in large part by examining and rejecting the view—held by radical democrats, conservatives, and most liberals—that authority involves a surrender of judgment by those subject to authority. In contrast, I develop the view that authority, particularly in posttraditional contexts, involves a limited suspension of judgment enabled by a context of democratic challenge and public accountability. An important point is that democratic authority supports robust deliberative decision making by enabling individuals to allocate their time, energy, and knowledge to the issues most significant to them.

Governance-driven democratization

While democratic reforms of electoral institutions continue, their capacities for deepening democracy are limited by the large, pluralized, complex, and territorial political units through which they work. Much of the institutional innovation in democracy has shifted elsewhere – into ‘governance’, the development and administration of public policy. The democratic potentials of governance reside in the potentially responsive linkages between what governments do and what citizens receive. From the perspective of democratic theory, however, this ‘governance driven-democratization’ is a frontier. Concepts inherited from participatory democratic theory such as citizen engagement and direct democracy obscure more than they reveal. Most of the new experiments engage a relatively few citizens. Many involve only self-selected stakeholders and activists, and so by-pass broader public interests, or generate new forms of exclusion. In this paper, I specify the concept and domains of governance-driven democratization, and suggest a method for critical assessment. We can ask, on a case by case basis, about opportunities and dangers as measured by the democratic values of inclusion of the affected, empowerment, representation, and deliberation.

Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy

Research into the deliberative dimensions of democracy has been remarkably productive over the last decade or so, spawning new insights into how deliberation functions within the many political venues that constitute contemporary democracies. Normative theories of deliberative democracy have justified and sometimes inspired a wide range of new institutional developments, from citizen juries, stakeholder meetings, deliberative polling, and deliberative forums to the Freedom of Information legislation that enhances public deliberation (Chambers, 2003; Gastil and Levine, 2005; Parkinson, 2006). The key claim of deliberative theories of democracy is simple and compelling: deliberative approaches to collective decisions under conditions of conflict produce better decisions than those resulting from alternative means of conducting politics: coercion, traditional deference, or markets. The decisions resulting from deliberation are likely to be more legitimate, more reasonable, more informed, more effective, and more politically viable (Cohen, 1996; Habermas, 1996; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996; Bohman, 1998).

What is Political

Our conceptions of politics ought to: (a) help clarify our normative interests in politics; (b) encompass everyday understandings of politics; and (c) define the domain of politics in ways that serve explanation. Events in the last couple of decades - from the rise of new social movements to the end to the Berlin Wall - have combined with shifts in the culture of expectations within political science to overtake most of our received definitions in these respects. I offer a conception of politics that focuses on the intersection of power and conflict, and argue that such a conception is more in accord with our political world today than are most common conceptions, especially in light of new concerns with democracy and democratization. Finally, I show how this conception illuminates our contemporary understandings of democracy.

Can participatory democracy produce better selves? Psychological dimensions of Habermas's discursive model of democracy

Participatory democrats hold that when individuals participate in democratic processes they are likely to become more tolerant of differences, more attuned to reciprocity, bettor able to engage in moral discourse and judgment, and more prone to examine their own preferences. These democratic dispositions in turn strengthen democratic processes. Notwithstanding the centrality of this selftransformation thesis to democratic theory, Jiirgen Habermas remains the only democratic theorist to have developed an account of transformative processes. This he does by linking democratic discourse to individual development of critical capacities for political judgment, or autonomy. Habermass account, however, requires reconstruction, since he for the most part addresses his ideas to problems other than those of democratic theory. Such a reconstruction suggests that the self-transformation thesis needs to be qualified: political contexts may elicit, rather than overcome, psychodynamic barriers to autonomy. This and related considerations suggest that democratic transformations of the self are more likely in some kinds of democratic contexts than others.

Voting with Your Feet: Exit-based Empowerment in Democratic Theory

Democracy is about including those who are potentially affected by collective decisions in making those decisions. For this reason, contemporary democratic theory primarily assumes membership combined with effective voice. An alternative to voice is exit: Dissatisfied members may choose to leave a group rather than voice their displeasure. Rights and capacities for exit can function as low-cost, effective empowerments, particularly for those without voice. But because contemporary democratic theory often dismisses exit as appropriate only for economic markets, the democratic potentials of exit have rarely been theorized. Exit-based empowerments should be as central to the design and integrity of democracy as distributions of votes and voice, long considered its key structural features. When they are integrated into other democratic devices, exit-based empowerments should generate and widely distribute usable powers for those who need them most, evoke responsiveness from elites, induce voice, discipline monopoly, and underwrite vibrant and pluralistic societies.

Max Weber's Liberalism for a Nietzschean World

V ebers commentators often accuse him of lacking a coherent political philosophy because his pluralist-elite theory of democracy seems indifferent to liberal-democratic values. I argue, however, that the core of Webers political philosophy is a politicized neo-Kantian liberalism, one that produces an ethically significant and positive concept of politics. The problem is rather that Webers pessimism about institutionalizing positive politics in bureaucratized societies left the ethical core of his political philosophy inexplicit. This introduced a conflict into his thought between his ethical commitments and his assessments of political possibilities. The conflict is compelling because it reflects the contemporary gap between the promise and performance of liberal democracies. At the same time, formulating Webers problems in these terms helps identify democratic solutions that remain obscure in his assessment of conflicts between bureaucratization and democracy.

Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion

While not the worst of political pathologies, corruption is the one most likely to be found thriving in electoral democracies. Not as dangerous as war, nor as urgent as terrorism, some have even argued that the little bit of corruption that comes with democracies makes them work better—by lowering transaction costs, reducing the inefficiencies of cumbersome rules, and generally making things happen (Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996 ; see also Leys 1965 ; Huntington 1968 ). This article draws on Warren ( 2004 ).