The Complete Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy, school of thought in political theory that claims that after the deliberative process is completed but that deliberation can produce.
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Reasons based on tacit knowledge cannot be given, no matter how idealized the speech situation. This actually undermines the ideal speech-situation itself, as it requires the realization of particular normative conditions; including the requirements of equal voice and equal opportunity to effectively participate. An alternative approach to deliberation which also has an important epistemic component is epistemic democracy Benson, forthcoming; Estlund, ; Landemore, Epistemic democrats differ from Habermas in that they take there to be procedure independent standards by which democratic decisions can be judged.

Broadly speaking, they advocate deliberation based on its ability to communicate and utilize knowledge in order to arrive at rational, good or correct decisions, where rational, good and correct are defined by some non-procedural standard. Collective deliberation is argued to be the best process to gather, transfer and generate relevant information for effective decision-making.

There will often be relevant tacit knowledge which can inform policy but which is excluded from verbal deliberation, therefore, reducing the quality of its decisions. Deliberation will not, for example, be able to draw on the tacit knowledge of specialist scientists which could aid public policy. Epistemic democracy can only base decisions on explicit forms of knowledge which reduces its epistemic potential. The problem of tacit knowledge presents an important challenge to deliberative democracy from both proceduralist and epistemic perspectives.

By prioritizing linguistic forms of communication, deliberative democracy privileges explicit knowledge at the cost of excluding tacit forms of knowledge. One may reply to this by arguing that deliberation need not include tacit knowledge as deliberation is a process which can make such knowledge explicit.

Through deliberation, the assumptions and foundations of different claims can be examined in order that they can be made explicit. To an extent this is true, and it is certainly one advantage that deliberation has over the market approaches considered in the next section. For example, it is observed that when environmental managers talk with each other, they are able to recognize and articulate some of their previously non-articulated knowledge Fazey et al.

First, some of the knowledge that people have, such as knowing how to ride a bike, may have an irreducible tacit component which cannot be made explicit even through extended conversation Ryle, — Second, some tacit knowledge will be too complex for people to fully propositionize it, especially under the time constraints of real-world deliberation, although it may be theoretically possible.

For instance, it may be theoretically possible to express all the rules of language and grammar propositionally. However, this does not mean that I, through conversation with others, will be able to work out all the rules I tacitly follow when I speak. In fact, given the complexity of these rules, it is very unlikely that I will ever be able to do so.

Similarly, an environmental manager may not be able to fully propositionize their knowledge of a complex ecosystem under the time constraints of actual deliberation, despite the fact that it may be conceptually possible to do so. So although deliberation may be able to make some practical knowledge explicit, it still needs to show how it can include that knowledge which cannot be articulated if it is to overcome the problem of tacit knowledge.

Following Hayek a , b , , , Pennington takes the problem of tacit knowledge to be not just a critique of deliberation but also a positive argument for market institutions. Markets are argued to have the capacity for extralinguistic communication in the form of market prices. Market participants act on their own knowledge and through acts of or not buying and selling products influence the formation of prices. The knowledge upon which they act, whether it is explicit or tacit, is then communicated throughout the economy as others adjust to changes in price signals.

Individuals who act on price changes will not be fully aware of the knowledge upon which they act. However, this exact knowledge is not required. Prices give signals about the relative supply and demand of goods which allows people to adjust their actions without ever needing to know the reasons behind any particular price change Hayek, b.

As well as price signals, free markets also allow greater opportunity for knowledge transfer through emulation, as people learn from the success or failure of others. This mechanism of emulation is also open to deliberative democracy. Deliberative institutions are able to learn and copy one another, and the opportunity for this will increase with the level of decentralization. However, this opportunity is argued to be greater in markets as a system of individual property rights expands the number of decision points and therefore the number of decisions from which to learn. The acknowledgement of the importance of tacit knowledge is, therefore, said to give good reason to support markets over democratic institutions.

There are, however, significant limits to the market approach to dealing with tacit knowledge. There are, for example, well-recognized problems with the ability of markets to deal with things such as public goods or externalities, which will often require alternative mechanisms to price signals. However, there are also specifically epistemic problems with price-based communication which affect how markets utilize tacit knowledge. A market actor will not, for instance, know whether a price change results from the actions of traders or from actual changes in relative scarcity, nor will they know if these changes are short or long-term.

Although Stiglitz does not discuss tacit knowledge, this general informational problem will affect the ability of markets to utilize tacit knowledge as actors will not necessarily know how to adjust to the price fluctuations this knowledge creates. In addition to the problems highlighted by Stiglitz, inequalities also present in markets can adversely affect the communication of tacit knowledge.

The communication of knowledge is therefore open to distortion by inequalities in wealth and income. Even allowing for a certain amount of social mobility, the price mechanism risks amplifying the knowledge of those with large amounts of buying power and property, while ignoring the knowledge of those with fewer resources.

The knowledge of people with little property or buying power, such as the indigenous communities discussed previously, may have their knowledge drowned out by the large influence wealthy individuals and corporations have on price formation. Furthermore, markets can also struggle to deal with inequalities in the distribution of tacit knowledge itself. Much important tacit knowledge is not evenly distributed but instead only known to certain specific individuals, such as specialist scientists, who have training and experience in a field. The ability of these people, however, to communicate their knowledge through prices is very limited.

A handful of scientists, for instance, are unlikely to be able to communicate their unique knowledge through acts of buying and selling. However, markets will often struggle to deal with this problem as small groups of people with a large amount of scarce knowledge may be unable to influence prices. Finally, the free-market society which Hayekians advocate can be seen to suffer from the opposite problem to deliberation. The importance it gives to communication through market prices can be seen to reduce the scope for linguistic communication and high-quality explicit knowledge.

However, this will not amount to the communicative potential of deliberative democracy also see Benson, forthcoming. Deliberative institutions bring dispersed people, who may not otherwise meet, together and into dialogue with each other. Bringing dispersed individuals together means that they can be subjected to forms of explicit knowledge with which they would otherwise not come into contact. People with diverse perspectives, expertise and knowledge can join in structured deliberation where they have the opportunity, through linguistic communication, to share explicit knowledge and learn from each other.

Just as deliberation may not have as great a capacity for emulation as private markets, markets also do not have as great a capacity for linguistic communication as institutions of deliberative democracy which can bring dispersed individuals together. Markets could, therefore, be seen to privilege non-linguistic forms of communication at the expense of limiting, relative to deliberative democracy, explicit forms of knowledge and reasoning.

This brief discussion has aimed to show a number of limitations and imperfections in the market approach to tacit knowledge, reducing the strength of the positive Hayekian argument. Although imperfect, markets do at least have some mechanisms for utilizing tacit knowledge, something which deliberative democracy is said to necessarily exclude. It is, therefore, necessary to return to our discussion of deliberative democracy.

The problem of tacit knowledge argues that non-explicit knowledge is necessarily excluded from deliberative democracy because it is based on verbal dialogue. Contrary to this, it will be argued that a linguistic process does have the potential for incorporating tacit knowledge. Here, testimony is simply defined as a speech act of an individual saying, telling or asserting something Searle, Testimony is sometimes taken to refer only to storytelling or expressions of lived experience.

However, it will be taken here to refer to speech acts more broadly. Trust in testimony is then the acceptance of speech acts, or part of speech acts, on the word of the speaker. It is the acceptance of speech acts on the credibility or authority of the speaker as opposed to solely an evaluation of the propositions of the speech acts themselves. The importance of trust in testimony is that it can allow deliberative decision-making to utilize knowledge even when it is not explicitly expressed in linguistic communication.

To see how this is possible, we can first consider ordinary kinds of testimony. Testimony can be given in the absence of trust, and it can be received by an audience who place no trust in, or even mistrusts, the speaker. In such a case, the audience would accept or reject any part of that testimony purely on its propositional content.

Where the testimony meets the necessary standards, it would be accepted or otherwise rejected by its audience. Because the acceptance of the testimony is based purely on scrutinizing the propositional content of speech acts, any knowledge communicated must be contained within these very speech acts. Any information which is communicated must, therefore, be explicit and not tacit knowledge as it must be contained within speech acts. Now, we can consider testimony which is accepted, at least in part, on the bases of trust. However, if the audience accepts testimony on the basis of trust, they will also be able to utilize knowledge beyond that which is directly contained within the speech acts of the testifier.

Trust allows deliberators to act upon the knowledge of the speaker even when this knowledge is not, or cannot be, explicitly expressed. To see how this is the case, it is useful to consider a non-deliberative example of a doctor and a patient. When a doctor diagnoses an illness and recommends a treatment, she does so on the basis of her explicit and tacit medical knowledge.

She draws from her theoretical knowledge acquired through her training and her practical knowledge acquired through practising medicine itself. This wealth of knowledge is never expressed to the patient and in the case of tacit knowledge cannot be expressed to them. If, for example, they decide to accept the recommended treatment, that decision will be utilizing all the explicit and tacit knowledge on which the doctor based that recommendation. Such knowledge was never directly expressed to the patient.

Through this example, we can see that trust in testimony is able to communicate more than just explicit information because it allows people to utilize and act upon the tacit knowledge behind the claims of others. By this same mechanism, tacit knowledge can be utilized within institutions of deliberative democracy. When someone gives testimony in a deliberative forum, people can act upon and take into account the tacit knowledge which supports their claims, assertions and recommendations without the requirement that it be explicitly articulated.

They will draw on knowledge which they are unable to express to other deliberators explicitly. However, if other deliberators accept their speech acts on the basis of trust, then they will be able to act upon and utilize this tacit knowledge. They will be able to take the recommendations and opinions of the speaker into consideration and utilize all the knowledge which supports them, without needing that knowledge to be explicitly communicated in propositional form. If the speaker claims that the policy under consideration is changing the ecosystem in some way then by accepting, or partly accepting, this on the basis of trust allows deliberators to utilize the tacit knowledge on which this claim is based and bring it into their decision-making.

The speaker will of course also be able to give some linguistic reasons for their claims and draw from their explicit knowledge. In practice then, utilizing tacit knowledge through trust in testimony will rarely, if ever, involve the acceptance of claims purely on trust. It is important to note that the audience to such testimony will not know the content of the knowledge on which they act. As discussed previously, tacit knowledge can only be learnt fully through participation in a practice or skill.

However, accepting speech acts on trust allows people to utilize the tacit knowledge of others without the need to know it themselves. In this respect, it overcomes the problem of tacit knowledge in a similar way to market prices. Price signals are not able to communicate the content of knowledge.

However, they do communicate to people the necessary information in order that they can adjust their actions.

Deliberative democracy - Wikipedia

For this reason, Horwitz Trust in testimony should similarly be thought of as a knowledge surrogate. It does not allow participants in deliberation to come to know practical knowledge, but it does allow deliberators to utilize the tacit knowledge of others without ever coming to know it themselves. Trust in testimony, like market prices, can act as a knowledge surrogate which can allow deliberative institutions to utilize tacit knowledge.

How well, however, can trust communicate knowledge in a deliberative setting? Trust requires deliberators to evaluate the credibility of a speaker and then accept or reject knowledge based on this evaluation. It requires a deliberation about the credibility of speakers. The different factors involved in such evaluations will be discussed in the next section.

This section will look to address some problems which question the effectiveness of trust in testimony as a mechanism for knowledge transfer in deliberative democracy. The first problem comes from Sanders and Fricker , who have pointed to the influence that social positions, gender and ethnicity can have on the acceptance and evaluation of claims. Trust in testimony requires us to accept claims and knowledge based on the credibility of speakers. However, judgments of credibility can be adversely influenced by the social positions of speakers, with those from marginalized groups being seen as less credible than those from more privileged groups.

A common example of such influences would be suggestions of female workers not being considered in professional meetings, while the same suggestions being quickly accepted when expressed later by a man. However, they also present significant epistemic problems to the communication of knowledge based on trust in testimony. Mackie argues, in relation to work in psychology, that people are unlikely to accept new information or change their minds in deliberation.

Part of the reason for this is that people face social influences not to express changes in their positions. New information or reasons which would be sufficient to alter a belief in isolation may not, however, alter the belief when it is part of a wider network. This does not mean that people never accept new information, but rather that it may take a long time for them to do so when it contradicts other beliefs they hold Mackie, There are then a number of social influences and psychological mechanism which question the ability of trust in testimony to communicate knowledge effectively.

A number of things need to be said in reply to these problems. First, it is important to note that these problems affect deliberation generally and not just the mechanism of trust in testimony. Both Sanders and Fricker show that people may give extra weight to reasons and argument expressed by people in privileged positions while giving less weight or even ignoring those expressed by people from marginalized groups. Even if trust judgments are excluded from deliberation, prejudicial social influences can still affect the communication of knowledge and arguments. Similarly, Mackie shows how people may not alter their beliefs when confronted with reasons which have nothing to do with trust.

The communication of knowledge through trust in testimony may not, therefore, be any worse off than other forms of communication which take place in deliberation. Such problem will also affect markets, to the extent that they also involve linguistic forms of communication. Despite affecting other approaches, these problems still present challenges the communication of tacit knowledge through trust in testimony.

Advocates of deliberative democracy have, however, pointed to a number of ways deliberation can be structured in order to reduce these problems significantly. Fishkin , for instance, has argued that deliberative designs which use trained moderators and place less emphasis on consensus, are empirically much less effected by social positions as compared to the jury deliberation examined by Sanders.

Similarly, giving more space to compromise and repeated deliberations can allow people to accept new information and change their minds more easily. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that people actually do often change their minds in deliberation Fishkin, ; Goodin and Niemeyer, ; Luskin et al. Changes in positions are also most often the result of people being introduced to new information which is the particular issue when we are considering trust in testimony. Therefore, although social influences and psychological mechanisms can affect the communication of knowledge via trust in testimony, there are ways of structuring deliberation in order that they can be significantly reduced.

Finally, trust judgments and explicit evaluations of credibility may help to tackle some of these problems. As a result, they will not typically be opened up to argument or challenge. However, trust in testimony makes evaluations of speakers explicit in deliberation. At least where trust is required, it makes considerations about the credibility of speakers explicit and opens up such considerations to argument. This will not overcome all such influences.

Normative Theories of Democracy

People with strong prejudicial attitudes may not give credibility to certain speakers even when they are presented with good reasons to do so. However, coupled with structural factors, this mechanism can at least help to check the influence of social position on credibility judgments.

This section has addressed some of the challenges facing the communication of knowledge through trust in testimony. The problems are important, and they cannot be completely eradicated from deliberation. However, there are still a number of ways that these problems can be significantly reduced and made less influential. The fact that they cannot be removed completely points to the fact that trust in testimony is an imperfect mechanism for knowledge transfer. However, no alternative mechanism for communicating tacit knowledge is perfect, and we have seen the weighty limitation facing its communication through markets and price signals.

Trust in testimony then needs to be seen as an imperfect mechanism for communication, although its imperfections can be significantly managed and reduced. It has been argued that through trust in testimony deliberative democracy can communicate and utilize tacit knowledge. This section will argue that this defence has important implications for deliberative democratic theory more generally. In particular, it will be argued that tacit knowledge and trust in testimony create significant problems for certain influential approaches of deliberative democracy.

These accounts of deliberative democracy have been criticized from a number of fronts, such as their inability to account for emotions, self-interest and compromise Mansbridge et al. This section will argue that by confining deliberation to impersonal reason, these approaches will also fail to incorporate tacit forms of knowledge through trust in testimony. They cannot, therefore, avoid the significant problems both procedural and epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy face when they exclude tacit knowledge.

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The important aspect of these approaches, for our current discussion, is that they base deliberation on purely impersonal forms of reason. Any testimony, claim or fact given within deliberation must be explicitly supported by clear reasoning. Decisions are then formed in relation to these reasons. As Gutmann and Thomson argue, reason-giving is common to many conceptions of democracy because of its connection with autonomy. It is only when they do this that they act autonomously as opposed to being swayed by the coercion of others.

While people may exercise their power to coerce others to support their ends, reason supplies an impersonal force of persuasion. Reason is impersonal in that it convinces others, not because of the authority or position of the individual giving those reasons, but through the adequacy or truth of those reasons themselves.


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Reason has a force of persuasion independent of any individual or institutional power because it can appeal to abstract propositions, such as claims or statements, as opposed to persons. The introduction of tacit knowledge, however, is problematic for these approaches to deliberative democracy. This is because claims and proposals made on the bases of tacit knowledge cannot be supported by impersonal reasoning.

When deciding to accept or reject testimony made in deliberation, the usual task would be to assess whether there are inherently good reasons to support the claims, assertions and statements given. These propositions should be considered abstractly, and questions should be asked about what knowledge or argument can be given in support of these abstract propositions. However, when testimony is based on tacit knowledge, no such knowledge or argument can be given.

Tacit knowledge cannot be expressed linguistically, so it is impossible to articulate clear reasons to support testimony based on such knowledge. In practice, testimony is unlikely to be based on tacit knowledge alone so some explicit impersonal reasons can be made. However, to the extent that this testimony is based on tacit knowledge, no such reasons can be given. As a result, the requirement that deliberators must support their claims with impersonal reasons cannot be met. This is the reason why trust is required. Deliberators cannot directly evaluate claims based on tacit knowledge so must instead evaluate the trustworthiness of the speaker.

Evaluations of trust or credibility require an assessment not just of the propositions of testimony, irrespective of the speaker, but also an assessment of the speaker themselves.

They need to access whether speakers have the expertise, training and experiences in order to have the knowledge to support their claims and whether they have the good character and intentions in order to make their claims truthfully. Trust, therefore, departs from impersonal reason. Reasons that appeal to the expertise and character of a speaker ask people to accept testimony not because there are inherently good reasons to support the statements themselves, but because the person giving them has certain qualities.

Approaches to deliberative democracy based on purely impersonal reason cannot, therefore, deal with tacit knowledge. When it comes to tacit knowledge, the requirement that all deliberates must give impersonal reasons for their claims cannot be met, as such knowledge cannot be articulated to others. Instead, such knowledge requires reasoning which appeals to evaluations of credibility and trust.

It requires reasons which attend to speakers, not just speech acts. This is not a problem only for Habermasian approaches to deliberation but any which rejects considerations of speakers. Importantly, this problem is present for such positions even in ideal conditions. Even in an ideal speech situation or an ideal discourse, certain claims cannot be supported by impersonal reasons as the knowledge behind them is non-propositional. Approaches based on impersonal reason will fail to incorporate tacit knowledge even in ideal deliberation. In order to deal with the problem of tacit knowledge, deliberative democracy must include other forms of reasoning.

Deliberation cannot involve only impersonal reasoning about abstract propositions but must accept reasoning about trust and credibility. The discussion of tacit knowledge and trust in testimony has been argued to present important problems for deliberative theories which include only impersonal forms of reasoning.

Supporters of these approaches may, however, object to the introduction of trust into deliberation democracy and argue that it produces more problems than it solves. This section will respond to two of most important of these objections. The first objection to trust in testimony is that accepting propositions on the authority of a speaker leads deliberation in the direction of irrationalism.

The problem with this objection, however, is that judgments of credibility are not judgments about the actual truth value of propositions. These judgments do not and cannot directly answer the question of truth value. These factors do, however, have a bearing on whether we should accept the statement when we are in a position where we cannot access its truth value. Judgments of credibility and character do not determine the actual truth value of statements, but they do act as reliable proxies which give us reason for accepting a statement as true when we do not have direct access to its truth value.

It is not irrational to accept testimony based on the knowledge, experience and intentions of the persons giving it as these are not direct claims about the absolute truth value of the testimony. When we cannot access the truth of a statement ourselves directly, it is completely rational to access the credibility of the speaker and base our acceptance of the statement on this assessment.

The second objection is that accepting claims based on trust is incompatible with autonomy. As we have seen, autonomy is a key reason for wanting to keep deliberation confined to impersonal reason, and the acceptance of testimony based on the authority of a speaker may be seen to violate this. However, autonomy should not be threatened by the introduction of trust, as trust judgments are not equivalent to the acceptance of claims based on unquestioned authority or power.

Rather it is to determine in accordance with reasons that it is justified to accept certain things given the credibility of those who express them. When trusting the diagnoses of a doctor, for example, we do not give up our judgment to the authority or power of the doctor, but rather use our judgment to determine that the doctor has the kind of expertise and intentions to suggest they are communicating correct knowledge. Accepting knowledge on trust requires scrutiny and considered judgment; two things are inherent to a deliberative process where people reflect collectively on reasons.

In fact, seeing trust as inconsistent with rationality or autonomy would seem to create an unreasonable condition for their achievement. A large amount of our knowledge is not obtained through direct experiences but rather the testimony of others.

Information acquired via friends, books, documentaries and academic papers all rely on the acceptance of testimony through trust and credibility. To take the acceptance of testimony on trust as incompatible with rationality or autonomy would, therefore, require us to give up much of the knowledge we possess and create too high a burden for their achievement.

It would mean, for example, that someone in a city unknown to them, who follows the directions of a stranger or a map to the local train station, acts irrationally or relinquishes their autonomy by doing so. It has been argued that trust in testimony can allow deliberative institutions to incorporate tacit forms of knowledge and that deliberative theory needs to include more than purely impersonal forms of reasoning if it is to do so.

Deliberative democracy

As the passage from Hume quoted above suggests, trust in testimony is actually a significant source of much of our knowledge. When we gain knowledge in our day to day lives this is often, if not mostly, through trusting the claims of some authority rather than through our direct experience.

Trust in testimony is an important part of knowledge acquisition in everyday life and in everyday talk. As a result, it is also important to knowledge in markets. As we have already mentioned, markets have space for linguistic forms of communication, although this was argued to be less significant than in deliberative democracy. People do not just respond to price changes but also make decisions in relation to the knowledge they require through their everyday talk with others. The last part of this article will, therefore, consider and compare the ways that trust in testimony operates in everyday talk, markets and deliberation.

An account of knowledge in everyday talk is given by Hardin A key aspect of this account is that it is of personal or private knowledge. To the extent that it is concerned with justified beliefs, it is concerned with how it is justified to the individual who accepts it. It does not aim at justifying knowledge tout court but looks at how and when it is justified for a particular individual to acquire certain knowledge, given its possible benefits and costs to that individual Hardin, This leads Hardin to be rather pessimistic about how individuals evaluate the credibility of authorities.

Hardin seems overly pessimistic in this respect. They accept the testimony of others when it is justified to them as individuals. In the sphere of everyday talk and markets, people will accept the testimony of others when it is justified for them as individuals. This, however, is markedly different to how knowledge is accepted in the formal institutions of deliberative democracy. When people deliberate together about collective decisions knowledge is not, and should not, be accepted because it is justified to any one individual. Rather knowledge in deliberation must be justified to others.

If someone makes a claim in deliberation, people must give reasons to their fellow deliberators for why they should accept it. When testimony is given on the basis of tacit knowledge, deliberators must justify to others why it should be accepted given the expertise and intentions of the speaker. The acceptance of knowledge in deliberation must be justified not to any one individual but to others. Knowledge in deliberation is, therefore, not personal but public. This is not to say that it is at the level of scientific knowledge. Deliberators do not apply, nor could they apply, the methods of empirical science to knowledge claim in deliberation.

However, knowledge in deliberation is public in the sense that its acceptance has to be justified to others with reasons, reasons which include the credibility of speakers. This public justification is built into a deliberative process as people must look to convince others in order that their views gain acceptance. The different way trust in testimony operates within formal deliberation, as compared to everyday talk and markets, has both normative and epistemic significances. First, when people accept and act upon knowledge in the market, they are not required to justify this to anyone else.

Studies by James Fishkin and others have found that deliberative democracy tends to produce outcomes which are superior to those in other forms of democracy. For Ross, the key reason for this is that in deliberative democracy citizens are empowered by knowledge that their debates will have a measurable impact on society. A claimed failure of most theories of deliberative democracy is that they do not address the problems of voting. James Fishkin 's work, "Democracy and Deliberation", introduced a way to apply the theory of deliberative democracy to real-world decision making, by way of what he calls the deliberative opinion poll.

In the deliberative opinion poll, a statistically representative sample of the nation or a community is gathered to discuss an issue in conditions that further deliberation. The group is then polled, and the results of the poll and the actual deliberation can be used both as a recommending force and in certain circumstances, to replace a vote. Dozens of deliberative opinion polls have been conducted across the United States since his book was published. The political philosopher Charles Blattberg has criticized deliberative democracy on four grounds: A criticism of deliberation is that potentially it allows those most skilled in rhetoric to sway the decision in their favour.

This criticism has been made since deliberative democracy first arose in Ancient Athens. Consensus-based decision making similar to deliberative democracy is characteristic of the hunter gather band societies thought to predominate in pre-historical times. As some of these societies became more complex with developments like division of labour , community-based decision making was displaced by various forms of authoritarian rule.

The first example of democracy arose in Greece as Athenian democracy during the sixth century BC. Athenian democracy was both deliberative and largely direct: Athenian democracy came to an end in BC. When democracy was revived as a political system about years later, decisions were made by representatives rather than directly by the people. In a sense, this revived version was deliberative from its beginnings; for example, in Edmund Burke made a famous speech where he called Great Britain's parliament a deliberative assembly.

The deliberative element of democracy was not widely studied by academics until the late 20th century. Although some of the seminal work was done in the s and 80s, it was only in that deliberative democracy began to attract substantial attention from political scientists. The more common view, held by contributors such as James Fishkin , is that direct deliberative democracy can be complementary to traditional representative democracy.

Since , hundreds of implementations of direct deliberative democracy have taken place throughout the world. For example, lay citizens have used deliberative democracy to determine local budget allocations in various cities and to undertake major public projects, such as the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Deliberative democracy recognizes a conflict of interest between the citizen participating, those affected or victimized by the process being undertaken, and the group-entity that organizes the decision.

Thus it usually involves an extensive outreach effort to include marginalized, isolated, ignored groups in decisions, and to extensively document dissent , grounds for dissent, and future predictions of consequences of actions. It focuses as much on the process as the results. In this form it is a complete theory of civics. On the other hand, many practitioners of deliberative democracy attempt to be as neutral and open-ended as possible, inviting or even randomly selecting people who represent a wide range of views and providing them with balanced materials to guide their discussions.

Examples include National Issues Forums , Choices for the 21st Century, study circles, deliberative opinion polls , the Citizens' Initiative Review , and the 21st-century town meetings convened by AmericaSpeaks , among others. In these cases, deliberative democracy is not connected to left-wing politics but is intended to create a conversation among people of different philosophies and beliefs. In Canada, there have been two prominent applications of deliberative democratic models.

In , the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform convened a policy jury to consider alternatives to the first-past-the-post electoral systems. In , the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform convened to consider alternative electoral systems in that province. The Green Party of the United States refers to its particular proposals for grassroots democracy and electoral reform by this name.

Although not always the case, participation in deliberation has often been found to shift participants opinions in favour of Green positions, and can even cause a favourable change of voting intention. According to Professor Stephen Tierney, perhaps the earliest notable example of academic interest in the deliberative aspects of democracy occurred in John Rawls work A Theory of Justice.

Bessette coined the term "deliberative democracy" in his work "Deliberative Democracy: Although political theorists took the lead in the study of deliberative democracy, political scientists have in recent years begun to investigate its processes. One of the main challenges currently is to discover more about the actual conditions under which the ideals of deliberative democracy are more or less likely to be realized. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This section needs additional citations for verification.

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