Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

to debate and decide on any topic they wanted to. And indeed, they
did so, not only metaphorically but with decisions that yielded real
and sometimes unfavourable consequences.
• Accountability: The constant political involvement did not take place
under the protection of shadowy anonymity but in the light of the
public realm, under the observant eyes of fellow citizens. Therefore,
anyone could and was held accountable for what they did, which
found its formal expression in the permanent control of office holders.
However, it also affected less formally involved citizens, as the
tragic case of Socrates demonstrates.
[11]
• Having elaborated on these three key elements of the public realm
and turning back to the participatory experiments discussed before, it
becomes apparent that their failure can be traced back to the absence
of one or more of these elements:
• Equality: Organisers of deliberative forums usually emphasise the
importance of equality among participants. However, this premise
was violated as soon as an official person joined the discussion. This
finding shows that equality is not established by simply positing it,
but – as the ancient example teaches – it has to be maintained and
reinforced through cleverly designed institutions and mechanisms
that must be refined as soon as people find ways to by-pass them.
• Decision-making ability: Admittedly, most deliberative forums do not
intend nor promise to have a direct effect on real policy decisions.
Yet, this is also a major source of disillusionment among participants
of those experiments (Button/Mattson 1999: 629f.). Support for such
forums would be far more enthusiastic if they actually had an influence
on political processes. The same is true for online participation
where in some cases increased citizen involvement in the decisionmaking
process was overtly aspired to, but it obviously had zero
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DESIGNING THE PUBLIC
REALM – A PREREQUISITE
FOR DEMOCRATIC
INNOVATION
Marco Walter
11
It is telling that the second of these elements ‘decision-making ability’ is often either
ignored or taken for granted in normative democratic designs. For example, Hüller
(2010: 84) identifies three principles of democracy: “political equality and/or reciprocity,
publicity and accountability” and seems to assume that the influence on actual decisions
is implied in those principles. Smith (2009: 22-24) is aware of this problem and therefore
includes “popular control” as a feature to test the quality of democratic innovations. In
consequence, the present paper corroborates that decision-making ability can neither
be taken for granted nor will it naturally arise out of other prerequisites, but has to be
established explicitly at the outset of democratic processes.