Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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3. Deliberation and democracy – an example<br />
What Dahl terms enlightened understanding is close to what is meant<br />
by a robust level of deliberation in one strand of democratic theory.<br />
Deliberation is clearly a democratic virtue - it is better that citizens<br />
discuss and understand the meanings and consequences of the choices<br />
they need to make. It is also desirable that citizens understand each<br />
other more fully than is needed in pure bargaining relations, and that<br />
they try to reach a substantial agreement. Yet if we increase deliberation<br />
to very high levels, growing tensions with other basic features of<br />
democracy seem likely.<br />
Deliberation and participation compete for time and resources.<br />
One can try to erase this tension by declaring them to be versions of<br />
the same thing, but this makes little sense if one thinks about any actual<br />
political context. Deliberating about a program or an issue takes time.<br />
Participating in a sustained way in an effort to influence relevant views<br />
and decisions also takes time. And it is not the same activity, or the same<br />
kind of time. There is also a tension between the relatively more reflective<br />
stance entailed in deliberation and the more partisan stance that is usually<br />
part of participation. Unless time is unlimited, then, more deliberation<br />
<strong>do</strong>es not mean more participation, and it may well mean less.<br />
Deliberation and equality of voting have no particularly strong<br />
relation. Increasing deliberation should not cause voting equality to<br />
diminish – the likely relation is neutral.<br />
71<br />
DEMOCRATIC VIRTUES<br />
David Plotke<br />
constant at a relatively low level, above but near the threshold of democracy. Then we<br />
would consider what happens as the level of the remaining attribute was increased (e.g.,<br />
rising levels of participation). We could then make judgments about how this increase<br />
influences the other attributes.<br />
The second approach would focus on pair wise analyses of the five main attributes of<br />
democracy indicated by Dahl. We would start by examining each of the ten pairs (such<br />
as inclusion and agenda control). What happens to one of the two attributes in each<br />
set as we increase the level of the other – what happens to deliberation as participation<br />
increases, for example? Does increasing one attribute produce a positive or negative result<br />
with the other? The next step would be to see whether there are some properties of the<br />
relations that allow us to group them in a theoretically interesting way.<br />
The second route might be more rigorous, although it would risk becoming impossibly<br />
complex. The first route risks oversimplification, but the advantages in clarity and directness<br />
are large. I will not undertake either procedure here – my purpose in discussing<br />
them is to suggest the size of this relatively unexplored theoretical territory.