Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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