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Reviving Deliberative Democracy 1 REVIVING DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 1 James Fishkin, Stanford University Our images of democracy are a palimpsest, with political practices and their attendant norms and values layered on top of each other. Earlier images shine through, sometimes highlighted, sometimes only barely visible. Rule by the people, in one sense or another, has undergone a long journey over more than 2,400 years. Despite the many complexities in this story, there are a few key ideas that pose fundamental and recurring issues of institutional design. In this paper I will try to highlight those, as they provide a frame for thinking both about the history of democratic practice and the key challenges ahead, at least for those concerned with democratic reform. To focus thought, consider the four democratic mechanisms in the chart below. They have each produced influential images of democratic practice at different times. All have a claim on modern thought and practice and all have, at various times, guided democratic reforms. These four options, inevi­ tably a simplification, are built around two distinctions: direct versus indirect and filtered versus unfiltered. Direct versus indirect identifies whether it is the people themselves who are expressing a view (or making a decision) or their elected representatives. When I say the people themselves, it can be a portion of the people, sometimes with a mode of selection or self selection other than election. Filtered versus unfiltered opinion identifies whether public opinion is subjected to an institutionalized process that successfully facilitates considera­ tion of competing reasons for competing options or whether opinion has not been subjected to such a process (and is thus more or less in the form we find in ordinary life) and hence, unfiltered. Ultimately, the question for political theory is whether a particular demo­ cratic mechanism, or combination of mechanisms, provides a basis for a After the Brussels symposium on "Democracy Gridlocked" a revised version of this talk was given at the ~ropean Consortium for Political Research, Bordeaux, France, September 2013. meaningful expression of what is commonly called "the will of the people". What we might mean by the "will of the people" is somewhat different when grounded in these different mechanisms. But the question of what might be the most meaningful account of the will of the people is central to conside­ ring which institutional designs best fulfill our democratic aspirations. In the argument I will sketch here, the will of the people is ideally both deliberative (in that the public has weighed competing reasons for what it decides to do on the basis of evidence and good information) and it is representative (inclu­ sive of all the strata and viewpoints in the society roughly in their appropriate proportions). If people decide on the basis of mis-information, or if their views have been manipulated by deception, then that is a case of defective public will formation. If significant viewpoints and interests are shut out of the discussion then the process of public will formation has also been distorted. We will return to these considerations later but begin with some simple distinctions. Democratic Mechanisms Filtered UJ 'W ~ a: z UJ u.i Indirect 4· Madisonian Representatives a:~ u ..n 0 I: 'W 0 < _J Madison and Indirect Filtration The fear of direct, unfiltered opinion (option 1) motivated Madison's strategy of"successive filtrations" (option 4). The Founders even tried to avoid the word "democracy" in describing their proposed "republic"•. After all, the people had killed Socrates and they had recently lived through Shays's rebellion so the mob - aroused by passions and interests that motivate factions adverse to the rights of others- was a spectre that affected the design 3• The Founders relied not on 2 I am using the word "democratic" in the classification of these mechanisms while acknowl­ edging that Madison as noted would not have used that word except for unfiltered direct democracy. 3 Ironically, Socrates had been convicted, not by a mob, but a jury that was randomly selected, a design that usually provides what we are calling filtered rather than unfiltered direct public views. We now know a good deal more of the case, and there is good evidence the jury direct qeliberation by the people but by representatives as modeled, say in their image of the Senate. As Madison observed in Federalist 63 about Socrates and the Jack of a Senate in Ancient Athens: What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next. The Senate was the institutional embodiment of Madison's "strategy of succes­ sive filtrations". The people elected the state legislatures and the state legisla­ tures selected the Senators. In a parallel way, the election of the President would be the task of an Electoral College selected by the states (and deliberating on a state by state basis). The constitutional convention and the ratifying conven­ tions were meant to be deliberative. All of these bodies constitute indirect filtra­ tion, both because the indirect character contributes to the selection of who is in >­ the room and because the people so selected, it was thought, would be inclined u <( to think about the public interest. uct: 0 Such a design was meant to be "a defense to the people against their own :L LJ.J 0 temporary errors and delusions". As Madison argues in an earlier passage in the LJ.J > same number of The Federalist: ~ 0::: LJ.J ::::;"' There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated LJ.J 0 by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful <.;) z misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they > >LJ.J themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. 0::: Hence the unfiltered direct expressions of the people are vulnerable to the passions and interests that pose a danger to the rights and interests of the community. The defense is in the indirect filtration of institutions like the Senate: In these critical moments how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves, until was goaded into its verdict by Socrates himself. Nevertheless tl1e tri al of Socrates set back the credibility of direct con.sulta'lion of the public, whether filtered or not, for two millennia. See I. F. STONE, The Tri.ql ofSocmtes for an account of how Socrates goaded the Athenians to produce his conviction. reason, justice and truth can regain their authority over the public mind. (The Federalist 63). The argument is detailed further in a famous portion of Federalist 10. Again it is a contrast between what we are calling option 1 and option 4. The chal­ lenge for institutional design is to avoid the mischiefs of faction. Factions are defined as "a number of citizens ... united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". In a "pure democracy" as in what was pictured as the direct democracy of the Assembly in Ancient Athens "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual". Direct unfiltered democracy has no cure for the mischiefs of faction. But a "republic ... in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking". A key part of the cure is the filter of representation, in the famous passage "to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests w •W of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be le'ast likely to >­ <{ 0:: sacrifice it to temporary and or partial considerations". z w Note that the "refining and enlarging" produces a transformation of opinion: u.i ~ 0:: u under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by 0 :i:: the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than •W 0 if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. <{ --' The representatives have achieved what he elsewhere calls the "deliberative sense of the community". If people were simply asked their opinions, without going through a similar process, then their expressions, unfiltered, might be overwhelmed by passions or interests dangerous to the rights of others 4 • He notes the design is not guaranteed to work. "Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices or sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption or by other means, first obtain the suffrages and then betray the interests of the people." The argument then proceeds to consider the circumstances, large or small republic, in which representatives might best be recruited to deliberate in the public 4 See Coleen Sheehan for the argument that Madison came to think that the "commerce of ideas" or the growth of communication would assist the rest of the public in also refining and enlarging their views in parallel to representatives. See C. A. SHEEHAN, fames Madison and the Spirit of Republican Government, Cambridge, 2009, p. 100. interest. Without pursuing the entire the argument here, it is worth emphasizing one aspect - deliberating representatives provide a solution to the problem of faction. The argument is that "if a faction consists ofless than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote".
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