The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.1 (2004) 44-59

Three Models of Democratic Deliberation ¹

Nöelle McAfee
University of Massachusetts Lowell

This paper comes out of my experience working at the intersection of three models of deliberative democracy: (1) the preference-based model held by many deliberative theorists in the social sciences; (2) the rational proceduralist model suggested by John Rawls's political philosophy and Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics; and (3) what I will call an integrative model that has been overlooked in the literature but can be seen at work in most actual deliberative forums composed of members of a polity deliberating on that polity's direction. The latter includes the National Issues Forums (NIF), a network of civic organizations that run deliberative forums consonant with a quasi-Deweyan approach to public deliberation. My aim in this paper is to see the extent to which any or all of these models can be mapped onto actual deliberative forums, including deliberative polls, the method developed by James Fishkin (1991; 1995). These three models are not mutually exclusive. A deliberator might see herself engaged in more than one sort at a time (perhaps testing out, as in the second sort, whether a justification for a policy is acceptable to all, while at the same time hoping to find some integration even where participants cannot reach accord, as in model three). Any combination could work, in practice, even though some of the methods may, again in practice, work at cross purposes. For example, focusing largely on the normative aims of the second model might lead one to minimize the empirical facts of people's actual, strategic aims, of which the third model is highly aware. I want to draw out the theoretical differences between these approaches and show how these differences matter in practice.

My own "intersection" among these three approaches is rather makeshift: I happened to begin working with Fishkin on a deliberative poll we called the National Issues Convention (NIC) while I was a graduate student at the University of Texas (writing a dissertation, in part, on Jürgen Habermas). I was never Fishkin's student, rather our collaboration began because of my association with the Kettering Foundation, which is a major force behind the NIF. ² Fishkin became allied with NIF and the Kettering Foundation because of their shared interests [End Page 44] in deliberation and because Kettering offered support with finding trained moderators and putting together issue briefing books. All the while, most of the deliberative theory swirling in the air drew on the resurgence of political philosophy brought on both by Rawls's work and by Habermas's notion of reasoning, that in moral, ethical, and political discourse participants should try to offer justifications for their favored policies that would be agreeable to all others affected by a policy.

My particular affiliations aside, the intersection of deliberative thought in the interstices of deliberative polling, normative political theory, and actual deliberative practice is a more general phenomenon. All draw on the key term "deliberation," and observers expect a commonality because of this shared term. But this intersection is not an altogether seamless one. Many of those who take part in deliberative experiments have rather different ideas of what "deliberation" means; still, the term often gets used as if everyone agrees, though they do not. The differences are not merely semantic; they are rooted in very different conceptions of politics. Because it operates at the intersection of these differences, deliberative polling, specifically the two National Issues Conventions held in the United States, offers a useful case study of how these approaches converge and diverge. In these pages I describe the three models I see at work and offer some preliminary ideas of how they make their way into deliberative polling. My goal here is not to offer an encyclopedic account of these models but rather enough details to flesh out the key differences in their orientations and goals.

The Preference-Based Model

The first model I consider comes out of the social sciences, primarily via political scientists...