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Justifying deliberative democracy: Are two heads always wiser than one?

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Democracy is usually justified either on intrinsic or instrumental, particularly epistemic, grounds. Intrinsic justifications stress the values inherent in the democratic process itself, whereas epistemic ones stress that it results in good outcomes. This article examines whether epistemic justifications for deliberative democracy are superior to intrinsic ones. The Condorcet jury theorem is the most common epistemic justification of democracy. I argue that it is not appropriate for deliberative democracy. Yet deliberative democrats often explicitly state that the process will favour the best argument. This can only be the case if deliberation improves the overall competence of the group and of the individuals that constitute it. I analyse when deliberation will increase competences and when it will not do so and find that individual competences will not reliably increase as a result of deliberation. In order for deliberative democracy to be epistemically more effective than representative democracy, strong procedural assumptions need to be made and deliberative democracy needs to be justified based on a combination of epistemic and intrinsic elements.

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Notes

  1. Cohen applies these three elements to an epistemic interpretation of voting, but these can be extended to a deliberative form of decision-making as well, especially as deliberative democracy is most likely to take the form of voting preceded by deliberative discussion.

  2. Often, but not always, followed by voting.

  3. Estlund focuses on these ‘primary bads’ since all qualified persons would agree that they must be avoided, thereby providing a good approximation of an independent standard of correctness.

  4. If this condition fails to hold, that is individuals are more likely to be wrong than right, than the inverse of the original theorem becomes true and the group is more likely to be wrong than each individual member.

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Acknowledgements

I thank, Adrian Blau, Keith Dowding, Chandran Kukathas, Christian List and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

Authors
  1. Zsuzsanna Chappell
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Chappell, Z. Justifying deliberative democracy: Are two heads always wiser than one?. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 78–101 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.8

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