Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation

On this view, democracy is not about collective will formation but just a “competitive struggle for the people’s vote,”

By Competitive Democracy I mean the notion of democracy via electoral competition. Most influentially, this approach was championed by Joseph Schumpeter and more recently by Richard Posner and others.58 This approach to democracy is in fact the one that is most widely accepted around the world.

Leaders who appear to be following opinion may in fact be creating it.53 Whether or not one considers this leadership or manipulation, it undermines claims to popular control.

The root of deliberation is weighing.43 And the root idea of deliberative democracy—admittedly a very simple and commonsense notion—is that the people should weigh the arguments, the competing reasons, offered by their fellow citizens under good conditions for expressing and listening to them and considering them on the merits. A democracy designed

By definition, more people support the majority view than support the minority one. But for some questions there is also a long tradition of requiring super majorities rather than simple majorities. Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that “the more grave and important the questions discussed, the nearer should the opinion that is to prevail approach unanim

Equality-of-life chances for valued slots in society is a common criterion for equal opportunity for valued positions. If I have an equal chance there is a sense in which I have an equal opportunity.14 Most importantly, a good random sample should be free of participatory distortion.

The more general lesson is that self-selected participation is virtually certain to be unrepresentative and hence offer a distorted form of inclusion.

A great deal of research supports the picture of a public that is mostly inattentive, not well informed, and only episodically aroused. How can such a public exercise any significant control? Consider further that if leaders manipulate or deceive the public then in what sense is the public exerting control over leaders even when the leaders are doi

Even more ambitiously, if there is a deliberative agenda-setting process to determine what the people are deliberating about within that policy domain, then we can say that it is a well-ordered deliberative process.31 Further, if such processes are sufficiently widespread, we can say it is a well-ordered deliberative system.