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

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

There is vote suppression, distortions of campaign finance, a largely uninformed public, vast sums of money spent to mislead and manipulate public opinion, efforts to spread fake news on social media, and a public that is increasingly likely to talk mostly to the like-minded, and consult mostly news sources it agrees with.

The process permits the public to take thoughtful responsibility and the outcomes should be what the people decide they really want. This is the ideal. But there are many questions in an age of cynicism and mass disaffection about how this ideal can be realized.

aspirations for deliberative democracy look at how and whether our views of what should be done can be developed under conditions where evidence-based reasons and arguments can be more consequential.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, there were relatively few democracies. Then, beginning about 1974, the “third wave” spread democratic governance around the world from around 30 percent of the world’s independent states to close to 60 percent.9 This expansion brought public input and accountability to governance in most countries. However,

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.

In our long journey of bringing power to the people—through mass primaries, referenda, recall elections, direct election of senators in the US, public opinion polls, and other forms of public consultation—we have empowered a public that generally lacks the information and attention that would be required for applying the value of deliberation in ma

The people lack any real opportunity to think in depth about what they really want done. Instead they have competitive political sports and distractions. It is a kind of limited democracy with barely the pretense of engaging the will of the people.1

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.