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

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

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

the democratic way to win is to educate, organize, mobilize…more people than the other side has. ‘More’ is what makes the victory legitimate and while legitimacy is strengthened if good arguments can be made about the substantive issues at stake, the victory is rarely won by making good arguments.

Around the world, changes in democratic institutions, both formal and informal, have brought “power to the people” but under conditions where the people have little reason or effective incentive to think very much about the power they are supposed to exercise.

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

Why should we have democracy, one might argue, when we can have good governance (or better governance) without it? Our most influential democratic model, competitive elections, seems to have its own competition from apparently benevolent non-democracies. Democracy is under siege and needs to experiment and innovate. This book hopes to contribute to

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.

As we will see, self-selected intense groups can achieve mass participation and even deliberation, but such strategies will violate political equality because they will be unrepresentative.

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