Читать книгу Deliberative Democracy - Ian O'Flynn - Страница 10

There are many reasons to trace the origins of contemporary ideas about deliberative democracy. Of those reasons, one of the more interesting is that it shows us how deliberation, political equality and accountability came to be so central to democratic theory.

Theorists of deliberative democracy are wont to trace its origins back to ancient Athens (e.g., Fishkin 2018, 51–4). This tendency is perhaps understandable. As Josiah Ober explains, the ‘history of Athenian popular government shows that making good use of dispersed knowledge is the original source of democracy’s strength’ (2008, 2). The most famous institution in this respect was the Assembly (or ekklēsia) in which each citizen had the right to participate. However, because large public gatherings are not effective instruments of government, the Athenian system also relied on a 500-member governing Council (or boulē), chosen by lot from among those citizens who wished to volunteer to serve for a fixed term. Importantly, the council was charged not just with the day-to-day running of the state, but with setting the assembly’s agenda and evaluating proposals before resubmitting them to the assembly for decision (see also Schwartzberg 2015).

While deliberative theorists often celebrate the deliberative virtues of the Council and Assembly, recent scholarship shows that neither institution was organized as a deliberative institution: while deliberation was not precluded, in each case the aim was to facilitate decision-making by majority voting (Cammack 2021; cf. Ober 2008, 89–90). Granted, it also shows that, while the Assembly and Council were not particularly deliberative, the experience of participating in them is likely to have ‘prompted increased discussion of political issues outside those bodies’ (Cammack 2021, 137). Yet while ‘everyday talk’ may have affected how citizens voted, and while voting may in turn have prompted further deliberation, the point remains that, in ancient Athens, ‘there was significantly little organized political discussion’ (Cammack 2021, 137).

Thus, as Daniela Cammack concludes, the ‘distinctive feature of Athenian democracy was that citizens gathered in large numbers to decide actions by the result of votes, not that they took part in discussions or debates on a grand scale’ (2021, 162–3). In other words, the principal means of organizing dispersed knowledge was aggregation, not deliberation (cf. Ober 2008, 27, 98). In response, one could argue that, while ancient Athens was not quite the deliberative epitome it is sometimes taken to be, what ultimately matters is not historical accuracy but the normative ideas it suggests. That would be fine were it not for the fact that Athenian institutions were far from inclusive. They were, in fact, highly exclusive. Women, foreign residents and slaves – on most estimates, well more than half of the adult population – were not permitted to participate in political life and certainly not in the Assembly (Weale 2018, 18–23). Upper-class women could not leave the house unless they were veiled and accompanied by a male relative, while there is a good case for arguing that slavery was the essential condition for civic liberty: without it, the freedom and (just as importantly) the time to participate in the Assembly and to volunteer for the Council may simply not have existed.

The upshot is that, while Athenian institutions may have been designed for organizing the dispersed knowledge of citizens, the Assembly and Council were principally aggregative institutions and citizenship itself was narrowly circumscribed. There is, admittedly, a case for saying that since every democracy is a creature of its time, it should be evaluated on its own terms. But there is a stronger case for saying that the history of democracy is a history of inclusion. Today, we (rightly) tend to ask not just if there is political equality but also how far that equality extends (Dahl 1989, 88).

Much closer to our own era, John Stuart Mill ([1861] 1991) addressed this question directly. In his ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, he argued that while government should be responsible for making decisions, parliament should be responsible for holding government to account. More precisely, parliament should compel government to justify its decisions not just to its own supporters but to society at large. For this to happen, however, parliament needed to be much more inclusive. In a justifiably famous passage, Mill noted how the British working classes lacked representation of their own. As he went on to say:

I do not believe that the classes who do participate in it have in general any intention of sacrificing the working classes to themselves. … Yet does Parliament, or almost any of the members composing it, ever for an instant look at any question with the eyes of a working man? When a subject arises in which the labourers as such have an interest, is it regarded from any point of view but that of the employers of labour? I do not say that the working men’s view of these questions is in general nearer to the truth than the other: but it is sometimes quite as near; and in any case it ought to be respectfully listened to, instead of being, as it is, not merely turned away from, but ignored. ([1861] 1991, 246)

For Mill, therefore, the prospects for accountability in representative systems were tied to the prospects for inclusion. To hold government to account, parliament needed to be a microcosm of society, to which end he called for serious electoral reform. More precisely, he called for the introduction of ‘Mr Hare’s system’, or what today we would refer to as the single transferrable vote form of proportional representation. Indeed, he called for a more fundamental restructuring of society itself ([1869] 1991). Controversially for the time, he called for the emancipation of women and the recognition of their civil and political rights, including the right to work outside the home, the right to higher education and the right to vote. Only with such changes in place could parliament function as a genuine ‘Congress of Opinions’ or deliberative chamber.

Mill clearly thought that, in representative systems, parliament should be the core of deliberative practice. But there are tensions in his account. As already noted, his view is that, while government should be responsible for making decisions, parliament should be responsible for holding government to account. Yet although this division of labour makes perfect sense (again, large bodies are not effective instruments of government), it also suggests that, while holding people to account may be discursive, it is not deliberative. After all, accountability is not fundamentally about reasoning together to a common judgement. It is, at bottom, about making others answer for decisions that they have already made (cf. Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 128–32). That is obviously important in representative systems. But it raises a question about the deliberative nature of parliament.

While there are conceptual tensions in Mill’s account, there are also worries of a more principled sort. Nowadays, political equality is widely understood to entail (among other things) that each person should have one vote and each vote should count the same. However, Mill’s view was more restricted: ‘though every one ought to have a voice – that every one should have an equal voice is a totally different proposition’ ([1861] 1991, 334). We should broaden the argument pool, but we should also remember that some parts of the pool are likely to be murkier than others. (In other words, dispersed knowledge may not be evenly dispersed, an issue that, as we will see in Chapter 3, can also affect mini-publics.) Consequently, or so Mill thought, while everyone should have a vote, the votes of the better educated, or the more virtuous, should count for more; in practice, the better educated should have more than one vote. Hence, ‘plural voting’, as it is usually termed.

Mill, then, was clearly concerned by the fact that some people are more politically competent, or cognitively able, than others (see Thompson 1976, 99–101). Yet to modern ears, concerns of this sort have an unacceptably elitist ring to them (cf. Brennan 2016). Indeed, it was precisely concerns about elitism and its obverse, the decline of party identification and the loss of representation that it involved, that in no small measure led to the major deliberative revival that began in the 1980s and that has continued right up to the present day (Floridia 2017).

More precisely, three such concerns loomed large (see also Goodin 2003, 2–7). First, many democratic theorists (e.g., Elster 1986) had become increasingly dissatisfied with the prevailing view that, because democracy imposes unrealistic demands on the time and attention of ordinary people, political decision-making should be left to political elites who would then be held to account at election time. Second, the deliberative revival was also driven by a desire to afford a greater say to individuals and groups who, through no fault of their own, were politically marginalized. Partly, this was in response to the arguments of feminists and multiculturalists (see, e.g., Phillips 1991). But it was also in response to the more general failure of political elites to advance the cause of social justice (see, e.g., Fishkin 1991). Finally, democratic theorists were also concerned with the quality of democracy itself. In particular, they were searching for new means of addressing growing levels of political disaffection among ordinary citizens and the consequent atrophying of civic life (see, e.g., Cohen and Rogers 1992).

In short, democratic theorists sought to reject the prevailing elitist model of democracy in favour of one that could allow ordinary people, especially those at the margins, a much more effective say. They continue to make this case today, focusing not just on stable democratic societies, but on societies where democracy is far less secure – due, for example, to the legacy of colonialism, ethnic conflict, authoritarian backsliding or natural disasters (see, e.g., Curato 2019; Levy et al. 2021). They have even begun to think about the case for including future generations, or at least their interests, in democratic decision-making (e.g., Smith 2021).

At the same time, while deliberative democrats are united in the view that deliberation is essential to political legitimacy, they differ on how ‘deliberative democracy’ is best defined. In Chapter 2, we will consider the more important of these differences. However, since we must start somewhere, I want to conclude this chapter by focusing on the extended definition provided by Joshua Cohen in his seminal essay, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’ (1989). Granted, Cohen’s essay was not the first to argue for a deliberative revival. Jon Elster’s ‘The Market and the Forum’ (1986), published three years earlier, had already made that point, but since it did not provide an extended definition, Cohen’s is the more obvious place to begin.