Communitarian deliberative democracy and its implications for political discourse in South Africa

Abstract

Democracy in South Africa since the demise of apartheid has resulted in significant changes in political discourse. Yet, the country's multiparty democratic system remains challenged by majoritarianism, which might not always enhance deliberation in political discourse. In the present article, I show how constitutive goods of communitarian liberalism, namely caring, conversational justice and political reasoning, can be linked to the notion of deliberative democracy. Such a form of deliberative democracy is constituted by rationality that involves: (a) the view that rational articulation of arguments is a valuable part of human agency, (b) the view that political formulations have to be consistent and without contradiction, (c) the view that most citizens should in principle be attuned with 'the order of things', and (d) the view that relevant arguments need to be advanced in unconstrained inter-subjective processes of rational deliberation. It is such a notion of communitarian deliberative democracy that restricts majoritarianism and holds the promise to advance political discourse in South Africa.