Deliberative Democracy, More than Deliberation

Abstract

What is the relationship between deliberation and democracy? Despite the volumes dedicated to this question, recent admissions by prominent deliberative democrats—that we need not pursue a necessarily deliberative political system, but merely a democratic one—suggest that this remains an open question. Here, I defend the deliberative model’s staying power against those who argue that it has been set normatively adrift. Addressing concerns of “concept-stretching,” I show that the deliberative model provides much more than a defense of the practice of deliberation. Indeed, its key contribution is the answer it provides to the question of what democracy itself means in large pluralistic societies. Moreover, I show that by de-centering the practice of deliberation from deliberative theories of democracy, we can acknowledge the weakness of deliberation and the strengths of non-deliberative practices, while retaining the model’s normative commitments.