Editor's Introduction

Abstract

What is democracy? Is it a form, or a quality? A process, or a goal? A type of government, or a relation between government and governed and among the governed themselves? Is it “a” thing at all, or is it thoroughly plural—not just historically or demographically, but logically, morally, and metaphysically? Finally, whatever its essential nature, is democracy a genuine possibility that actual communities can realize given enough hard work and thinking? Or is it merely a rhetorical device for eliciting, from the powerful, the bare minimum of justice required to forestall chaos?In a variety of ways—some complementary, some (at least apparently) contradictory—all the contributors to this volume of The Good Society question the dichotomies invoked above. Ana Romero-Iribas and Graham Smith draw on other students of the ancient Greek conception of “political friendship” to complicate the role of “reciprocity” in democratic societies. Romero-Iribas and Smith do not deny the value of what historian James T. Kloppenberg identifies as democracy's foundational “rationale” for “treating all persons with respect,” and for “extend[ing] the category of those deserving consideration beyond the small body of citizens” in our familiar experience.1 Instead, they identify two forms of reciprocity, both of which undergird different types of friendship that can take political form: “reciprocity as exchange” (marked by active exchange of benefits in a recognized cycle) and “reciprocity as correspondence” (marked by tolerance of inactivity due to mutual admiration or commonality of purpose). Moreover, the authors argue, it is possible to conceive of friendship—traditional or political—without reciprocation. In these alternative friendships it is the separateness of the friends rather than their togetherness that unites them. Perhaps, they conclude, many of today's developed and (still) aspiring democracies would be strengthened if their citizens more diligently practiced the art of cultivating such friendships of estrangement, founded on a “common heterogeneity.”What would such practice look like, and what might empower and motivate us to do it? Kristina Brezicha's work suggests that the answers to both questions must begin with our schools. Brezicha's critique of current approaches to youth political socialization draws on Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory of development to suggest an interdisciplinary theory that, in applied form, would emphasize schools' potential to foster students' feelings of belonging. By integrating research on belonging from the political science, sociology, psychology, and youth development fields with Bronfrenbrenner's work, educators, in Brezicha's view, can reclaim the school's historical role of citizenship preparation without reverting to indoctrination or settling for rote memorization of the branches and functions of government.As if to put a finer point on Brezicha's argument, Maurizio Tinnirello and Michael Samuels insist that education at all levels must promote an explicitly critical stance toward global capitalism and the neoliberal norms and assumptions that drive and legitimize it, rather than “reflect” such norms and assumptions in curricula, pedagogy, and institutional structures. Where Brezicha sees schools as promising sites for fostering a complex sense of belonging to a diverse community striving for democracy, Tinnirello and Samuels see the education systems of the West as complicit in the fragmentation of political systems and social relations catalyzed by globalization. Rather than educating citizens to value individual opportunity and cultivate a narrow ethos of self-reliance, aspiring democracies should educate citizens to value mutualistic relationships with, and practice “cognitive compassion” for, their fellows—a course for which Tinnirello and Samuels offer some suggestions drawn from the playbooks of the neoliberals he criticizes.In the final article of the volume, Daniel May suggests another site in which citizens might fruitfully encounter, apply, and refine a civically constructive theory of democratic politics: community organizing. Using the Industrial Areas Foundation as a case study, May draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to challenge frequent indictments of the IAF's politics as instrumentally self-serving rather than democratically self-interested in a broadly flourishing commonwealth. An Arendtian lens, May argues, reveals that the oldest community organizing network in the United States has long nurtured and embodied a view of politics as a space for facilitating frank disclosure of self-interest in the service of constructive working relationships across difference—the type of political friendship, perhaps, that Romero-Iribas and Smith consider central to any democratic project. Indeed, the IAF model, as May interprets it, accounts for a richer array of factors motivating political life than Arendt's own theory accommodates. Despite their respective controversial reputations, Arendt and the IAF both offer lessons for organizing and empowering citizens of varied backgrounds and allegiances to do the daily work of democracy.The second part of the volume highlights one of the most ambitious efforts of the past thirty years to answer the question of democracy's essence while simultaneously designing machinery to give it life. James S. Fishkin is a leading theorist of deliberative democracy: the principle that decisions on public issues or affecting public life should be the product of reasonable, egalitarian debate among citizens rather than the aggregate of unchallenged opinions, and that any true democracy must maintain institutions that facilitate and respond meaningfully to such deliberative processes.2 For decades, and with increasing frequency over the last ten years, Fishkin has elaborated his theory through a series of on-the-ground, geographically wide-ranging, contextually adaptive experiments in what he calls (and has trademarked as) Deliberative Polling® (DP).3 Fishkin's latest book, Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), is an impressively current synthesis of his own decades of thinking and scores of experiments (many run in the past few years) in the deliberativist vein. It is unsurprising that some of the most innovative and influential democratic theorists working today were eager to engage Fishkin's latest arguments and evidence for DP's value; it is a boon for readers of The Good Society that they were also eager to present their conclusions in these pages, along with Fishkin's response. For, in my view, Fishkin's braiding of empirical and normative analysis with constructive theory and experiment is an almost ideal response to the challenge Peter Levine posed to the Civic Studies field—and partisans of justice and freedom generally—in these pages not so long ago: the challenge of weaving facts and values into concrete yet flexible strategies for democratic action.4This is not to idealize the particular form and products of Fishkin's empirical-normative-strategic approach. As Fishkin himself admits in his response, DP is “still in early stages,” and some of our contributors are skeptical of its scalability, for practical and moral reasons. Few, however, can deny that DP is an ingenious combination of theory and application that has generated huge and rich volumes of data on how, and with what results, citizens of diverse polities think, communicate, and learn in structured deliberative contexts. Given such richness—in turn a product of its prolific adaptability—DP's premise is simple. The prevailing “Schumpeterian” model of democracy—in which democracy is merely a forum for competition among aspiring governors, and citizen participation is limited to pleibiscitary legitimation and passive consumption of government policies—is both undemocratic and unnecessary.5 Specifically, Schumpeterian democracy fails to embody any of the four core principles of democracy as Fishkin understands it: political equality, participation, deliberation, and nontyranny—that is, avoidance of localized or discriminatory harm and costs whenever possible. The fact that extant institutions in (say) the United States fail to promote equality and participation in (ostensible) favor of (elite) deliberation and nontyranny does not mean that better institutions are impossible. Indeed, across the world Schumpeterian institutions are failing even to protect spheres of deliberation within partisan ranks, and without deliberation—without means of learning from even the slightest differences in perspective—the chances of those in power backing moves for equality, encouraging participation of the unequal, and avoiding a tyranny over the excluded are easily quantified at two: fat and slim. Thus, Fishkin argues, theorists are obliged to suggest something that can satisfy at least some democratic principles, deliberation foremost among them.In some ways, Fishkin's candidate—DP itself—is simple too. We can't squeeze the citizens of a whole country, state, province, or other polity of any size in a single room to analyze the same facts and learn from one another face-to-face, and as of now we lack the technology (mechano-digital and political) to do it virtually. Instead, let's take a random sample of constituents, stratified by major demographic and attitudinal indicators to ensure its representativeness. Let's bring them together, covering all expenses and paying for their time. Let's educate them on the issue or issues to be resolved; facilitate their reasonable expression, civil exchange, and evidence-based analysis of views; ascertain the resultant opinion of the majority; and make the case that “the people” writ large would endorse the same courses of action as the “deliberating microcosm” if given the opportunity, and thus should do so regardless.The virtue of the symposium is that it complicates this simple scheme without undermining the importance of its theoretical implications or even its practical applications. As Kimmo Grönlund's review of the book and brief reports of his own experiments both suggest, Deliberative Polling, and deliberative “mini-publics” generally, hold great promise for polities aspiring to democracy—in part, I would emphasize, because they demonstrate the simultaneously realizable and unrealizable character of the democratic ideal itself. As Grönlund notes, perhaps the crowning achievement of DP thus far is its recent incorporation into the Mongolian constitution as an “entry point” for, and required step in, that same constitution's amendment. Similarly enthusiastic is Jane Mansbridge, whose standing among deliberative democratic theorists is surpassed only by her esteem in the Civic Studies field she helped found.6 For all her enthusiasm, however, Mansbridge worries that the “paths” to DP's normative and practical legitimacy remain hidden, or obstacle-strewn at the least. She suggests several institutional innovations and communication strategies to clear the way.Meanwhile, Fishkin's critics are well represented here. Cristina Lafont—among the most prominent critics of deliberative microcosms within the larger deliberativist camp—emphasizes Mansbridge's first, normative challenge: How can any effort to vest decisional power in a vanishingly small minority of the populace be considered democratic? Lafont argues that, in its current practical and theoretical incarnations, DP fails to account for the “problem of the second best”—the possibility that pursuing the most realizable goals of an interlocking set in order to compensate for the thwarting of others does not always produce optimal results. Similarly, Simone Chambers, another prominent critic of “mini-public” approaches to democratic reform, takes Fishkin to task for his “pessimistic view of citizen competency outside of Deliberative Polls.” This pessimism, in Chambers's opinion, is a normative barrier to any project purporting to transcend Schumpeterianism. It also impedes the practical legitimacy of DPs, attaching too much importance to a strange and numerically restrictive mechanism unlikely to earn the public trust and more likely to distract from comprehensive reform agendas. Like Lafont, Chambers, and all the contributors, Yves Sintomer acknowledges Fishkin's massive contributions to successive waves of institutional innovation in democratic theory, but thinks his greatest achievement is primarily theoretical: his revival of the ancient Athenian practice of “sortition”—in Fishkin's case, through stratified random sampling—and his linking of the concept to deliberative democratic aims. Sintomer is less convinced of the feasibility and desirability of widely embedded Deliberative Polling, however, questioning whether the method takes adequate account of the way external power dynamics can influence internal deliberations, and wondering what room a Fishkinian deliberative polity would make for social movements seeking to alter such dynamics.Perhaps the most systematic critique of Fishkin's book comes from Mark Warren. Despite praising Fishkin for his theoretical sophistication and major contribution to the empirical study of public deliberation and deliberative innovations, Warren identifies six areas of further research that he considers necessary to the fulfillment of Fishkin's aims. Like Mansbridge, he wonders what makes or might make mini-publics legitimate in the eyes of nonparticipants; like Lafont, Chambers, and Sintomer, he wonders if Fishkin imagines DPs promoting other types of citizen participation, and if so, how? There are also questions of inclusion and exclusion that stratified random sampling does not adequately address. How are the strata determined in the case of issues and decisions that transcend political jurisdictions? How can deeply interested but randomly excluded individuals—including officeholding political elites or administrative professionals—be persuaded to support rather than undermine the DP process and results?Legitimacy is, again, the main issue for Lawrence Lessig, who provides the most elaborative response to Fishkin's model. In a fragmented media environment, Lessig argues, “the challenge is not to craft the model” for reasoned deliberation and decision making; Fishkin has shown that it can be done. Rather, “the challenge is to convince the public that it should endorse or demand that it only be represented through such a sensible process.” Lessig sees a solution in simultaneously run, regionally dispersed, sequestered yet widely covered Deliberative Polls—“a kind of reality TV meets deliberative democracy.” He even envisions and describes in detail a scenario in which the U.S. Congress passes a statute mandating such a process in any scenario in which seventeen states (roughly one-third of the fifty total) support an Article V convention for wholesale constitutional overhaul.Our last reviewer, Sanford Levinson, is equally enthusiastic about the potentially sweeping implications of Fishkin's work. On Levinson's reading, Fishkin's book offers a critique, implicit but powerful, “of our near-exclusive focus on the mechanics of elections themselves,” rather than on the institutional and cultural framework in which our elections occur. Levinson has for decades been a prominent voice denouncing the lack of imagination—or intellectual courage—among “political scientists and lawyers (and, for that matter, pundits and politicians)” who dismiss all talk of major constitutional revision as unrealistic. For Levinson, what is unrealistic is to insist on the adequacy of a dismally unrepresentative and inefficient political system when promising alternatives present themselves. It is the courage of Fishkin's work that makes his book “essential reading for anyone interested in the health of our polities, at home and abroad.”Responding to so many and such thoughtful readings of his life's work was a huge task which Fishkin has executed splendidly. I will let his words speak for themselves, except to note that they glow with his characteristic grace and genuine curiosity. His personal practice of the deliberative virtues he promotes—including the friendship, inclusivity, cognitive compassion, and tolerant frankness our article authors endorse—provide a fitting close to this volume of The Good Society—the gist of which, it seems to me, is that democracy is what the people make of it.