Learning Not to Love Revolution

Abstract

Whenever possible, participatory institutions should bring together citizens of opposing views in circumstances that reward mutual understanding and the accurate gathering of information. Deliberation among intellectuals, or even elected representatives, is not enough. In the United States, theorists have accordingly proposed neighborhood and workplace assemblies, referenda requiring two distinct votes separated by a period of deliberation, and policy juries formed from representative samples of citizens all institutional means of nourishing deliberation at its citizen roots. Each nation must work out the deliberative innovations, and the mix of adversary and deliberative institutions, that fit its own patterns of cleavage, its own history, and its own culture. In the long run, deliberative processes may offer the best hope of finding ways to handle not only class conflicts, but also the ethnic disputes that threaten to split several of the newly democratizing nations in Eastern Europe. While consociational and federal solutions can produce reasonably just allocations among groups, shifting citizen perspectives from class or ethnic interests to a long-run common good requires the transformations of self that deliberative processes make possible. Jane Mansbridge is Professor of Political Science and a member of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her first book, Beyond Advel5ary from which many ideas in this article are drawn, was followed by Why We Lost the ERA, a study of the problems of deliberation in the social movement that advocated the Equal Rights Amendment. Beyond Self-Interest, a colledion of Mansbridge'S recent research on public-interested motivation, will be published this spring by the University of Chicago Press. present article draws on the following 8OUItes: Benjamin Barbel;. Strong Democracy {Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)i Adam Przeworski, Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy, in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986); George Schopflin, The Political Traditions of Eastern Europe:' Daedelus, vol. 119 (1990); Valerie Bunce, The Transition from State Socialism to Liberal Democracy, in Kazimirtz Poznanski, ed., Great Transformation in Reverse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).