Three Models of Democratic Deliberation

Abstract

This paper comes out of my experience working at the of three models of deliberative democracy: (1) the preference-based model held by many deliberative theorists in the social sciences; (2) the rational proceduralist model suggested by John Rawls's political philosophy and Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics; and (3) what I will call an integrative model that has been overlooked in the literature but can be seen at work in most actual deliberative forums com- posed of members of a polity deliberating on that polity's direction. The latter includes the National Issues Forums (NIF), a network of civic organizations that run deliberative forums consonant with a quasi-Deweyan approach to pub- lic deliberation. My aim in this paper is to see the extent to which any or all of these models can be mapped onto actual deliberative forums, including delib- erative polls, the method developed by James Fishkin (1991; 1995). These three models are not mutually exclusive. A deliberator might see herself engaged in more than one sort at a time (perhaps testing out, as in the second sort, whether a justification for a policy is acceptable to all, while at the same time hoping to find some integration even where participants cannot reach accord, as in model three). Any combination could work, in practice, even though some of the meth- ods may, again in practice, work at cross purposes. For example, focusing largely on the normative aims of the second model might lead one to minimize the empirical facts of people's actual, strategic aims, of which the third model is highly aware. I want to draw out the theoretical differences between these ap- proaches and show how these differences matter in practice. My own intersection among these three approaches is rather makeshift: I happened to begin working with Fishkin on a deliberative poll we called the National Issues Convention (NIC) while I was a graduate student at the Univer- sity of Texas (writing a dissertation, in part, on Jurgen Habermas). I was never Fishkin's student, rather our collaboration began because of my association with the Kettering Foundation, which is a major force behind the NIF. 2 Fishkin be- came allied with NIF and the Kettering Foundation because of their shared in-