What Should we Expect from More Democracy?

Abstract

THEORIES OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY hold that if individuals were more broadly empowered, especially in the institutions that most directly affect their everyday lives, their experiences would have transformative effects. Individuals would become more public spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests. Transformations such as these would improve the workings of higher-level representative institutions, as well as mitigate threats that democracy is often held to pose to rights, pluralism, and governability.1 And institutions that make collective decisions in radically democratic ways will tend to generate new forms of solidarity, cooperation, and civic attachment. One version of radical democracy that has been gaining currencyincreasingly referred to as democracy-holds that, of the variety of possible democratic experiences, deliberation is most central to these generative and transformative effects.2 Unlike many democratic theorists, proponents of deliberative democracy do not view formal procedures such as voting and political rights as definitive of democracy. Rather, on the deliberative view, we should regard democratic rules and procedures as mechanisms that empower and protect democratic deliberations. Formal