A systemic approach to deliberative democracy

The last several decades have seen growing agreement among political theorists and empirical political scientists that the legitimacy of a democracy depends in part on the quality of deliberation that informs citizens and their representatives. Until recently, those who wanted to study and improve the quality of deliberation in democracies began with, basically, two strategies. One concentrated on deliberation in legislative bodies of all sorts and the campaigns that produce their members. The other strategy, not necessarily at odds with the first, addressed the design, promulgation, and empowerment of small deliberative initiatives in which citizens could deliberate under relatively favourable conditions. Both of these strategies, however, focused only on individual sites and not on the interdependence of sites within a larger system. Typically, the ideal has been cast in the image of the best possible single deliberative forum. Most empirical research on deliberative democracy, accordingly, has concentrated ‘either on a single episode of deliberation, as in one-time group discussions, or on a continuing series with the same group or in the same type of institution’ (Thompson 2008a: 213). Yet no single forum, however ideally constituted, could possess deliberative capacity sufficient to legitimate most of the decisions and policies that democracies adopt. To understand the larger goal of deliberation, we suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the study of individual institutions and processes to examine their interaction in the system as a whole. We recognize that most democracies are complex entities in which a wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work – including informal networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non-profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, and the courts. We thus advocate what may be called a systemic approach to deliberative democracy.