Session 7b: Deliberative Democracy II
1st Global Conference
Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic
Deliberative Democracy as a Learning Process: A Refutation of Habermas’s Deliberative Democracy
Vivienne Boon
University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Habermas in his recent writings argued that a European democratic polity should be founded on the memory of the atrocities of the Second World War. There are many problems with this conception of European democracy – not least its idealised nature that bears little resemblance to concrete reality, and its monological prescription which appears to counter his own claim to intersubjectivity – but perhaps more importantly the fact that this notion is built on a controversial model of social evolution. This model of evolution is highly problematic, as it is premised on biological and archaeological foundations that were deemed valid in the 1970s but have since been proven inaccurate. But more importantly for Habermas’s internal framework: it falls victim to the Hegelian critique of Kant. For, it makes tautological statements, loses its relation to practical complexity and forfeits its motivational referent. It also inadvertently implies a foundationalist conception of the philosophy of history that Habermas himself wants to refute. This paper will argue that democracy should not be regarded as a learning process or as entailing a mode of rationalisation as Habermas conceives it.
The Deliberative Case Against the Secret Ballot (and Why it Fails)
Bart Engelen and Thomas Nys
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In this paper, we distinguish between the aggregative, the republican and the deliberative model of democracy by analyzing the way they conceptualize the input, the procedure and the output of democratic decision-making. While we support the growing consensus in current literature that the deliberative model is normatively superior to the others, we believe it is not without problems itself. In our view, any plausible defense of deliberative democracy is provisional. Only if citizens are able to gain knowledge about and critically discuss political issues, can genuine deliberation (including its desirable effects) come about. If not, political disagreements may polarize and/or less well-off citizens may participate even less in politics.
Instead of shying away from voting procedures, we believe proponents of deliberative democracy should aim to reform them in order to boost the deliberative character of votes and voters. More concretely, they seriously ought to consider opening up the vote, because this would induce people to publicly discuss and justify their political views and to form a discursively defensible judgment on how to vote. Those who really want votes and voters to be (more) deliberative should thus abolish the secret ballot. As with deliberative democracy, however, this defense of open voting is provisional. Only if people have the knowledge, the competence and the confidence to express and discuss their political views in public – which is the same proviso for deliberative democracy to work – should the secret ballot be abolished. In our view, the fact that nobody actually proposes to do so shows that this proviso is not (yet) met. This, in turn, reveals that the deliberative model of democracy is typically quite demanding and thus inevitably faces certain limits.
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