Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

CAN DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY BE PARTISAN?

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08913811.2010.508631

1933-8007

Russell Muirhead,

Social Media and Politics

Abstract Abstract Any workable ideal of deliberative democracy that includes elections will need modern democracy's ever-present ally, parties. Since the primary function of parties is to win office rather than to reflect on public questions, parties are potential problems for the deliberative enterprise. They are more at home in aggregative models of democracy than in deliberative models. While deliberative democracy will need its moments of aggregation—and therefore, must have parties—partisans as they actually arise in the political world possess traits that undermine the deliberative ideal. If partisans of partisanship are to be unembarrassed by (or are to correct) these defects, even workable ideals of deliberative democracy need to stand at some distance from the partisan imperative. Notes 1. The phrase realistic utopia comes from John Rawls (1999 Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 6–7). Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (2004 Gutmann, Amy and Thompson, Dennis. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy?, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 13, 13–21) identify aggregative conceptions of democracy as the "leading rivals" to deliberative democracy. In their view, aggregative democracy "takes preferences as given" and "requires no justifications for the preferences themselves, but seeks to combine them in various ways that are efficient and fair." Aggregative democracy views voters as consumers and sees political rhetoric as a form of marketing rather than as argument meant to rationally persuade. In aggregative conceptions of democracy, reason-giving matters less (if at all), and the pre-discursive existence of preferences matters more. 2. See also Zaller (1992 Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 241): "People tend to accept what is congenial to their partisan values and to reject what is not"; and Bafumi (2004 Bafumi , Joseph . 2004 . "The Stubborn American Voter." APSA Meeting , Chicago, IL . [Google Scholar]). It should be noted that the Michigan School found almost no voters who met the Progressive ideal of independent citizens exercising their own judgment with intellectual integrity. Those voters who abjured any loyalty to the two main parties and identified as "independents" were not the free-thinking sorts who worked through issues and political decisions for themselves but rather were profoundly apolitical. They displayed little interest in campaigns, held foggy images of the candidates, and betrayed no knowledge of issues. The ideal of independence had no grounding in the facts. The following general finding is precisely what deliberative democracy refuses to take as a given: a "portrait of an electorate almost wholly without detailed information about decision making in government. .. [that] knows little about what government has done on these issues [that might be the subject of legislative or administrative action] or what the parties propose to do. It is almost completely unable to judge the rationality of government actions" (Campbell et. al. [1960] 1976 Campbell , Angus , Philip E. Converse , Warren E. Miller , and Donald E. Stokes . [1960] 1976 . The American Voter . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . [Google Scholar], 543). While this conclusion has been contested at the aggregate level (Page and Shapiro 1992 Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert. 1992. The Rational Public, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), its assessment of individual-level political knowledge largely stands. 3. In 2004, the gap between Democrats who approved of Bush (17 percent) and Republicans who approved (91 percent) was "the largest Gallup has ever observed for an incumbent president seeking re-election" (Jones 2004 Jones , Jeffrey M . 2004 10 March . "Public Divided on Bush: Great Partisan Differences in Job Approval." Gallup News Service [Google Scholar]). A similar partisan gap—65 percent—characterizes the approval ratings of President Obama (Jones 2010 Jones , Jeffrey M. 2010 25 January 'Obama's Approval Most Polarized for First Year President.' www.gallup.com/poll/125345/obama-approval-polarized-first-yearpresident.aspx [Google Scholar]). 4. For figures on the percentage of the voting public with partisan identification, see Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002 Green, Donald, Palmquist, Bradley and Schickler, Eric. 2002. Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], 16. 5. Political people just as often incline to convert opinion into fact, by casting certain things as "natural" or "necessary" when they are not; this may even be the case with the "necessity of party." See Bernard Williams (1993 Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 103–29) on "natural identities." By creating facts where they do not exist and erasing them where they do, they undercut the possibility for political deliberation. 6. This argument summarizes Arendt 1967 Arendt , Hannah . 1967 . "Truth and Politics." In Political Theory and Social Change . David Spitz . New York : Atherton . [Google Scholar], 3–37. 7. White House Press Release, 29 November 2005. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051129-2.html 8. Retrospective voting may not be so simple, especially under conditions of party polarization, as Michael H. Murakami (2008 Murakami, Michael H. 2008. "Paradoxes of Democratic Accountability: Polarized Parties, Hard Decisions, and No Despot To Veto". Critical Review, 20(1–2): 91–113. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 91–113) shows. Ackerman and Fishkin 2004 Ackerman, Bruce and Fishkin, James S. 2004. Deliberation Day, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]; Fishkin and Luskin 2006 Fishkin, James S. and Luskin, Robert C. 2006. "Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion". Acta Politica, 40: 284–98. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 284–98; Fishkin 1995 Fishkin, James S. 1995. The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]. 9. For this point and a more general understanding of the advantages of sortition, I am indebted to Joel Parker, a graduate student in the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, whose dissertation offers the most rigorous, extensive, and sympathetic case extant for instituting random selection in the design of democratic constitutions. 10. As Joshua Cohen (1998 Cohen , Joshua . 1998 . "Democracy and Liberty." In Deliberative Democracy . Jon Elster . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 186) argues, "The idea [of deliberative democracy] is manifestly to tie the exercise of power to conditions of public reasoning." Rawls ([1997] 1999 Rawls , John . [1997] 1999 . "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited." In Collected Papers . Samuel Freeman . Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar], 579) also equates "a well-ordered constitutional democracy" with "deliberative democracy"; also see the discussion of reciprocity in Gutmann and Thompson 1996 Gutmann, Amy and Thompson, Dennis. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar], 13–15, 52–94. Even without the construct of "public reason," it is difficult to imagine a deliberative theory that does not put the public giving and taking of reasons at the center, and which in addition does not differentiate reasons that embody a respect for others as free and equal from those that do not. Some abjure the term "public reason" because they suppose it must lead to consensus. For instance, Dryzek (2000 Dryzek, John. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 15) asserts that "Rawlsian public reason is singular, and produces consensus." This is a mistake. 11. In contrast to the relative silence about parties among deliberative democrats, parties command explicit and sustained attention in the archetype of aggregative democratic theories (Downs 1957 Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy, Boston: Addison-Wesley. [Google Scholar], 24–27). 12. This is closely related to what Diana Mutz (2006 Mutz, Diana. 2006. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 102–05) observes: Seeing every side of a question leads to ambivalence and disengagement, not decision and commitment—although she suggests that it is precisely deliberation amid a "rough process" of disagreement that produces this effect. 13. The principal contender would be some form of aggregative democracy that relies heavily on the "miracle of aggregation," by which relatively uninformed individuals can, without discussion, produce rational aggregate outcomes (e.g., Page and Shapiro 1992; Zaller 1992; and Kinder 1998). But even this miracle can do nothing to assure aggregate outcomes are fair, decent, or well informed (Hoffman 1998 Hoffman, Tom. 1998. "Rationality Reconceived: The Mass Electorate and Democratic Theory". Critical Review, 12(4): 459–80. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 471), and this defect would push every normative aggregative conception in a deliberative direction. 14. For instance, an electoral system that gave a majority of legislative seats to parties that garnered a minority of the popular vote would have a legitimacy problem, even if such outcomes were occasional, as in the United States. For an assessment of contemporary democracies on this dimension, see Lijphart 1999 Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], 289–93. 15. For a contrary view, see Ackerman and Fishkin 2004 Ackerman, Bruce and Fishkin, James S. 2004. Deliberation Day, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], 62–65. 16. The notion is not that any party in a constitutional democracy is for that reason constitutional; what counts is rather what political principles a party is committed to. Extreme right parties that oppose "the legitimizing bases of liberal-democratic regimes, basically, individual freedom and collective individual representation through collective agencies," are not constitutional parties even though they function within constitutional democracies (Ignazi 2003 Ignazi, Piero. 2003. Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 212). They oppose the constitutional conditions that make their own dissent possible. Also see Rosenblum 2008 Rosenblum, Nancy L. 2008. On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], 412–55. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRussell Muirheadthe author of Just Work (Harvard, 2004)