The Poor Fit Between Deliberative Theory and Deliberative Practice – A Preoccupation With Speech and Debate A sizeable literature has developed to evaluate deliberative democratic institutions and practices. Typically these studies will focus on how citizen participation either does or does not conform to a set of “deliberative norms.” Were citizens deliberating properly? Was the institution set up to facilitate meaningful debate? The effect here is to reinforce concepts from deliberative theory in defining what value (if any) can be found in instances where citizens meet and work together. And, generally, the focus is on the quality of argumentation by participants. This tendency stems from a preoccupation with language and speech in deliberative theory that forecloses the possibility that elements beyond rational-critical debate might matter as much, or more, than the quality of citizen argumentation. And this is true even as researchers attempt to move beyond rational debate and consider the value in other communicative forms like emotional speech or narrative. I will offer a very brief account of where I believe this preoccupation with language and argument comes from, and then show in a bit more detail how it is reproduced in recent attempts to understand citizen deliberation in practice. Habermas, His Heirs, and Ideal Communication as the Foundation of Democratic Deliberation I do not an overly long treatment of the development of the deliberative literature is necessary here, but I do think it’s worth briefly going back to Habermas, since his foundational concepts still motivate the vast majority of the work on
about citizens’ co-participation in democratic institutions, I will now turn to recognition theory. What We Do When We Meet and Speak About Problems of Common Concern – Using Recognition Theory to Get a More Robust Picture of Interpersonal Engagement Within “Deliberative” Designs Part of the problem with the deliberative literature, then, is the preoccupation with a kind of rational debate oriented towards problem-solving, all unfolding in the communicative exchange of citizens – a preoccupation I think is best attributed to its Habermasian foundations. Efforts to broaden the understanding of cooperative citizen interaction often continue to run up against this prefigured understanding, restricting how we design and evaluate these spaces. This was evident, for instance, in Gutmann and Thompson’s struggle to see the value in Truth Commissions. In the remainder of this essay I want to suggest that recognition theory might open up our understanding about what we envision for small scale “deliberative” institutions: what kinds of things we can hope unfold in these designs, how we envision “good” participation, and what kinds of outcomes might be appropriate. Deliberative theory accounts for some of the possibilities, but not nearly all, while often obscuring other valuable outcomes. And it may also be that even the deliberative project itself is based on some interpersonal elements that it cannot offer a good account of how to create and secure (like trust and solidarity). Thus, to get a sense of what else we might focus on when thinking about designing institutions that bring citizens into direct contact with one another, I turn to the work of Axel Honneth.