I wonder why the blogosphere zeitgeist is throwing up musings about the desirability of some latter day form of Athenian participatory democracy? Nicholas Gruen’s post earlier today, in which he advocated a randomly selected “people’s chamber” of Parliament, is a proximate example. So too is Tim Dunlop’s ongoing advocacy of James Fishkin’s “deliberative polling” concept, trialled in Australia in the runup to the 1999 Republic Referendum, and again in relation to indigenous reconciliation and the ACT’s statutory bill of rights scheme.
The most obvious objection to participatory democracy is that it usually results in extreme conservatism verging on inertia, because the ignorance and disinterest of the great bulk of the citizenry makes such a system excessively vulnerable to fear campaigns by opponents of any given reform. The depressing history of constitutional referenda in Australia is a powerful example of this phenomenon.
Both Fishkin’s “deliberative polling” concept and Nicholas Gruen’s “people’s chamber” idea attempt to combat this by randomly selecting a group of citizens and subjecting them to intensive, comprehensive and balanced information/education about the issue under consideration. The education process is aimed partly at combatting the discovery, most famously identified with American political scientist Robert Converse, that most voters are abysmally ignorant about the issues and candidates about which they are expected to pass democratic judgment.
Fishkin’s deliberative polling also draws on Jurgen Habermas’s somewhat utopian (if thoroughly argued) concepts of “deliberative democracy” and “communicative rationality”. Habermas argues that it should be possible to construct a neo-Athenian participatory democracy, where people would behave as rational, thoughtful political actors, discussing issues in a considered, careful way and reaching a consensus on the best policy. Fishkin’s deliberative polling concept is in part an attempt to create a working Habermasian model of communicative rationality among ordinary citizens.
These sorts of concepts are open to a wide range of objections, some more cogent than others. But the one I find most persuasive is that of Chantal Mouffe. She’s a post-modernist, but I won’t hold that against her. Mouffe’s immediate subject is Habermas’s deliberative democracy theories, but her critique is equally applicable to Fishkin, and for that matter Nicholas Gruen’s “people’s house”, to the extent that they posit a real possibility of a true rational democratic consensus based on finding and agreeing about the best policy option:
Once the theoretical terrain has been delineated in such a way, we can begin formulating an alternative to both the aggregative and the deliberative model, one that I propose to call “agonistic pluralism”. A first distinction is needed in order to clarify the new perspective that I am putting forward, the distinction between “politics” and “the political”. By “the political”, I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations, antagonism that can take many forms and emerge in different type of social relations. “Politics”, on the other hand, indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of “the political”. I consider that it is only when we acknowledge the dimension of “the political” and understand that “politics” consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose what I take to be the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion, since this would imply the eradication of the political. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation
of an “us” by the determination of a “them”. The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them opposition which is an impossibility but the different way in which it is established. The crucial issue is to establish this us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.
Even in a relatively homogeneous democracy like Australia, people inevitably have widely different backgrounds, upbringings, aspirations and culural, religous and political beliefs. The idea that a single “best” policy solution even exists in any meaningful sense, such that most people would recognise and agree about it if only they were properly informed and educated about the issues by their intellectual betters, is an arrogant fantasy. Bloggers of all people should have discovered the hard way that consensus, even between the sort of highly educated audience that blogs like this one typically attract, is an impossibility.
No doubt advocates of deliberative polling like Tim Dunlop would point to the phenomenon of much higher levels of consensus that have typically emerged from exercises like the deliberative poll conducted prior to the Republic Referendum. However, I attended that poll as one of the randomly selected participants, and my considered conclusion was that the strong pro-republican shift in sentiment, over the course of the two day deliberative exercise, owed much more to the group dynamics and psychology of the occasion than to the inherent strength of the republican case (in fact the ARM referendum model was badly flawed in my view, and deserved the rejection it ultimately received). What I think actually occurs in a deliberative polling exercise is that the participants are made to feel like privileged citizens and bearers of the nation’s democratic burden to such an extent that it seems almost obligatory to reach a positive/constructive outcome (as opposed to one which simply rejects whatever reform measure that is under deliberation).
Mouffe suggests that the aim of any political deliberation is not “consensus”, because that will usually be impossible, but a workable accommodation between competing interests and viewpoints. Democratic deliberation should aim at turning “enemies” into mere political adversaries or rivals, and potentially violent antagonism into “agonism” where peaceful accommodations/compromises between opponents are not only possible but the normal and expected outcome of political disputation.
Mouffe’s critique of Habermas (and for that matter Fishkin and Gruen) strikes me as a compelling one, and much more credible than Habermas’s impossibly utopian (if complex and nuanced) conception of liberal democracy.