Landemore: Response to Brennan

2021 ◽  
pp. 272-279
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Vote System ◽  
Weighted Vote ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Despite the avalanche of facts that Jason Brennan brings against the average voter and his skepticism of deliberation among ordinary citizens, the resulting attack on democracy turns out to be surprisingly limited. In the end, Brennan concedes, democracy is still the best regime around, no matter how flawed, and we have a duty to fix it. He also concedes that deliberation among randomly selected citizens is going to be part of the solution. Landemore argues that Brennan’s solution, however—a combination of randomly selected mini-publics designing questionnaires and a weighted vote system based on these questionnaires—is still too elitist, empirically inattentive to existing experiments in deliberative democracy, and unlikely to work.

Deliberation in Deeply Divided Societies

2018 ◽  
pp. 741-754
Author(s):  
Ian O´Flynn ◽  
Didier Caluwaerts
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Many comparative scholars argue that deliberation has little or no role to play in managing deep national, ethnic, or linguistic divisions. In their view, seeking compromise across deep divides should be the exclusive preserve of political elites, since ordinary people will tend to be highly insecure and hence lack the capacity to deliberate meaningfully across deep divides. In this chapter, we want to consider, and indeed defend, the claim that deliberation has a vital role to play in deeply divided societies—not just in terms of shaping relationships between competing political elites, but also between elites and the ordinary citizens they claim to represent. To substantiate this argument, we draw on and contribute to a growing body of literature on deliberative consociation and deliberative democracy in divided societies that seeks to examine whether deliberation can help ethnic groups in conflict to deal democratically with their divisions.

Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative Democracy

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Landemore
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The People ◽  
Tight Connection ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Popular Rule ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Deliberative democracy is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the current crisis of representative democracy. If deliberative democracy is necessarily representative and if representation betrays the true meaning of democracy as rule of, by, and for the people, then how can deliberative democracy retain any validity as a theory of political legitimacy? Any tight connection between deliberative democracy and representative democracy thus risks making deliberative democracy obsolete: a dated paradigm fit for a precrisis order, but maladjusted to the world of Occupy, the Pirate Party, the Zapatistas, and other antirepresentative movements. This essay argues that the problem comes from a particular and historically situated understanding of representative democracy as rule by elected elites. I argue that in order to retain its normative appeal and political relevance, deliberative democracy should dissociate itself from representative democracy thus understood and reinvent itself as the core of a more truly democratic paradigm, which I call “open democracy.” In open democracy, popular rule means the mediated but real exercise of power by ordinary citizens. This new paradigm privileges nonelectoral forms of representation and in it, power is meant to remain constantly inclusive of and accessible–in other words open–to ordinary citizens.

Deliberative Democracy in India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramya Parthasarathy ◽  
Vijayendra Rao
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy

COLLECTING THE PERSONAL ORIGIN DOCUMENTS OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR PERIOD

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Elena M. Burova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Literature ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Organization Of Work ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

The article covers the issues of initiative acquisition of archives in the documents of personal origin during the Great Patriotic War, the organization of work to identify and collect the wartime documents. Collecting documents of ordinary citizens, in particular letters from the front and to the front is analyzed. Proposals to create the specialized archives of documents on the history of the war were never implemented. Quite a lot of the actions, search operations and expeditions were conducted in the country, for example, the “Chronicle of the Great Patriotic War”, the “Frontline letter”, the “Search”, the “Memory”, etc., during which a significant number of documents of war participants and home front workers were collected and stored. Not so much of the documents of personal origin of the war participants are concentrated in the archives. In general, there prevails the collection type of organization for storing documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War. With reference to the corpus of documents of personal origin of the war period the research literature pays its attention mostly to correspondence and diaries, memoirs. Historians and archivists, analyzing wartime letters, offer different classifications depending on the authors, recipients, subjects, etc. The article provides a generalized classification of letters based on their inherent similarities. The author also analyzes the reasons for a small number of extant diaries and memoirs, and provides examples of their classification. Likewise the article describes current approaches to the collection of personal papers within the frames of the Moscow Glavarkhiv project “Moscow – with care for history” and the Ministry of Defense project “The Memory Road”.

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