Mechanisms of Internal Deliberation

Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms of reflection and internal deliberation: how citizens assess deliberative inputs and update their beliefs in light of them. It discusses, first, how epistemic weights are assigned to the claims encountered in public deliberation. Epistemic weights alone should determine what citizens believe to be true. It discusses, second, how democratic weights (derived proportionally to the stakes citizens have in collective decisions) are allocated to the same deliberative inputs. Both epistemic and democratic weights should bear on the question of what citizens collectively should do. The chapter finally discusses how the epistemic and democratic weights of the same claim should be balanced against each other in internal deliberation.

Introduction

Deliberative democracy has experienced several ‘turns’. This chapter reflects critically on them, situating the book’s main arguments within the academic landscape. By its focus on mechanisms at work in a real existing deliberative democracy, and its support for informal networked deliberation as its main platform, Deliberation Naturalized aims to tackle some important shortcomings associated with the last ‘turns’ of deliberative theory.

Message Repetition and Epistemic Overinclusion

Chapter 9 discusses how message repetition can undermine citizens’ internal deliberations by leading them to double-count the same piece of information. When speakers do not maintain their epistemic independence, they can lead their listeners to attribute to much weigh to their claims in internal deliberation—a case of epistemic overinclusion. This threat to informal networked deliberation can be mitigated through the adoption of special deliberative norms by citizens and influentials alike and the redesign of social media platforms.

Mechanisms of Symbolic Support for Deliberation

Chapter 3 introduces the concept of ritual deliberation: discursive interactions that procedurally resemble genuine democratic deliberation while substantively failing to be. Participants in genuine democratic deliberation are open-minded and exhibit deliberative states of mind (a sincere intention and reasonable expectation to persuade and be persuaded by others), while participants in ritual deliberations either lack a sincere intention or a reasonable expectation to do so. Ritual deliberations can be found in various arenas, from legislatures to international organizations. While they are not genuinely deliberative in themselves, those ritual deliberations serve a latent deliberative function in supporting genuine democratic deliberation elsewhere.

Mechanisms of Deliberating Together

Chapter 5 discusses the mechanisms allowing citizens to deliberate together on an everyday basis: their social-qua-communicative networks. It distinguishes between two models of deliberation: synchronic-group deliberation and serial-diachronic deliberation. The first is exemplified by mini-publics and other formally organized group deliberative events, the second by informal networked deliberation occurring everyday among citizens. The chapter argues that informal networked deliberation can serve as the main platform for a real existing deliberative democracy. It can satisfy at the macro level the classic deliberative-democratic standards of inclusion, equality, and reciprocity that small-scale organized group deliberations can achieve only in micro settings.

Conclusion

This book defends a naturalized conception of deliberative democracy that has informal networked deliberation at its core. Some think that the only way in which citizens can properly deliberate is through carefully engineered group deliberations. This chapter concludes by defending informal networked deliberation as the main platform of a real existing deliberative democracy. It warns that the challenges democratic deliberation faces today have less to do with informal networked deliberation’s structural limitations or citizens’ poor deliberative skills, and more to do with the weaknesses of political institutions, politicians’ extreme partisanship, and misinformation campaigns supported by an increasingly partisan press. Those problems are external to networked deliberation and must be tackled separately.

Networked Deliberation across Political Difference

Chapter 7 explores one important obstacle to informal networked deliberation: polarization. If citizens exclude differently-minded people from their networks or refuse to deliberate with them on political matters, then informal networked deliberation cannot fulfil its full potential. Drawing extensively on empirical research, the chapter points out that citizens’ networks are heterogenous, and citizens do deliberate with differently-minded others. They may not completely change their minds in response, but in any case opinion change is not a good indicator for genuine deliberation and its reflective processes of internal deliberation. Finally, this chapter discusses how organized group deliberations can be used as ‘network interventions’ and valued instrumentally for what they can achieve at the community level. By selecting participants with the help of network mapping, organized deliberation can leverage the diffusion capacity of people’s social networks to scale up important deliberative effects across the entire community.

Mechanisms of External Public Spectacle

What others think matters for internal deliberation. Perceptions of public opinion—of the distribution of opinions across the entire community—are important for the same reason. Informal networked deliberation can give citizens only a partial view of the support any opinion or claim enjoys community-wide. This chapter discusses one important deliberative contribution mass media can make to citizens’ internal deliberations: providing information about the incidence of opinion and stakes in society at large. I discuss different ways in which the media can more accurately convey frequency information through its design of public spectacles. The selection of arguments and opinions they feature, how they feature them, as well as the selection of public speakers to voice them, all matter in this respect.

Sensitive Issues and Pluralistic Ignorance

Informal networked deliberation can be hindered if citizens refuse to discuss certain topics with others or do so in an insincere way. Topics that are perceived as being settled and non-contentious in the community, like social norms, might elicit such a response. The problem, however, is that some norms survive with the help of pluralistic ignorance—a situation where most people wrongly believe that most others support a norm when in fact they do not, based on those others’ silence and public compliance with those norms. This chapter proposes a way in which organized group deliberations under the Chatham House rule can be used to discover pluralistic ignorance where it exists, by encouraging citizens to sincerely communicate their concerns to others without the fear of social sanctions. Once it is thus revealed, surveys can be used to confirm, and hence dispel, pluralistic ignorance.

Mechanisms of Deliberation in the Formal Political System

Chapter 2 examines the mechanisms of deliberation at work in the empowered space. The chapter discusses several institutions, such as legislatures, executive cabinets, and courts. It points out that the nature, structure, and function that these institutions fulfil in a democracy makes them poor sites for genuine democratic deliberation. Instead, the public sphere, which does not exhibit the same limitations, can better accommodate genuine democratic deliberation. Coupled with periodic accountability mechanisms to ensure it is consequential, mass citizen deliberation must be the currency of a deliberative democracy.