dalus The Prospects & Limits of Deliberative Democracy

This essay proceeds in three steps. First, it will briefly outline the often invoked “crisis” of representative democracy and its major symptoms. Second, it will discuss a popular yet, as I shall argue, worryingly misguided response to that crisis: namely, the switch to plebiscitarian methods of “direct” democracy, as advocated, for example, by rightist populist forces in many European Union member states. The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum of June 2016 illuminates the weaknesses of this approach. Third, it will suggest a rough design for enriching representative electoral democracy with nonelectoral (but “aleatory,” or randomized) and nonmajoritarian (but deliberative and consultative) bodies and their peculiar methods of political will formation (as opposed to the expression of a popular will already formed). One core question of political theory is how best to make collectively binding decisions: who should make those decisions, and by what rules and procedures? The modalities of decision-making are not just something to be determined at the founding, or “constitutional” moment, of a political community once and for all times by some pouvoir constituant (constituent power). The question of whether our rules and procedures are still “good enough” or whether they are in need of amendments and adjustments is an ongoing challenge in the background of any political process, and certainly one that qualifies as democratic. Yet how should we decide how to decide? The difficulty of any conceivable answer to this question derives from its tricky recursive logic. The answer, in order to be recognized as valid and binding, must itself be decided upon–but how and by whom? If we were able to deduce the “right” mode of decision-making from a robust theory of a divine order, as in an ideal-typical theocratic regime, the problem CLAUS OFFE, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy since 1995, is Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Germany. He is author of Europe Entrapped (2015), Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (1997), and Modernity and the State: East, West (1996).