Facilitation is indispensable to organized deliberative practices, yet largely absent from deliberative theory. This article theorizes the role of the deliberative facilitator through the central dilemma of 'following from the front'. The facilitator necessarily occupies a leadership position in the deliberating group, yet must follow the group as it unfolds its own discourse on the issue at hand. This article will specify this tension in the framing of publics, the handling of expertise, the conduct of deliberation, and the crucial phase of bringing a deliberation to a conclusion. The various criticisms of deliberative practice in these dimensions are treated not as decisive objections, but rather as tensions to be negotiated by those who organize and conduct deliberative minipublics. This article aims to show the value of critical empirical work on deliberative practices as describing potential dangers, which can be set against the normative ideals and democratic potentials involved in attempts to generate deliberation in minipublics.
There can be good reasons to doubt the authority of a group of scientists. But those reasons do not include lack of unanimity among them. Indeed, holding science to a unanimity or near-unanimity standard has a pernicious effect on scientific deliberation, and on the transparency that is so crucial to the authority of science in a democracy. What authorizes a conclusion is the quality of the deliberation that produced it, which is enhanced by the presence of a non-dismissible minority. Scientists can speak as one in more ways than one. We recommend a different sort of consensus that is partly substantive and partly procedural. It is a version of what Margaret Gilbert calls “joint acceptance”–we call it “deliberative acceptance.” It capitalizes on there being a persistent minority, and thereby encourages accurate reporting of the state of agreement and disagreement among deliberators.
In this essay I consider the problem of locating expertise in deliberative politics. Given its importance in processes of opinion formation among policy makers and wider publics on issues such as climate change, expert deliberation is a significant topic in its own right. However, I also suggest that the problem of locating expertise within deliberative politics is just a special case of a more general problem in deliberative systems: How to locate different deliberative 'moments' with respect to each other and to observing publics. One aspect of this problem involves the need to take on trust the outcomes of deliberations in other parts of the system, which raises a problem of authority: it involves not making one's acceptance of a command or proposition conditional on an independent examination of the grounds of the command or proposition. This problem arises with respect to public acceptance of the claims issuing from expert deliberation, but it also arises with respect to the outcomes of minipublics that have themselves sometimes been conceived as a response to the problem of bringing public judgment to bear on expertise. It is in part in response 1 to this problem that some critics have described minipublics as a form of 'deliberative elitism' (Lafont 2014; Urbinati 2010), displacing rather than supplementing public judgment. Far from being a democratic remedy for potentially exclusive and elitist expert deliberation, minipublics are thus thought to themselves represent a form of elitism. In this essay I attempt to locate the problem of 'deliberative elitism' in a broader discussion of the problem of expertise within a democratic system, and the more general question of the grounds on which one might accept the outcomes of a deliberation in which one was not a participant. In answering this question I emphasise the importance of providing conditions that support public judgment at the level of 'metadeliberation' on the value and functions of divisions of deliberative labor itself. It was in the context of his discussion of the difficulties of bringing competent citizen judgment to to bear on 1 delegation to experts in government (seeking delegation without alienation) that Robert Dahl first developed the idea of a 'minipopulus' (Dahl 1985, 76). ! 1 Alfred Moore-Deliberative Elitism-Critical Policy Studies I begin the essay with a discussion of the idea of a deliberative system, with particular reference to the problem of expertise. I then consider deliberation among experts, that is, exemplified by expert committees and commissions, where on the one hand participation is exclusive and members are selected for competence, and on the other there is a strong orientation to reason-giving and equality among participants. However, internal means of securing deliberative ideals only go so far. In the third section I describe three ways in which societal practices of contestation and critique contribute to the conditions of possibility of public judgment of expert claims and practices: the articulation of new issues...
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