A Formal Theory of Democratic Deliberation

Abstract

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.

Notes from the Editors

“…Work that does not fit neatly in one subfield is almost ideal for a discipline-wide journal. A case in point is Chung and Duggan’s (2020) article, which presents a strategic model of debate that represents three different styles of democratic deliberation, appealing to social choice modelers and democratic theorists alike.…”

I Trends in Theorizing Democratic Legitimacy

“…This argument underlies an analytical turn to deliberative democracy, considering deliberation a proper source of democratic legitimacy (Trojan, 2021). Accordingly, outcomes are democratically legitimate, provided that they are the object of reasoned agreement by free equals (Chung & Duggan, 2020). Despite an argument-rich academic discussion, there has been a lack of a formal theory of democratic deliberation that would explain the essence of generating democratic legitimacy.…”

Persuasion or Co-creation? Social Identity Threat and the Mechanisms of Deliberative Transformation

“…5 In formal mathematical models of deliberation, this assumption-that deliberation involves adjudicating between a set of pre-formulated alternatives-is often stated explicitly (e.g. Chung & Duggan, 2020;List, 2018). In this conception, then, deliberation can only produce belief change insofar as participants are persuaded by a sufficiently strong argument to reject positions or beliefs (including, of course, meta-beliefs about epistemology or values) that they previously held or to adopt the preexisting positions or beliefs of their opponents.…”