Deliberative Pragmatic Equilibrium Review: A Framework for Comparing Institutional Devices and Their Enactment of Deliberative Democracy in the UK

Abstract

This article:• Presents a framework for comparing institutions and their ability to enact various norms of deliberative democracy across various stages of the policy process and different levels of governance. • Specifically contextualises this framework for application in the UK.A range of institutional mechanisms have been advocated to ensure the practical application of deliberative democracy, and these are now being employed in practice throughout the UK. However, different institutional mechanisms will be suited to the enactment of variant democratic principles and will be able to adapt to some features of complexity and not others. This means certain institutional devices will be able to operate effectively at different levels of governance, but not at others, and contribute to some, but not all, stages of a decision-making sequence, within different political systems. A comprehensive and systematic comparison of the relationship these institutions have to deliberative democracy is therefore required so that these institutions can be effectively sequenced to ensure all the key elements of deliberative democracy are enacted in the UK political system, at each level of governance and stage of decision-making. This article therefore develops the 'Deliberative Pragmatic Equilibrium Review' (DePER) framework to enable such a comparison of institutional mechanisms, with respect to how they enact key principles of deliberative democracy, by combining normative and empirical analysis through the employment of Fung's 'pragmatic equilibrium' approach. The framework is applicable to all political systems, but is here tailored specifically for institutional comparison in the UK, although it is not applied to concrete cases in this article.

Defining and typologising democratic innovations

“…For example, it ignores the democratic innovations that are occurring in transnational and global governance (Rask and Worthington, 2015;Rask et al, 2012) (see Chapter 24 of this Handbook). Moreover, we believe that other contexts must be considered in this assessment, such as, policy area, level of governance, stage in the policy process and function in the policy process (Elstub, 2014a). The premise being that if a practice is new to these contexts it could still be classed as a democratic innovation, even if it had been implemented elsewhere within the same state (Sørensen, 2017).…”

“…Secondly, the level of governance that the democratic innovation is embedded in will influence the choices made between the array of quasi-contingent features available, which in turn influences the realisation of the ineliminable core. These levels include local, regional/ subnational, national, transnational and global (Elstub, 2014a). Therefore, if a democratic innovation is not new to the political system it can still constitute innovation if it is used at a level of governance within that system where it has not been used regularly.…”

“…Therefore, if a democratic innovation is not new to the political system it can still constitute innovation if it is used at a level of governance within that system where it has not been used regularly. Democratic innovations can also be used at different stages of the policy-making process which can also influence the choices in design options between the quasi-contingent features (Elstub, 2014a). These include agenda-setting, options-mapping, debate and discussion, decision-making, implementation and review.…”

Participatory innovations and maxi‐publics: The influence of participation possibilities on perceived legitimacy at the local level in Finland

“…Using a simple additive measure does not, however, capture the multidimensionality of PIs, their democratic qualities and potential (Elstub 2014;Fung 2015). Four mutually exclusive sub-categories of PIs were created on the basis of the typology presented in the previous section.…”

Deliberative democratization: a framework for systemic analysis

“…We then outline a framework that operationalises that idea for the purpose of empirical research (cf. Cinalli and O'Flynn 2014;Elstub 2014) and, in particular, for measuring a transition society's actual deliberative capacity.…”