Survey Article: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Systemic Turn

Abstract

D ELIBERATIVE democracy as a theoretical enterprise has gone through a series of phases or 'turns'. 1 The most recent manifestation of this dynamic is the idea of the 'deliberative system', of which a variety of formulations have been proposed. An important initial reflective synthesis of work on deliberative systems is the recent essay, 'A systemic approach to deliberative democracy'. 2 Co-authored by an impressive range of deliberative theorists (), the essay has become a manifesto for the systemic turn (henceforth we refer to the essay as the 'Manifesto'). In this article, we offer a critical reconstruction of the systemic turn and, more particularly, the theoretical trajectory proposed by the Manifesto. Specifically, we distinguish the characteristics of currently dominant approaches to deliberative systems, arguing that there are good reasons to be cautious concerning the merits of this systemic turn and sceptical in respect of its credentials as an expression of deliberative democracy as a political ideal. Having offered a sustained critique of the current trajectory of the deliberative systems literature, we sketch two constructive alternatives. I. CONTEXTUALISING THE SYSTEMIC TURNThe initial wave of work on deliberative democracy focused on the emergence and refinement of the ideal of deliberation and the articulation of deliberative *We wish to express our gratitude to Jane Mansbridge who has been generous in offering extensive reflections on several versions of this article and pushing us to clarify our critique. We would also like to thank democracy. 3 Conceptual debate over the specification of the nature of the ideal of deliberation continues apace, incorporating, for example, feminist theorists' expansion of what can reasonably be understood as reason-giving. 4 In the second phase of scholarship-its 'empirical turn'-scholars have studied applications of deliberative democracy, including, for example, forms of mini-publics, constitutional courts and legislatures both in open and closed session. 5 Although these studies help clarify the institutional conditions under which good quality deliberation might be enabled, a reasonable criticism is that too often the analysis prioritises 'discrete instances of deliberation, investigated with little if any attention to their relationship to the system as a whole'. 6 Many have seen the systemic turn as a natural development in the life-history of deliberative democracy, a third phase that extends the conception of deliberative democracy to take into account the deliberative characteristics of the political system as a whole. As the Manifesto argues:No single forum, however ideally constituted could possess deliberative capacity sufficient to legitimate most of the decisions and policies that democracies adopt. To understand the larger goal of deliberation, we suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the study of individual institutions and processes to examine their interaction in the system as a whole. We recognize that most democracies are complex enti...

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