Jurgen Habermas I - What Is Meant by 'Deliberative Democracy'? Objections and Misunderstandings. (p.81-103)

Class: PHIL-282
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Book: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, edited by Ciaran Cronin.

Text

What Is Meant by ‘Deliberative Democracy’? Objections and Misunderstandings Modern democracy differs fundamentally from its ancient predecessors in that it represents a political community constituted by means of modern law, one which equips its citizens with equal subjective rights. Furthermore, it developed in territorial states and is distinguished from the small-scale Greek model above all by its representative character; for, in modern democracies, the citizens can engage in political will formation only indirectly, that is, through general elections. The crucial point in our context is that the condition of a jointly exercised act of will can only be fulfilled in an inclusive public sphere. For only if the electoral acts are a result of the citizens’ participation in largely anonymous, but jointly conducted, mass communication processes can these decisions satisfy two requirements: that, as the result of joint will formation, they are made individually and independently by everyone. Public communication is the necessary link connecting the political autonomy of the individual with the joint political will formation of the citizenry as a whole.

This constellation is important, because I am concerned in what follows with a crucial problem that can only be solved through democratic will formation. For it is only as participants in the process of forming public opinions that individual citizens, when they form opinions and make decisions as individuals, can reconcile the tension between each private citizen’s [Gesellschaftsbürger] own interests and the interest of public citizens [Staatsbürger] in the common good. This tension, which is inherent in the very definition of the democratic constitutional state, must be processed already within the scope of the political decisions of individual citizens, because public citizens must not identify completely with themselves in their role as private citizens, notwithstanding the union of public and private citizen in a single person. The democratic constitutional state guarantees every citizen, equally originally, both political autonomy and the equal freedoms of a subject of private law. The legal norms that guarantee such freedoms, Kant’s ‘coercive laws of freedom’, can be willed equally by all only if they reflect a balance between the respective conflicting interests founded on solidarity. And this balance can, in turn, only be achieved in the public sphere by the electorate engaging in joint political processes of opinion and will formation.

Also for present purposes, I would like to begin with some comments on this aspect of modern democracies (1) before explaining why the latter depend on deliberative forms of politics and why the objections raised against this conception – namely, that it is oblivious of power (2) and that its supposed ‘orientation to truth’ is mistaken (3) – are as groundless as the alternative interpretations proposed by expertocrats and populists (4).

(1) The constitutional state does not fall from the sky. Rather, it is founded by constituent assemblies that are necessarily informed by a spirit of solidarity, some element of which must also be perpetuated in and with this state. In the social contract tradition, this founding act has been imagined in terms of a transition from the state of nature to the state of society. Philosophers at first came up with quite different motives for this transition. Be that as it may, the two constitutional revolutions that actually took place at the end of the eighteenth century were at any rate historical events that owed their existence to the joint decision and public negotiations of enterprising citizens. Subsequent generations must not squander the social capital of this original founding act. They must make at least modest efforts to constantly renew it through continued participation in the democratic process of political legislation – and sometimes these efforts must even have a counterfactual character (as is the case in Germany, whose Basic Law did not originate in a democratic decision by its citizens).

Even if the liberal purpose of the constitutional state is to guarantee equal private liberties to freely associated private citizens in the form of subjective rights, these liberties remain free from paternalistic heteronomy only if these same citizens, in their role as public citizens and democratic co-legislators, make use of the rights of communication and participation, which are granted simultaneously, in the spirit of an intersubjective exercise of political autonomy. The private liberties of the constitutional state can only correspond to their own interests if citizens confer their rights on themselves. Legislation oriented to the common good must strike a balance between conflicting social interests and seek to compensate for the social inequalities that continually arise in a quasi-natural way in capitalist societies, to such an extent that all citizens receive the same opportunities to lead a self-determined life in accordance with their individual conceptions of themselves. All private citizens want a fair opportunity to use their subjective rights to shape their lives. Only in that case will they be motivated and able to make any use of their democratic rights at all, specifically one which is not motivated exclusively by self-interest. In this way, a self-stabilizing cycle can become established in which, on the one hand, the autonomous use of civic rights generates, through the legislative process, those subjective rights that (as John Rawls requires) have the same value for all, so that the enjoyment of these rights in turn ensures all citizens the social independence that first enables and enjoins them to make active use of political autonomy. In this way, private and public autonomy must enable and promote each other.

This self-stabilizing cycle, however, has a fault line which shows that different demands are involved in the use citizens should make of their political participation rights and in the use they can make of their private freedoms. The guarantees of both public and private liberty assume the same form, namely, that of subjective rights; but while the legal form of an entitlement is tailored to the interest-driven use of the private liberties, it does not fit in the same way with the political obligation to exercise democratic rights. Each citizen is enjoined to make use of her right to vote, and in general her rights of communication and participation, to resolve in a fair and informed manner the problem that the political parties cannot take out of the citizens' hands - namely, that of striking a fair balance between legitimate private interests and public interests in making their political choices. Even if, as a general rule, the democratic state doses this public interest expectation sparingly, every individual, in her role as a public citizen, is involved in solving the problem that every democratic polity inscribes on its banner with its constitutional principles - namely, that all citizens should, by and large, also be able to recognize their own will in the actually implemented laws and freedoms that emerge from the formation of a pluralistic democratic will. No matter how far existing democracies have moved away from this political goal in the meantime - and the oldest among them scandalously ahead of all the rest - they are worthy of being called democracies only as long as the mass of their citizens credibly adhere to this goal.

Because the same subjective rights must also have 'the same value' for each citizen in the long run, they cannot be guaranteed in a politically enduring way without the possibility of safeguarding coercive law in the political solidarity of the legislating citizens. This becomes apparent whenever this self-stabilizing circular relationship between legislation with a sufficient public-interest orientation and sufficient satisfaction of the spectrum of private interests falters. In order to contain the swings of a crisis-prone economic system that tends to produce social inequalities, prudent government intervention is needed in any case. Political self-stabilization can fail in a particularly drastic way, however, when wars or disasters place the political community under stress, because it can no longer maintain itself in the customary flexible equilibrium without extraordinary collective efforts. In such cases - or if, as in the case of a pandemic, the challenge is posed by uncontrolled natural processes - the state must muster extraordinary and, if necessary, disproportionately large forces of solidarity from its citizens to counter a danger intruding contingently from the outside that poses a threat to the collective as a whole. In the current exceptional situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the state can only exact such extraordinary collective efforts at the cost of temporarily regressing below the legal level of mature democracies. Only because such exceptional situations require a comparatively higher level of solidarity do the official requirements - in support of the prima facie priority of official protection of public health - upset the otherwise customary, self-stabilizing circular process between the contributions of citizens to political will formation oriented to the public interest and the intact scope for exercising individual liberties. 2

In such cases, the extraordinary contributions of solidarity are often no longer recognizable as such. In that case, the burdens that must be placed on citizens are still civic contributions to a collective effort that has been democratically decided. But they lose their voluntary character because the state must use legal coercion to demand these contributions of solidarity, albeit with legal authorization, for functional reasons alone, even though, legally speaking, they may only be politically expected but not prescribed. If the question of which citizens can be expected to bear which burdens is decided by a will legitimized by the legislature, there can scarcely be any doubt about the legitimacy of mandatory solidarity contributions, because otherwise the state would have to pursue policies that would amount to accepting an increase in infection and death rates that is in itself avoidable. But such a catastrophe brings to awareness in a drastic way that the inherent structural problem of democratic constitutions of striking a balance between the self-interested exercise of subjective freedoms and the functionally necessary orientation towards the common good must be solved by the citizens themselves - and that this problem can only be solved through a joint process of opinion and will formation in the political public sphere.

In such exceptional situations, it becomes glaringly obvious what is also at stake in the normal case. Contrary to the widespread caricature, democratic politics must not be exhausted by the naked balancing of interests between citizens and organizations making decisions based on private, egoistic motives - it must not be exhausted in unbridled compromises. Rather, it is a matter of striking a balance between the subjective freedoms enjoyed by private citizens as beneficiaries of formally equal rights and the solidarity that public citizens owe one another in their role as co-legislators. For the point of the democratic constitutional state is to ensure that the same individual liberties also have the same de facto value for everyone. The inclusive public communication dominated by mass media is the only place in the democracies of large-scale territorial states in which this process of jointly striking a balance between self-interest and the orientation towards the common good can occur. In the voting booth, only individual opinions are registered; the common element is the context in which these are formed - the cacophony of opinions circulating in the public sphere that condense into competing public opinions. The theoretical programme of deliberative democracy has gained academic recognition since the early 1990s, initially in the United States. Nevertheless, it repeatedly encounters a number of stereotypical objections, which I would like to address briefly.

(2) The historical association of the notion of deliberative politics with early liberal ideas of 'deliberative assemblies' is sufficient to arouse the suspicion that the notion rests on an idealistic picture of parliamentarism that obscures the hard facts of power-driven realpolitik. Thus, the first objection focuses on the question of why we emphasize the deliberative element in politics, of all things, although 'politics' primarily means the struggle for power - for acquiring and asserting power and its resources. This objection is implicitly based on the empiricist concept of power that is widespread in sociology. According to this concept, a ruler can rely on the threat potential afforded him by the means of sanction at his disposal to impose his will against the resistance of opponents. But this realist conception of power cannot explain the core element of modern democracies, namely, the fact that majority decisions are accepted on average. With the increasing individualism of the pluralistic societies of the West, unifying worldviews have lost their ability to legitimize power. Without recourse to such metasocial sources of legitimation, democratic constitutional states must draw upon their own resources to legitimize the exercise of ruling functions - namely, by means of the legally institutionalized procedure of democratic (possibly qualified) majority decision-making.

However, the aforementioned sociological concept of power cannot explain how this procedure works. If all that was decided in periodically repeated elections was that the majority is authorized to impose its political will on the minority for a certain period of time, the explanation for the acceptance of the majority principle would be spurious at best. According to the empiricist view of elections, the majority of the votes counted represents an imagined physical superiority of the corresponding majority of the voters themselves; and this supposedly justifies why the political camp of the respective 'predominant' portion of the citizenry 'gets its way, which means a government whose declared goals are based on its preferences rather than on those of the temporarily defeated minority. Since the empiricist notion of power is based on the concept of freedom of choice and action, it sees majority rule as being expressed in the fact that the government guarantees the predominant portion of the population privileged practical scope to pursue its preferences.

Even if the recourse to the threat potential of the superior physical force of a majority of citizens is only supposed to serve as a reserve in case the directives of those in power meet with physical resistance, this version would scarcely provide an adequate explanation of the underpinnings of a political order based on human rights. A self-determining association of free and equal legal subjects is founded on the idea of the self-empowerment of each citizen only to obey those laws that she has given herself based on a political process of opinion and will formation in which she engages with all other citizens. This demanding idea cannot be redeemed using the empiricist notions of power and freedom according to which majority decisions are legitimized by aggregating the numbers of 'raw preferences of all participants.

Instead, democratic elections must be understood as the final stage of a problem-solving process, that is, as the result of a joint formation of opinion and will by citizens who first form their preferences in the course of a public, more or less rational debate over how to deal with the problems requiring political regulation.

This element of deliberation as preparation for making decisions is an essential part of the explanation of how the democratic procedure also legitimizes majority decisions in the eyes of the defeated minority. From the participant perspective, the persuasiveness of the procedure is explained by an unlikely combination of two features: on the one hand, this requires the participation of all persons who may be affected by the outcome; on the other hand, it makes the decision itself dependent on the more or less discursive character of the preceding deliberation. The condition of inclusiveness corresponds to the democratic requirement that all those potentially affected should participate, while the filter of the deliberative exchange of proposals, information and reasons justifies the assumption that the result is rationally acceptable. This assumption can be tested in turn against the deliberative quality of the preceding deliberations. Such discourses are expected to mobilize competition between relevant public opinions based on germane topics, requisite information and pertinent pro and contra stances. In short, the coupling of inclusive participation with discursive deliberation explains the expectation that the results are rationally acceptable. Because every decision means that a discourse is being broken off, however, the defeated minorities can also accept majority decisions without having to abandon their own convictions in the hope that their arguments will be successful in the long run.

(3) Another objection is directed against the assumption that political debates are oriented towards 'truth' at all, and thus towards the goal of reaching agreement.

Don't political discourses have a manifestly polemical character and hence seem to demand a description that captures their intrinsically agonal nature? But it is precisely the 'orientation towards truth' - that is, the conviction or feeling of those involved that their opinions and assessments are 'right' - that fuels political controversies and lends them their contentious character. Admittedly, we need to differentiate here, because while many things are disputed in politics, only assertoric statements can be true or false in the strict sense. Of course, the claims to validity we associate - going beyond factual statements - with moral or juridical statements about justice, for example, can also be correct or mistaken; they can be treated like claims to truth in discourses. And even statements that are not associated with binary-coded validity claims can be defended or criticized on more or less convincing grounds. Even ethical-political statements that, from the point of view of a political community or a subculture, are a matter of the preferability of certain values over secondary values or, in general, of identification with certain forms of life, can be rendered plausible using reasons. Unlike expressions of preferences, ethical and even aesthetic expressions also assert claims to validity in the space of reasons.

Preferences, like desires, only admit of subjective expression or, as subjective claims, they can only be justified in the light of valid norms. In short, if one grasps the logical form of practical questions and remembers that politics essentially touches on those questions which are negotiated, beyond self-referential interests, from moral, legal and ethical-political points of view, it also becomes clear that public political disputes, even when they go beyond contentious factual questions, are conducted in the discursive space of the exchange of reasons. This is also true of compromises, i.e. of most of the controversial political issues, because compromises operate within a legal framework and are subject in turn to considerations of fairness.

The reference to the agonal trait of politics only yields an objection to the conception of deliberative politics if we confuse the intention of the participants - who, with their utterances, want to make an epistemic (i.e. a justified and rationally criticizable) contribution to the debate - with the naive expectation that agreement could be reached here and now in political discussions; for the pressure to make decisions means that political discussions, unlike the 'infinite conversation' of philosophers, are always subject to time limits. It is precisely the awareness of the pressure to decide that lends the attitude in which arguments based on practical reason are presented and defended its impatient character and sharpness of tone. At the same time, all parties involved are aware that at best reasonable, but for the time being only competing, public opinions can - and should - be generated in the mass communication of the public sphere steered by the media. The citizens should be able to make informed decisions, each for him- or herself, in the voting booth in the light of these public opinions. It is only in parliaments and other state institutions that legally binding decisions can be made face to face following democratic deliberation. However, the election results must be processed at the further levels of the political system so that voters gain the impression over the course of the legislative period that the output, i.e. the policies actually implemented, stands in a recognizable relation to the voters' input and their orientation to the election promises of the party or parties charged with governing.

In order to legitimize the government, the political system must do more than merely produce satisfactory results. For unless the democratic vote is connected in recognizable ways with what voters actually receive', political rule becomes an autonomous paternalistic regime. In other words, once the function of the political public sphere decays, the state loses its democratic substance, even if the 'rule of law' remains unaffected and the government more or less satisfies its voters. This latent danger can only be averted in the large-scale polities of the modern era insofar as the media infrastructure of the public sphere enables halfway deliberative opinion and will formation by the population itself. The independent media must generate sufficient power of articulation to maintain the connection of political power back to the communicative power generated by the citizens, the only 'power' that 'proceeds' from the people.

On the other hand, democratically legitimized rule also requires a government that has confidence in its political power to make policy. Merely giving the appearance of a democratically steered leadership is not enough. The opinion poll-driven politics characteristic of the currently dominant political style of maintaining power by opportunistically adapting policy to systemic constraints is undemocratic, because it both calls into question the state's capacity for political action and circumvents political opinion and will formation in civil society and in the political public sphere.

When the political elites become paralysed by the defeatism nurtured by systems theory, the population cannot fail to lose faith in governments that only pretend to be able and willing to act.

(4) Correcting misunderstandings that plague the concept of deliberative politics directs our attention to empirically quite demanding normative presuppositions of the democratic constitutional state and thus provokes the objection that the proposed reading is excessively idealistic. Therefore, there are good reasons to consider two of the currently prevailing alternative readings, in order to examine whether - while acknowledging the concern to deflate high-flown normative claims 4l they can be reconciled with at least the core content of democratic constitutions. One side takes the pluralistic surface phenomena of the 'raw', so to speak, spontaneous and authentic will of the electorate as its starting point, while the other side, conversely, represents the expert judgement of the political elite as relatively independent of the verdict of the electorate and public opinion. Both alternatives ignore in equal measure the relevance of an enlightened and inclusive formation of opinion and will by the citizens in the political public sphere. Thus relieved of a normatively demanding expectation, these readings can boast that they are 'realistic' in a certain sense; but then the political regression we are currently witnessing raises the pressing question as to what happens to democracies in which the political public sphere disintegrates and the interplay between political parties and public opinion wanes.

For the 'pluralist' approach, the claim of a democratic constitution is sufficiently fulfilled with the procedure of free elections', because the statistical aggregation of votes ensures that each citizen's vote is counted equally, hence fairly, and in this formal sense comes 'into play. This minimalist reading ignores the question of how the democratic vote comes about. In general elections, however, the summation and distribution of individual votes determines which among the competing forces should govern the country and with which declared objectives. The result, therefore, regardless of the fact that it is composed of many autonomously cast individual votes, concerns all of the citizens in common; it is 'their government to which the voters have bound themselves with their vote. Since each individual already expects such an institutional result - i.e. one that has far-reaching consequences for all citizens alike - when she casts her vote, it would only be consistent if the individual election decisions had proceeded from a corresponding, i.e. joint, political decision-making process. Therefore, the alleged advantage of the pluralistic approach, which regards the mode of opinion and will formation from an individualistic point of view as a private matter of the individual, obscures an essential aspect. Specifically, it ignores the actual task of democratic citizens, which is to integrate the individual interests that each of them has as a private citizen with what is in the shared interest of all citizens.

The 'expertocratic' approach is also realistic insofar as it highlights the slim budget of time, motivation, attention and cognitive effort that ordinary citizens, preoccupied with their professional and personal lives, expend on their role as citizens. At the same time, it reminds us of the growing complexity of the tasks that government and administration have to cope with in modern societies. The complexity of the various self-regulating societal subsystems does tend to relieve the pressure on a state organization that has itself become an independent functional system. But when the political experts become the default option for repairing the malfunctions of almost all other functional subsystems, or even when they pursue constructive political goals, they have to acquire diverse and detailed expertise. Therefore, the argument goes, politics inevitably overtaxes not only the citizen's willingness to respond and their attention, but also their ability to respond. The allegedly unbridgeable gulf between the specialized knowledge required to deal with the problems and common sense makes it impossible, according to the technocratic view, to involve the citizens themselves seriously in the formation of opinions about political alternatives.

Moreover, this seems to be confirmed by the plebiscitary character of the election campaigns: party manifestos that no one reads are replaced by professional advertising for candidates. This description is also not unrealistic. But the price the citizens pay for this deficit is, in turn, the renunciation of any meaningful use of their political autonomy.

The 'realism' of the two approaches is a result of the fact that they stylize empirically well-documented traits of will formation in Western mass democracies. At the same time, they suggest that these traits, whether or not they are regarded as normative deficits, are inevitable under modern social conditions. But the evidence for this more far-reaching statement is far from convincing. The growing pluralism of our societies is a matter of the multiplication of cultural forms of life and individual lifestyles; as a result, there is a general trend in large-scale societies for the burden of social integration to shift from the level of socialized lifeworlds to that of political citizenship, whereby integration via citizenship becomes detached from national, i.e. pre-political, ties. But if social cohesion must increasingly be secured at the more abstract level of citizenship, this functional imperative speaks all the more strongly in favour of mobilizing political opinion and will formation; the digital infrastructure would also be more or less favourable to such a development, but only on the condition that it is subjected to a corresponding regulation, which for the time being is lacking. Something similar holds true for the disparity between the expertise of the political experts and the capacity to respond of the civic common sense of the citizens. It is true that the work of governments and administrations also requires a high level of expertise. But aside from the fact that politicians are themselves in need of advice from their experts, it is simply not true that complex political considerations cannot be translated into everyday language that interested citizens (i.e. all of us) can understand - otherwise they would not be political considerations.

The 'realism' of the two approaches is a result of the fact that they stylize empirically well-documented traits of will formation in Western mass democracies. At the same time, they suggest that these traits, whether or not they are regarded as normative deficits, are inevitable under modern social conditions. But the evidence for this more far-reaching statement is far from convincing. The growing pluralism of our societies is a matter of the multiplication of cultural forms of life and individual lifestyles; as a result, there is a general trend in large-scale societies for the burden of social integration to shift from the level of socialized lifeworlds to that of political citizenship, whereby integration via citizenship becomes detached from national, i.e. pre-political, ties. But if social cohesion must increasingly be secured at the more abstract level of citizenship, this functional imperative speaks all the more strongly in favour of mobilizing political opinion and will formation; the digital infrastructure would also be more or less favourable to such a development, but only on the condition that it is subjected to a corresponding regulation, which for the time being is lacking. Something similar holds true for the disparity between the expertise of the political experts and the capacity to respond of the civic common sense of the citizens. It is true that the work of governments and administrations also requires a high level of expertise. But aside from the fact that politicians are themselves in need of advice from their experts, it is simply not true that complex political considerations cannot be translated into everyday language that interested citizens (i.e. all of us) can understand - otherwise they would not be political considerations.

Summary & Notes

1. DD: Modern Context & Legitimacy (Sec. 1)

• Def. Modern Dem.: Political community based on modern law $\to$ equal subjective rights.
  • Distinction: Differs from ancient models by representative character (indirect will formation via elections).
• Crucial Condition: Joint political will formation needs an inclusive public sphere.
  • Mechanism: Public communication links individual political autonomy $\to$ joint will formation of citizenry.
• Core Tension (Must be reconciled): Conflict between:
  • Private Citizens (Gesellschaftsbürger): Focused on own interests.
  • Public Citizens (Staatsbürger): Focused on the common good.
• Constitutional State: Guarantees political autonomy + equal private freedoms.
  • Requirement: Requires striking a balance between conflicting interests based on solidarity.
• Social Capital: Must be constantly renewed through continued participation in democratic processes.
• DD Goal: Ensure subjective liberties have the same de facto value for everyone.
  • Fault Line: Tension exists between interest-driven use of private liberties vs. political obligation to exercise democratic rights fairly.
• Current Danger: If public communication decays, rule becomes an autonomous paternalistic regime, even if the 'rule of law' remains.

2. Objection: DD is Power-Oblivious (Sec. 2)

• Claim: Politics is a struggle for power (realpolitik); DD ignores empiricist power (ruler uses sanctions/threats).

• Response (Legitimacy): Empiricist power model fails to explain acceptance of majority decisions in modern Dems.

  • Modern legitimacy draws on the legally institutionalized procedure of democratic majority decision-making.

• Elections vs. Deliberation: Elections are the final stage of a problem-solving process. Deliberation is the preparation (forming preferences via rational debate).

• Procedure Legitimacy Explained: Combines two essential features:

  1. Inclusive Participation: All affected persons must participate.
  2. Discursive Deliberation: Exchange of proposals, information, and reasons precedes the decision.
  • Result: This combination justifies the assumption that results are rationally acceptable. Defeated minority accepts decision, hoping their arguments succeed in the long run.

3. Objection: DD's 'Truth Orientation' is Mistaken (Sec. 3)

• Claim: Political debates are polemical/agonal (conflictual), not oriented toward truth/agreement.
• Response: The conviction that one's opinions are 'right' (orientation toward truth) is what fuels political controversies.
• Validity Claims (Political Dispute Components): Disputes go beyond mere factual truth/falsity.
  • Moral/Juridical Statements: Assert claims about justice (can be correct/mistaken).
  • Ethical-Political Statements: Assert claims about preferability of values/forms of life (must be rendered plausible using reasons).
  • Note: Even compromises are subject to considerations of fairness within a legal framework.
• Reality of Political Debate: Goal is not immediate consensus. Pressure to decide creates sharpness and time limits.
  • True Goal: Generating competing public opinions (informed debate) in the public sphere, allowing citizens to make informed decisions when voting.
• Undemocratic Style Example: Opinion poll-driven politics (opportunistically adapting policy) is undemocratic as it circumvents opinion and will formation in the public sphere.

4. Alternative Interpretations (Misunderstandings) (Sec. 4)

Both alternatives ignore the necessity of enlightened and inclusive will formation.