Deliberation, EDemocracy, and the Virtual Public Sphere

1
Deliberation, E-Democracy, and the Virtual Public
Sphere

• Democratic deficit
• Participation
• Public Sphere
• Deliberative democracy
• Theory
• Practice
• WWW as self-generating public sphere?
• Engineering online deliberation

2
Democratic deficit

• Modern (liberal) democracies inherently deficient
• Ideal
• Greek word meaning rule by the people
• Government of the people, by the people, and for
  the people (Abraham Lincoln)
• Logistic problem
• Equal participation becomes impossible in large
  communities
• Emergence of elites unavoidable
• Historical prejudice
• Distrust in mass decision making by enlightenment
  philosophers, democratic theorists, founding
  fathers

3
Representative democracy

• Election and exchange of elites
• Changing paradigm in democratic theory
• Minimalist/elitist models of democracy
  (Schumpeter, Downs, Dahl) becoming dominant in
  20th century
• Empirical theory of democracy
• Meaningful participation in collective decision
  making of more than a tiny minority is
  inconceivable
• Invisible hand mechanism ensures that
  aggregation of unaltruistic preferences leads to
  desirable social outcomes
• Responsible party model
• Suggestion to replace the term democracy with
  that of polyarchy (Dahl)

4
Participation

• Voting
• From habitual to evaluative (rational)
• Ineffective form of citizen participation
• According to elitist theories (Schumpeter),
  voting is no more than a regularly recurring
  element of uncertainty in elite domination
  (incumbents could be thrown out)
• Declining turnout
• Party membership
• Parties increasingly centralised
• Professional campaign agents replacing members
• Members tend to be more radical than leaders,
  hence liability rather than asset in campaigns,
  in time of policy convergence
• Political activism (demonstrations, petitions,
  etc.)
• Increasingly disassociated from traditional party
  system and its mobilisational power
• Quasi anti-political participation

5
Participatory democracy

• Resurgence of substantive models of democracy in
  1960s/70s (e.g. Carol Pateman)
• Five building blocks of participatory democracy
  (Zittel 2003)
• Promotion of a new mode of decision making
  (deliberation)
• Strengthening of the direct mode of decision
  making
• Referendums/direct democracy (Switzerland,
  Ireland)
• Democratization of the local level (local
  democracy)
• Higher levels of political interest in local
  matters than national
• Higher likelihood/expectation of political
  efficacy
• More feasible to generate deliberative structures
  at local than national level
• Increased citizen participation at local level
  could raise political interest/ perceived
  efficacy resulting in more participation (e.g.
  turnout) at national level
• Democratization of functionally defined units of
  the political system (segmentation)
• E.g. workplace democracy, intra-party democracy
• Implementation of representation as delegation
• Not just responsible, but responsible
  parties/candidates
• Responsive to the policy concerns of their
  constituents
• Communicative and educative function of political
  representatives
• Frequent recall between representative and
  constituency

6
Critique of the institutions of liberal democracy

• Consistent use of the principle of representation
• Central significance of the electoral connection
  as a mechanism for interest aggregation
• Institutional restraints impinging on political
  participation in liberal democracy lessen
  political engagement and spawn political apathy
  in the long term
• Demand for institutions that facilitate as much
  political participation as possible

7
The public sphere

• Habermas The Structural Transformation of the
  Public Sphere
• Defines public sphere as
• Autonomous (free from state/government
  intervention)
• Deliberative forum for open, equal debate of
  public issues
• Taking place in clubs, tea houses
• Mainly comprised of economically rising but
  politically marginalised bourgeoisie
• Distributed through (and taking place in) free
  press, which also confronts ruling elites with
  focus and state of public opinion
• Largely blaming mass media (centralization/commerc
  ialization) for transformation (destruction) of
  public sphere
• Degrading citizens from participants to audience
• Critical public transformed into apathetic mass
  (atomised individuals, who are being fed
  information)
• Reducing public opinion from collective opinion
  formation process into mere aggregation of
  (uninformed, unchallenged, underdeveloped,
  prejudicial) opinions

8
Improving democracy through deliberation

• Philosophical rationale for deliberative
  democracy
• Policy-making derives legitimacy from preceding
  public deliberation
• The public sphere comes into existence whenever
  and wherever all affected by general social and
  political norms of action engage in a practical
  discourse, evaluating their validity
• Argumentation can exploit the conflict between
  success-oriented competitors for the purpose of
  achieving consensus as long as the arguments are
  not reduced to mere means of influencing one
  another
• Weak publics informal vehicles of public opinion
• Taken together, they form a wild complex that
  resists organization as a whole
• Strong publics institutions seeking out
  cooperative solutions to practical problems
• a locus of public deliberation culminating in
  legally binding decisions (or laws)

9
Habermas influence

• Prompting revival in participatory challenges to
  empirical democratic theory
• Originally published in German in 1960s
• First English translation in 1980s
• Coinciding (?) with increased theorizing about
  deliberative democracy
• The communicative network of a public made up of
  rationally debating private citizens has
  collapsed the public opinion once emergent from
  it has partly decomposed into the informal
  opinions of private citizens without a public and
  partly become concentrated into formal opinions
  of publicistically effective institutions.
  (Habermas, 1989 247)
• In the 1990, embraced by cyberenthusiasts

10
Deliberative democracy

• Modes of decision making
• Voting
• Aggregation of preferences
• Majority rule decision making
• Deliberating
• Aiming for unanimity/compromise
• Voting theories (in particular Rational Choice
  models) assume
• that preferences are given (exogenous to decision
  making process)
• Deliberative democracy presumes
• Values are stable
• Preferences, opinions, tastes change
• Preferences change, although not compulsory, is
  the assumed purpose of deliberation
• Deliberation is successful if agreement is found,
  which implies some change in preferences
• Deliberation may help overcome decision making
  dilemma like vote cycles

11
Virtues of deliberation

• Civic virtue
• Discussion produces bettercitizens (more
  informed, active, responsible)
• Deliberation lowers propensity to (and benefit
  of) strategic behaviour
• Governance virtue
• Decisions taken following open discussions have
  greater legitimacy
• Deliberation enhances quality of decisions
• Cognitive virtue
• If opinions are not fixed, open dialogue gives
  rise to new, more articulated points of view
• Deliberation increases knowledge

12
Reason, emotion, rhetoric

• Habermas speech should be founded on reason,
  defended through rational argumentation
• Aristotle performative mode of public speech,
  engaging rational and nonrational elements
• Rhetoric, according to Habermas, is primarily
  manipulative, hence an obstacle to constructive
  deliberation
• Since people react emotionally, and differ in
  rhetorical skill, one needs to consider the role
  of rhetoric in deliberation to avoid unrealistic
  assumptions
• If all people affected are to be equal
  participants
• Rhetorical skills, prior information, political
  interest etc. vary with education, age, etc.
• Participation will be asymmetrical
• Arousing emotions serves to engage larger
  numbers, rather than pure rationality

13
Deliberative practice

• Deliberative polls
• Developed by James Fishkin in the 1990s
• Representative sample (ca. 300 participants)
• Invited to debate politics
• Measuring opinion change as a result of
  deliberation
• Findings
• Change occurs regularly
• Predominant tendency towards more liberal
  opinions through deliberation
• Moderation of opinions
• Deliberative organisations
• Goals
• Education
• Conflict resolution
• Cooperation
• Action
• Policy
• Deliberative groups predominantly goal-oriented
• Self-selection of members
• Deliberative practice tends to yield additional
  means of political participation for those
  already more politically interested and informed
  than the average

14
Technology and promise

• Internet emerging in early 1990s, coinciding with
  increased emphasis on deliberative democracy
• Technology promoted as solution of participatory
  deficit in Western democracies
• Means of communication (one-to-one, one-to-many,
  many-to-many)
• Decentralised
• Outside state control
• Allowing anyone to produce and receive text
• Parallel to 18th century media landscape
• Less exclusive than Habermas bourgeois debate
  clubs in 18th century

15
Technology and theory

• Instead of deliberative theorists embracing
  ICT/WWW as basis for reinvigoration of public
  sphere, it was cyberenthusiasts who incorporated
  deliberative thinking in their appraisal of the
  promise of online use
• it is through the free wheeling and rambling
  discussion that the online medium makes possible,
  that one can more thoughtfully consider diverse
  views. The Internet helps to remove the
  constraints to communication, to make it possible
  to explore what the underlying dispute or
  agreement is, and then to determine the new view
  that will resolve the issue in contention.
  This helps to generate the diversity of the
  variety of viewpoints that one has to consider to
  analyze a question or problem. In this process
  the wide ranging discussion made possible by the
  Internet is not limited to two communicators, but
  can include a large and almost unlimited number.
  (Hauben, 1999)

16
Online debates

• Internet - a self-reflective medium
• Most of the literature on virtual public sphere
  is published only online
• Extensive meta-debates within discussion forums
  (netiquette)
• Patterns of online use
• User adaptation to the medium
• Vertical and horizontal segmentation
• Social exclusiveness of technology
• Medium of use not consumption
• Unlimited filtering

17
Internet communities

• Self-selection
• Altering the concept of community (different
  entry/exit conditions than in face-to-face
  communities)
• Observed homogeneity in usenet groups
• groups that are evenly divided in opinion, or
  approximately so, must be rare. Asymmetry in the
  distribution of beliefs within groups is likely
  to be prevalent, particularly since it is known
  that individuals tend to seek out politically
  like-minded individuals. (Huckfeldt and Sprague
  1995)
• Group polarization (possibly detrimental effect
  on democracy)
• With respect to the Internet and new
  communications technologies, the implication is
  that groups of like-minded people, engaged in
  discussion with one another, will end up thinking
  the same thing that they thought before but in
  more extreme form. (Sunstein 2001)
• Tendency towards monological (rather than
  dialogical) mode of communication
• little more than a middle-class residents
  association in cyberspace (McClellan, 1994)

18
Engineering online participation

• UK under New Labour at the forefront of
  development of e-governance and e-democracy
• Tony Blair promising
• a new relationship between the individual and
  the state. We want to give power back to the
  people, and in return we expect them to take on
  greater responsibility for themselves.
• changing how national government is run as well
  as devolving power outwards to the people.
  (Blair, T. New Britain my vision of a young
  country London Fourth Estate, 1996)
• Minister for e-commerce, Douglas Alexander MP
• The 2001 UK general election gave us the lowest
  turnout since universal suff rage only 59 of
  the electorate were sufficiently engaged in the
  democratic process to take a stake in choosing
  their government. However, delve below these
  headline figures and the warning is even more
  stark. The detail of the demographics reveals
  that in the 18-25 age group over 60 did not
  vote. This group represents the democrats of the
  future and, if unaddressed, this level of
  disengagement would pose a threat to the
  long-term health of our democratic institutions.
  it is now time to set all this activity into a
  clear policy framework and put e-democracy on the
  information age agenda. Government should set out
  what it means by e-democracy and how it intends
  to use the power of technology to strengthen
  democracy. (2001)

19
Labours online strategy

• Stephen Coleman, Professor for E-Democracy,
  Oxford
• There are far more ?online communities? in
  existence than most people realise, constituting
  an autonomous civic network that can only be
  healthy for democracy. We are interested in
  exploring how governments can connect with such
  online communities, but the main emphasis of this
  report is to examine whether and how governments
  themselves can initiate and sustaine democracy
  exercises aimed at involving the public in the
  policy-making process. (Stephen Coleman and John
  Gøtze Bowling Together Online Public Engagement
  in Policy Deliberation London Hansard Society,
  2001)
• Two-way governance
• Information
• Consultation
• Active participation
• Moderation and mediation
• Deliberation requires trusted facilitation. In
  short, it does not just happen. (Coleman and
  Gøtze 2001)
• Rules for participants
• Regulate discussions
• Moderate messages
• Help reaching conclusions
• Summarize deliberations
• Ensure feedback to participants

20
Online citizenship in Britain

• Instrumental mode of communication
• Predominantly, information operates on a passive
  receiver
• Emphasis on government targets (100 delivery of
  government services online by end of 2005)
• Transactions/Interaction
• Participation/Conversation
• Design shortcomings
• Building on commercial online technology use
• State interference/usurpation of public sphere
• Deliberative but undemocratic, hence impossible
  to institutionalize impact on decision making