The Empirical Turn in Deliberative Democracy

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The Empirical Turn in Deliberative Democracy

• John Dryzek
• February 2008

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Background

• The alienation of political theory? - Gunnell
• Habermas 2006 the deliberative model of
  democracy appears to exemplify the widening gap
  between normative and empirical approaches to
  politics

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Approaches to Empirical Evidence Climbing the
Fact Ladder

• 1. No facts, just assumptions
• Rawls 1971 early Habermas Cohen
• 2. Stylized facts
• Rawls fact of reasonable pluralism
• Young 1996 on bias of deliberation
• 3. Bad facts
• Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy
• 4. Facts that miss the point
• Mutz, Hearing the Other Side
• 5. Better facts

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Evidence Speaks to Normative Theory Nine Tasks
of Deliberation

• A particular kind of communication
• - do people actually communicate like this?
• Evaluate against ideal
• or comparative assessment - Steiner et al, DQI

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• 2. Preference Change
• easier for non-partisan deliberators
• Niemeyer aligning preferences more closely with
  underlying subjectivity

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• 3. Legitimacy
• Habermas small-scale studies can only lend
  limited support to the empirical content of a
  deliberative paradigm designed for legitimation
  processes in large-scale or national societies
• micro test citizens acceptance of policies
  they disagree with
• macro case studies of deliberative system
  (Parkinson)

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• 4. Policy impact
• case studies (beyond the exemplary - Porto
  Alegre)
• 5. Problem-solving rationality
• easy to illustrate, hard to test

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• 6. Making collective choice more tractable
• List et al, evidence from deliberative polls on
  single-peakedness
• 7. Political equality
• Young, Sanders worry
• Cook et al inequalities exist, but less than for
  other forms of participation

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• 8. Social Learning
• Reconstructing relationships
• Kanra on Turkey
• 9. Democratization apply to comparative
  politics. Leib, He, Warren on China
• 10. Making Better Citizens
• Track people after participation in deliberative
  events

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Conclusion

• The alienation of political theory is over
• Deliberative democracy is leading the way