Deliberative Democracy and Its Transcendence: Perspectives of Freedom and Critique

Author: Dryzek
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: When discussing the specific transition from the public sphere to the state, it is more necessary to consider the actor factors, as their frameworks of preferences initially diverge from the discourse in the public sphere. Therefore, regardless of the role of the seemingly eloquent sophistry in the public sphere, it plays a particularly important role in the transition mechanism from the public sphere to the state.
Emphasizing the discourse shift from the public sphere to the administrative state, especially the shift in sophistry, takes us away from the world depicted by social choice theory. Participating in communicative action in the public sphere is vastly different from voting on aggregated preferences. However, this does not mean voting should be abolished, as electoral activities indeed create opportunities for discourse transformation, and elections themselves give state actors a reason to listen to public sentiment. From a democratic perspective, communicative action in the public sphere involves an ontological transformation, which stands in stark contrast to voting within the state. But is communicative action in the public sphere still democratic? Yes. Even if we narrowly consider democracy in terms of the formation of public opinion and its transformation into state action, the answer remains the same. In this chapter, I strive to maintain a degree of proportionality and comparability between the traditions of public choice and deliberative democracy. I hope I have clarified that aggregative democrats (including proponents of social choice theory) view certain mechanisms as essential components of full democracy. We can elaborate on deliberative democracy, which possesses communicative mechanisms similar to those mechanisms. In particular, deliberative mechanisms may be embedded within the dual perspectives of the public sphere and the state. Once these roles themselves are defined by discourse conditions and are resolved through alternative roles, deliberative democracy is not the incomplete theory that critics dismiss, although critics exaggerate its impracticality and principled incoherence and sneer at it.
Discourse mechanisms and electoral mechanisms do not encompass the entire theoretical space of the transition from the public sphere to the state. James Fishkin (1991, 1995) proposed a noteworthy perspective, which is linked to his views on deliberative public opinion polls. From the perspective of deliberative democracy, general public opinion polls are meaningless, as they only register preferences without consideration. Deliberative public opinion polls, on the other hand, randomly sample the public, have them discuss and deliberate on key election issues, survey their positions on a given issue, and then publish the results. The intention is to understand the distribution of opinions among the general public when they are able to participate in genuine deliberation. This is far different from the hasty preferences registered by general public opinion polls.
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