Journal of Public Deliberation
Volume 12
Issue 2 Special Issue: Equality, Equity, and
Deliberation
Article 4
10-13-2016
When is Deliberation Democratic?
David RH Moscrop
University of British Columbia, david.moscrop@alumni.ubc.ca
Mark E. Warren
University of British Columbia, warren@politics.ubc.ca
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Recommended Citation
Moscrop, David RH and Warren, Mark E. (2016) "When is Deliberation Democratic?," Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 12 : Iss. 2 ,
Article 4.
Available at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol12/iss2/art4
This Definitions and Goals is brought to you for free and open access by Public Deliberation. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Public
Deliberation by an authorized editor of Public Deliberation.
When is Deliberation Democratic?
Abstract
“Deliberative democracy” is a compound term. In both theory and practice, it connects deliberative
influence through reason giving, reciprocity, and publicity to a family of political systems that broadly
enable popular control of the state and government through empowerments such as voting, petitioning,
and contesting, as well as the electoral and judicial systems that enable them. These empowerments are
democratic when they are distributed to, and usable by, those affected by collective decisions in ways
that are both equal and equitable.
While deliberative influence is best protected and incentivized by democratic political systems, not all
deliberation is democratic, and not all approaches to democracy are deliberative. We should distinguish
and relate these terms: we need to differentiate the practice of deliberation from the contexts of
democratic enablements and empowerments in which it occurs. We can then focus on the predeliberative conditions that will enable or limit the extent to which deliberation is democratic. Two predeliberative democratic features stand out as particularly important in this context: popular
participation—how individuals come to have standing and voice as participants, and agendasetting—how concerns come to be defined as issues. We further argue that since deliberation typically
occurs downstream from agenda-setting, and since popular participation both shapes and is shaped by
this practice, theorists and practitioners of deliberative democracy should pay close attention to each
well before deliberation begins.
To make this case, we first theorize the democratic dimensions of deliberative democracy through the
concepts of equity and equality. Second, we focus on agenda setting and popular participation as
important, though not exclusive, pre-deliberative determinants of equality and equity during
deliberation. Finally, we offer suggestions about how theorists and practitioners of deliberative
democracy might think about responding to the challenges generated by the tension between equality
and equity prior to democratic deliberation.
Keywords
deliberation, democracy, equity, equality, agenda-setting, justice, fairness
This definitions and goals is available in Journal of Public Deliberation: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol12/iss2/art4
Moscrop and Warren: When is Deliberation Democratic?
“Deliberative democracy” is a compound term. In both theory and practice, it
connects deliberative influence through reason-giving, reciprocity, and
publicity to a family of political systems that broadly enable popular control of
the state and government through empowerments such as voting, petitioning,
and contesting, as well as the electoral and judicial systems that enable them.
These empowerments are democratic when they are distributed to, and usable
by, those affected by collective decisions in ways that are both equal and
equitable.
While deliberative influence is best protected and incentivized by democratic
political systems, not all deliberation is democratic, and not all approaches to
democracy are deliberative. We should distinguish and relate these terms: we
need to differentiate the practice of deliberation from the contexts of
democratic enablements and empowerments in which it occurs. We can then
focus on the pre-deliberative conditions that will enable or limit the extent to
which deliberation is democratic. Two pre-deliberative democratic features
stand out as particularly important in this context: popular participation—how
individuals come to have standing and voice as participants, and agendasetting—how concerns come to be defined as issues. We further argue that
since deliberation typically occurs downstream from agenda-setting, and since
popular participation both shapes and is shaped by this practice, theorists and
practitioners of deliberative democracy should pay close attention to each
feature well before deliberation begins.
To make this case, we first theorize the democratic dimensions of deliberative
democracy through the concepts of equity and equality. Second, we focus on
agenda-setting and popular participation as important, though not exclusive,
pre-deliberative determinants of equality and equity during deliberation.
Finally, we offer suggestions about how theorists and practitioners of
deliberative democracy might think about responding to the challenges
generated by the tension between equality and equity prior to democratic
deliberation.
Equality, Equity, and Deliberative Democracy
Deliberation can be separated from democracy conceptually and practically.
There can be deliberation that is not democratic and democratic practices that
are not deliberative. For instance, Rawls (2001) considered the United States
Supreme Court to be a pre-eminent deliberative body. But the Supreme Court
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has an agenda that is limited by judicial process and—though an important
part of a democratic system—is remote from democratic control. There are
also democratic practices that are not deliberative. These include practices
such as aggregate voting and purely strategic uses of words and images in
political campaigns.
At a high level of abstraction, we can conceive of the “democratic” part of
deliberative democracy as comprised of equality in opportunities for
participation, and equity in processes and outcomes. Within the context of
democratic theory, equality almost always refers constitutionally to rights and
empowerments that attach to citizenship—equal rights to vote, equal
protections for speech and association, equal standing before the law, and
equal supports for social precursors of participation, such as education. These
equal rights and empowerments are justified by moral equality; each person is
morally worthy and possessed of equal moral dignity, and assumed to be
capable of self-government (Dahl, 1999). In a democracy, these rights,
empowerments, and moral assumptions attach to each individual equally,
simply by virtue of their citizenship. They do so regardless of actual social and
economic inequalities, or inequalities of capacity. They belong to individuals
whether or not they are able to make use of them. Finally, these kinds of rights
and empowerments are relative to the political units through which they are
organized; their effectiveness is conditioned by the control governments
exercise over an issue, and by the ways political systems enable citizens to
participate in the kinds of control a government might exercise, including (for
example) electoral system design.
Equity is a different matter. While equality operates through distributions of
rights and empowerments that attach to citizenship, equity requires that each
person is given his or her due according to circumstance. Equity
considerations draw attention to the highly variable ways in which individuals
are situated within social relationships, and to the duties and obligations that
individuals have to one another as co-dependents within collectivities. That is,
equity reflects considerations of social justice (Pettit, 2012; Rawls, 2001).
Thus, while equality may be said to operate on a simple principle—equal
provision of formal empowerments and protections—equity is more
demanding and less amenable to formalization, as it requires attentiveness to
the circumstances of each individual. Ideally, equality enables equity: equal
distribution of empowerments such as votes, rights, and opportunities for
voice should enable citizens to press for equity, to place equity claims on the
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Moscrop and Warren: When is Deliberation Democratic?
agenda, and to deliberate about what equity requires in the many different
kinds of locations that comprise collectivities of interdependent equals.
Equality, properly understood, ought to move a society toward equity: when
equal empowerments underwrite voice, then deliberative mechanisms should
enable finer-grained attentiveness to historical injustices, persistent prejudices,
and highly variable starting places in life. But because these kinds of
circumstances affect the ways in which citizens are able to use their equalities,
questions of equity may also be pre-deliberative; precisely those who are
relatively disadvantaged may need additional support, organization, or
representation in order to have their voices included in deliberative processes.
Who Gets to Deliberate and about What?
When we convert these ideals into more substantive questions of deliberative
democracy, two questions stand out: How are issues placed on deliberative
agendas? And who gets to deliberate?
Imagine a (heavily stylized) deliberative cycle that proceeds as follows: first,
there is a period during which, in the course of everyday public life in a
democracy, an issue emerges and is taken up by an organization or
government as an issue fit for deliberation. A deliberative body of some kind
is selected and assembled. In the case of a legislature, the body is already
chosen by an electorate; in the case of a mini-public, some mechanism or
procedure will be required to select who will deliberate.
The deliberation and decisions that follow will be highly conditioned by the
way in which an issue has been framed and defined, and also by election or
selection of participants. The extent to which deliberation is, initially,
“democratic” will be the result of agenda-setting and participant selection.
Even in a stylized description such as this one, we can see that political
standing is highly contingent. People can use their formal equalities to
organize and press issues onto an agenda. One of the most critical functions of
a democracy is to enable processes by which public sphere actors can place
items on the agenda in a formal political sphere (e.g., the legislature, city
council, etc.) and encourage, influence, and bring about policy outcomes that
generally reflect the preferences and priorities of an affected constituency.
Formal recognition of an issue by (say) a legislature or city council as an
agenda item recursively grants political standing to an affected constituency,
granting them political status that exceeds, as it were, their formal equalities
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by recognizing, from among all the possible issues, a particular issue, around
which some group of people has mobilized. Once an agenda is recognized and
a constituency mobilized, equity considerations can enter into the political
process, particularly when there are deliberative moments that enable people
to make their claims. We often fail to conceptualize these formative moments
when considerations of equity enter into political processes, shifting from
equalities possessed by every citizen to more specific questions of who is
affected by an issue, and to what extent. The more general point is that if we
fail to ask about both equality and equity in these two formative moments—
the moments of agenda-setting and participation/representation, the “what”
and the “who”—the “democratic” element of deliberative democracy will be
undermined before deliberation even begins. As we suggest below, the
relationship between equality and equity is mirrored in an unresolved tension
within democratic theory between peoples who have claims to inclusion
owing to their formal equalities of citizenship, and those who have equity
claims by virtue of their affectedness by an issue or policy (Goodin, 2008;
Fung, 2013; Karpowitz & Raphael 2014).
When Equality Isn’t Sufficient to Democracy
Formal equalities are essential to democratic deliberation, as they provide the
institutional infrastructure that enables publics to form and organize, and
issues to be defined. They are essential to moving issues into decision-making
venues. And they are essential for accountability. Yet, formal equalities are
quite compatible with substantive inequities that can undermine the
democratic dimensions of deliberative processes. The sorts of things we
imagine as pressing issues tend to be defined prior to any critical evaluation of
why this issue is considered pressing and that issue is not for citizens of some
jurisdiction. The ways issues affect people will usually be highly
circumstantial. Affordable housing, for example, may not be an immediate
concern for most people, but it will be urgent for some. Equal distributions of
political rights and supports are insensitive to this kind of inequity. Worse,
those most affected are also unlikely to be best positioned to use the political
equalities they possess. Some rights—voting in particular—will disfavor
disadvantaged minorities. It can often be the case that from an equalityseeking principle that sets aside equity, the agenda issues of the minority will
be set aside again and again for some future in which there is more time, more
resources, and more magnanimous majorities.
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Moscrop and Warren: When is Deliberation Democratic?
Another equality-based approach to agenda-setting assumes a competitive
civil society in which diverse interests vie with one another to get their issues
on the agenda—in short, pluralism. An important argument in favor of the
pluralist approach is that citizens can gauge the intensity of their preferences
themselves and organize accordingly. Each individual is in charge, as it were,
of deciding how to translate formal equalities into substantive demands,
including demands for equity. There are no good reasons to limit the equalities
that enable pluralist politics. However, organization, pressure, and voice that
rely on self-selection will tend to mirror social inequalities, favoring those
with education, money, and social status. As E. E. Schattschneider famously
commented decades ago, "the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly
chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent" (1960, p. 35). Traditionally
marginalized communities face barriers to participation, in part because they
tend to acquire and develop the sorts of skills necessary for political
engagement at a much lower rate (Brady, Verba, & Schlozman 1995; Gaventa
1980). Considered as deliberative bodies that respond to organized pressure
and public discourse, for example, legislatures will tend to mirror these wellknown biases. They are sites of deliberation that often fail democracy, both
because they lack mechanisms for equity and because formal equalities reflect
social inequities. Without addressing inequities in agenda-setting and
participation, even highly deliberative bodies are likely to reflect the
preferences and priorities of those who have relative advantages.
These are well-developed issues within democratic theory. Less welldeveloped are the theoretical responses: Can we integrate considerations of
equity into an equality-focused set of theories, and then integrate them into
deliberative democratic theory? A promising approach within democratic
theory—one that could deal with equity considerations—looks at agenda
setting and political standing by asking about how and to what extent people
are affected by collective issues and decisions. There is now some movement
away from strict equality as the most basic measure of democracy, and toward
what is now called an “all-affected-interests principle” (Fung, 2013;
Habermas, 1996; Young, 2000). If one is affected or potentially affected by
collectivities, including structural locations within them, one should have a
claim to voice in crafting agendas and a say within deliberative processes.
This kind of principle moves us away from building democratic theory on
formal equalities alone, and toward thinking about substantive equities.
Imagining for a moment individuals who would like to put issues on the
agenda, let us assume that each person has a single vote, which they would use
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to put forward an issue for deliberation. The principle of equality would give
each individual one equal vote. If, for instance, you care about clean energy
policy, and each of the authors of this paper cared about health care premiums,
then the 2-to-1 vote for setting premiums on the agenda would be decisive.
The potential impacts of the issue are not reflected in the outcome. From the
standpoint of affectedness, however, things are different. If, for instance, a
change in clean energy policy would affect you (and others) significantly (say,
by improving air quality and greatly improving your quality of life) while
health premium reduction would affect us only weakly (say, by saving us a
hundred dollars a year), then the relative weights of our claims should be
adjusted. Of course, such adjustments already occur in practice: those who
care deeply about an issue can use their formal equalities to try to push it onto
the agenda. The results, however, are often inequitable, as this kind of “selfservice” democracy favors those with more education, money, and time. It
would be better to ask: Who is affected, in what ways, and by how much?
Then, perhaps, we could design agendas and participation in ways that
processes and outcomes are more likely to be equitable.
Our interpretation of the all-affected-interests principle ties the concept to
equity rather than to jurisdiction-based equality. If claims to being affected
were to produce equal claims to set agendas and participate, then almost any
issue quickly comes to include just about everyone, everywhere (Goodin,
2008). The results would not just be unworkable, they would be inequitable
(and unjust), as those with distant connections to an issue would have the
same claims as those who are immediately and dramatically affected. If,
however, we couple the principle with equity, then it will result in differential
claims to agenda-setting and participation. This characterization of the allaffected-interests principle should cash out in the ways deliberative processes
are designed around equity concerns: What affects me or us most? What is
most important to me or to us? By characterizing the principle this way, and
designing deliberation with equity in mind, the impact of outcomes and the
participation required of individuals and groups should scale relative to the
importance they have for individuals’ self-development and selfdetermination—that is, relative to social justice (Young, 2000). The question
about representation in a deliberation thus changes from “Who has a right to
be here?” to “How many are here from group X, Y, or Z relative to how much
this issue impacts groups X, Y, or Z?” While this kind of approach may seem
difficult to justify from the perspective of formal equalities, in fact we already
practice many versions that people find intuitively legitimate. For example,
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Moscrop and Warren: When is Deliberation Democratic?
although Canadians have equal rights to health care, the system supplies
health care differentially, according to each individual’s health needs. And
designed processes often target “stakeholders”—which is one way of
identifying and recognizing those who are most affected.
Within the context of deliberative democracy, the composition of a
deliberative body will likely reflect which concerns are brought to bear, and
how the issues are deliberated (Karpowitz & Mendelberg, 2014; Landemore,
2012). Pre-deliberative considerations about equity in terms of the makeup of
the group are thus central to outcomes independent of whatever issue it may
be that is being discussed. For all these reasons, we should be thinking about
techniques of involvement that select participants with consideration for
equity.
The all-affected-interests principle provides us with some guidance about how
to think about these considerations. Those who are disproportionately affected,
especially those who bear the greatest burdens of social inequalities and
inequities, should have a place at the table, either directly or through
representation. There are several questions we need to ask about the
composition of the participant body. Which backgrounds are represented at the
table? Which communities? Which kinds of discourses? And what sorts of
approaches to deliberation feed inclusions into the deliberative process itself?
A properly designed deliberation should aim to balance these and other
questions of representation to ensure that a variety of affected communities are
represented, and that those communities are given the appropriate opportunity
to substantively engage in the process in such a way that their participation
generates effective inclusion (Karpowitz and Raphael 2014). This requirement
brings about a tension between equality and equity when it comes to
determining who gets to the table, who gets to speak, and how often. For
instance, Karpowitz and Mendelberg (2014) find that in certain settings,
deliberations require a disproportionately high number of women compared to
men in order to moderate the gendered effects of male participation in
discussions. Strictly speaking, this kind of selection requires a prima facie
violation of the equality principle (assuming the issue at hand affects men and
women more or less equally), and instead substitutes an equity principle: a
deliberative body should be composed in such a way that the perspectives,
concerns, preferences, priorities, and deliberation systems of all genders are
substantively included.
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The requirement of equity-based, affectedness-sensitive inclusion, as opposed
to mere formal opportunities for inclusion, can be applied across genders,
ethnicities, linguistic communities, epistemic communities, age groups, socioeconomic classes, and others. Since in many cases sub-categories of these
groups have faced (and continue to face) impediments that have affected their
social and political standing, attention to pre-deliberative equity will be
important. For instance, imagine a proposed highway that will cut through a
low-income neighborhood. Building the highway will impact the city at large,
including economic output and business development, commute time for those
living outside the city, expenditure of public funds, and so forth. It will,
however, have a much more immediate and direct impact on the residents of
the neighborhood in question. Here again, the all-affected-interests principle
helps to give definition to considerations of equity. If the population of the
city is taken as the category of all affected, then one might presume that each
resident or relevant sub-group of residents should, in principle, have an equal
opportunity to be represented at the table. And yet if we follow the equitycentric all-affected-interests principle, it is not at all clear that equality
provides an equitable process. After all, having one’s commute time reduced
by 15 minutes a day is prima facie not equal to another having their
community permanently altered or destroyed. An equity-centric approach to
deciding who should be part of the deliberation might then heavily weight the
composition of the deliberative body in favor of the residents of the lowincome neighborhood, perhaps combined with representatives of broader
community interests in the region’s transportation infrastructure or any other
groups of affected people with equity-based standing. The same approach
might be imagined for issues including natural resource development, social
programs, public transportation, and so on. Indeed, on this point, democratic
deliberations designed through citizen assemblies or other forms of minipublics might enjoy an advantage when it comes to producing equitable
outcomes, since such bodies can be designed to reflect group-based
asymmetrical concerns and remain insulated from outside pressure (e.g.
moneyed interests) in a way that elected legislatures whose membership is
fixed after an election or self-selected bodies cannot.
Responding to Challenges
Rather than beginning with specific practices for enabling more just outcomes
from democratic deliberation, our focus is on ways of thinking about the
dimensions of process design that such outcomes presuppose. What sorts of
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Moscrop and Warren: When is Deliberation Democratic?
equality and equity considerations need to be built into a process for
deliberation to function democratically? We have focused on agenda-setting
and participant selection as two areas of importance, since each can have a
significant impact on not only the sorts of outcomes that are produced through
deliberation, but also on the sorts of issues that are given the status of public
issues in the first place.
Using this rough framework, we recommend three commitments to guide
agenda-setting and participant selection for democratic deliberation. First,
chances to determine an issue as an issue for deliberation should be
distributed more or less equally throughout a population in such a way that a
wide range of communities have the opportunity to deliberate about issues of
substantive, and, likely, often asymmetrical importance to them. On balance,
this means that, given scarce political resources, there ought to be a roughly
rotational cycle of agenda-setting such that no single community gains
advantage in determining which issues are fit for immediate deliberation and
which are not. This cycle ought to be concerned with equity insofar as it is
about ensuring that the sorts of issues that are raised and addressed are
dependent on need or merit according to the ends of social justice rather than
influence. Such a cycle would require that officials maintain regular contact
with a broad and deep plurality of political, social, cultural, ethnic, economic,
and geographical groups—some of which will certainly overlap with one
another.
Second, the composition of a deliberative body should roughly correspond to
the equity principle discussed above. That is, the degree to which a
community is affected by an issue at hand should be reflected in the
distribution of representation in a deliberation. This commitment requires a
balanced and nuanced consideration of the all-affected-interests principle
interpreted through the requirements of equity: it should be balanced to ensure
that a broad population of those affected by a policy are included in
deliberation, and nuanced to ensure that, when warranted, the degree to which
some people are affected by a policy compared to others is reflected in the
makeup and/or decision-making power of the deliberative body. Focusing on
equity in inclusion is one key to addressing structural inequalities and
injustices.
Finally, the composition of a deliberative body should take into account the
degree to which certain asymmetries will be required in the selection of
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deliberators in order to generate democracy within deliberation. For instance,
a mini-public might require more women than men in order to offset
traditional exclusionary dynamics, or it might require a balance of types of
epistemic approaches to reason-giving, requiring additional representation for
certain epistemic communities.
Conclusion
While formal equalities designed into political institutions are necessary for
functioning deliberative democracy, they are not sufficient. They should be
complemented with equity-based considerations, best captured in the allaffected-interests principle of participatory entitlement. This is an important
departure from standard democratic theory, but it is not a departure from
familiar principles our practices already respect. In the judicial arena, for
example, having one’s day in court is dependent upon the principle of
standing; that is, there must be significant harm, and courts aim to address
harms equitably. By analogy, political standing should reflect degrees of
affectedness. In the political arena, we already tacitly recognize this principle
within pluralist politics: the intensity of preferences translates into organized
advocacy and pressure, protected by the standard rights of speech and
association. We recognize equity in the distribution of welfare goods, such as
healthcare, income supports, and education. We are mostly comfortable with
“stakeholder” processes that implicitly weight participation by those “who
have a stake” in the issue. We are suggesting that we go one step further,
designing deliberative processes so they are proactively equity-focused,
following the all-affected-interests principle. Without taking these steps,
deliberative politics may often reflect the inequalities and inequities solidified
within the broader contexts of social structures and institutions.
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