Norms

CHAPTER 2 Norms There are many things to dislike about democracy. It demands so much from citizens. It is too slow. It gets nothing done. It breaks too many promises. It is ‘destined to disappoint’ (Stoker 2006). While it is important to know things that we do not like about politics, it is also important to think about how politics should be. What values do we think are important for a well-functioning democracy? What procedures should be in place when we are faced with intractable conflict or challenged to solve wicked problems? How should politics be consequential in responding to the needs of a pluralistic society? Normative democratic theory is the space to answer these questions. This field focuses on constructing a vision of democracy that makes it morally desirable. It imagines the principles that should shape the design of formal democratic institutions as well as the norms that should govern the public sphere. At its core, deliberative democracy is a normative theory of democracy—a ‘political aspiration’ as we defined it in the previous chapter. Aspirations are meaningful in that they serve as regulative ideals by which we can diagnose where actually existing democracies fall short. They also serve a navigational purpose, in the sense that aspirations provide direction for citizens to collectively chart their future (Appadurai 2004). Take the case of electoral integrity. This is a vision for democracy in which elections are competitive, free, and fair. But elections, even in © The Author(s) 2019 N. Curato et al., Power in Deliberative Democracy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95534-6_2 25 26 N. CURATO ET AL. countries that have the most robust political systems, always fail in some respects. Women continue to face barriers in getting party nomination. Campaign finance laws let corporate interests prevail. Black propaganda has become a normal feature of political campaigns. Despite these flaws, elections continue to be an essential part of democratic life. The virtues of electoral integrity serve as guide, whether it is with independent election monitors or the Freedom House Index, to determine the reforms necessary to achieve electoral integrity. And so we find it puzzling that when it is deliberative democracy that proposes normative standards by which we assess political practice, it is accused as a pie-in-the-sky theory that has no bearing on practical politics. We hear this from scholars and pundits, calling deliberative democracy a ‘pipe dream’ (Shapiro 1999), nothing more than a feel-good project of kumbaya (see Asen 2015). In particular, deliberation has been accused of evading the issue of power. Pitching deliberations as ‘neutral’ forums where power differentials are suspended, critics hold, only serves to create another forum that reinforces privilege and power (Schoem 2014). We seek to examine these issues in this chapter. We begin by revisiting deliberative democracy’s account of legitimacy, for this is the aspect of normative deliberative theory that theorises the role of power in politics. From the perspective of ideal theory, the crux is that deliberation counteracts coercive power (illegitimate power) and generates productive forms of power that become the source of democratic legitimacy. Deliberative theory is thus not averse to power per se, but to the coercive type of power that imposes threats or sanctions without justification (Mansbridge 2010).1 This view, however, has not gone uncontested. Criticisms come from two intellectual traditions. One is the tradition of realpolitik, which dismisses deliberative democracy as a naïve political project that fails to speak to the realities of everyday politics. The other tradition is a feminist and cultural critique, according to which the claims to universality behind deliberative virtues are anchored in the particularistic experiences of Western liberal democracies. These perspectives challenge deliberative democracy not based on its practical application but on the desirability of its idealised norms and principles. Both of these criticisms, we argue, can be addressed by drawing on contemporary accounts of deliberation. On the part of realpolitik, we offer non-ideal deliberative theory as a response that puts forward deliberative principles to guide political action in imperfect speech situations, without having to dismiss the ideal core of the theory. On the part of the NORMS 27 feminist and cultural critique, we argue that deliberative theory has increasingly become responsive to historiographies that decentre the idealised public spheres of the Enlightenment to counter-publics and grassroots histories that also celebrate generative forms of power from the margins. We find that deliberative norms are cross-cultural but differently experienced. More, however, can be done. If coercive power and productive power are at opposite ends of a spectrum, deliberative theory can offer a sharper account of what kind of power takes place in between these two poles. Coercive power is inevitable in imperfect democracies, but this kind of power can be humbled by deliberative norms. Productive power may be an elusive ideal, but working towards this goal is possible, whether by running mini-publics, enforcing institutional reforms, or reframing conversations in the public sphere. We argue, however, that these virtuous projects are never solely benign. To acknowledge the power asymmetries created by these well-intentioned democratic innovations, we propose that these should also be subject to their own tests of justifications in the space of reasons. We thus conclude the chapter with our account of deliberative power in an imperfect world. Deliberation, Power, anD legitimacy A treatise on power may not be in deliberative democracy’s founding documents, but an account of power is front and centre in its theory of legitimacy. In complex democratic societies, legitimacy ought to be the result of ‘free and unconstrained deliberation of all matters about common concern’ (Benhabib 1996: 68; also Cohen 2003). The extent to which the exercise or relationship of power is legitimate is based on its approximation of an ‘ideal deliberative procedure’. Theorists such as Joshua Cohen (1997) and Habermas (1984) have put forward various versions of an ideal deliberative procedure. We do not wish to rehearse these philosophical constructions here. Instead, our goal is to examine the place of power in the overall theoretical construct, and how this speaks to other normative models of democracy. We focus our discussion on two themes. Deliberative theory’s account of legitimacy is hinged on (1) the rejection of coercive forms of power (power over) and (2) a view of promoting productive power (power to) through deliberation. 28 N. CURATO ET AL. Rejection of Coercive Power Deliberative democracy is built on a rejection of coercive power. Dryzek defines authentic deliberation as one that induces ‘reflection on preferences, values and interests in a noncoercive fashion’ (Dryzek 2000: 76). For Habermas, the unforced force of the better argument prevails in an ideal speech situation, where differences of opinion are resolved based on reason and nothing else (Habermas 1990: 88–89). Deliberation is distinguished from spin, lies, manipulation, propaganda, threats, and violence. While deliberation is about the power of persuasion, the latter are examples of exercising power through coercion. But what is coercive power? There are three related types of coercive power from a deliberative perspective. Agential View An agential view would define coercive power as A causing B to do X that B would not otherwise have done based on force or threat of sanction. Here A and B are both agents, where A’s inducements cause B to act beyond his or her own volition. B acts based on an external threat, and not because of reasons and reflection. Violent threats are overt examples of coercive power, as in the case of a robber holding someone at gunpoint to force the victim to turn over one’s possessions. Coercive power goes beyond physical threats, as in the case of blackmail, where decision-makers are forced to rule in favour of the person making the threat, at the risk of suffering from smear campaigns and reputational damage. Deliberative democracy eschews this exercise of power, for it is the antithesis of freedom and autonomy. Coercion challenges our negative freedoms, or freedom from interference of others. Coercion occurs when an external agent (be they the state or other persons) interferes with our choices. This is not to say that all interferences are coercions, but some interferences can become coercive, such as legal mandates.2 It is for this reason that libertarian political philosophers are wary of any state actions that would interfere with our choices and lives. Yet coercion also challenges our positive freedoms or freedom for self-mastery. Having selfmastery means being motivated to act only based on one’s own rationality and autonomy, not having one’s actions limited by external agents or forces.3 Finally, coercion challenges our freedom from non-domination, or freedom of personal independence. To say that an agent is dominated NORMS 29 is to say that one is under the arbitrary will of another.4 Ideally, no citizen should be coerced into believing, acting, and acquiescing to the will of other citizens. One can imagine autocratic systems which minimise opportunities for citizens to freely reflect on their political preferences. As Dryzek puts it, ‘autocracies may be interested in individuals’ preferences but only to convince people to accept the regime’s doctrine, backed by a threat of coercion’ (Dryzek 2009: 1381). Authoritarian regimes may not fully shut down the spaces for public discourse, but they can practise arbitrary power that curbs any speech unsavoury to the regime.5 On this basis, deliberative theory shares liberal philosophy’s commitment to an individual’s freedom to live an independent life. Coercion also challenges the principle of autonomy that deliberative politics seeks to protect through virtues of respect, reciprocity, and justification. Deliberation argues that citizens should be treated not as passive actors but as autonomous agents who have the capacity to take part in the governance of societies to which they belong (Gutmann and Thompson 2004). If decision-makers refuse to subject their views or decisions to public deliberation, they have no legitimate basis for acting on behalf of their constituencies. ‘In so behaving’, argue Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, ‘they are also treating those over whom they exercise power as objects of paternalistic legislation rather than as domestic citizens to whom they owe an honest account of their actions’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 45). Liberal democracies are far from immune from—if not indeed vulnerable to—these sorts of behaviour. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is one classic example. Public justifications for the war were based on false information peddled by the United States and the United Kingdom, supported by mainstream media. Deepa Kumar (2006) refers to this as the media– military industrial complex, where the state’s pro-war propaganda comfortably co-existed with for-profit giant conglomerate media, which chose to ‘present certain “facts” and ignore others’ (Kumar 2006: 58). This was a lethal combination for democratic politics. Both the state and the media considered their constituents as objects of propaganda, with close to 60 percent of Americans holding factually incorrect views about the war (Ramsey in Kumar 2006). The war was coercive, or illegitimate in deliberative terms, because citizens and their representatives who authorised the war did not have the opportunity to engage in authentic deliberation based on credible evidence and a consideration of alternative views. 30 N. CURATO ET AL. Structural View The Iraq War example brings to the surface another version of coercive power, which places less emphasis on agents than on structures that impose constraints on the space of reasons. The structural view of power comes under many names—ideology, hegemony, or the ‘third face of power’, amongst others (see Lukes 2005). There are conceptual debates that tease out the vocabulary of structural power, but for the purposes of our discussion, we use these terms interchangeably to draw attention to the kind of coercive power present in ‘dominant values and the political myths, rituals and institutions which tend to favour the vested interests of one or more groups, relative to others’ (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 950). Unlike the agential view of power that focuses on the relationship between actors (e.g. the spin doctor and the voters, the tyrant and the oppressed, capitalists and workers), the structural view of power focuses on architectures of power that limit the agenda for deliberation, suppress potential issues from surfacing, and frame political preferences to privilege particular interests. While some view power as instantiated in moments of decision-making (i.e. who gets their way), a structural view of power focuses on what takes place long before decisions are made. The President of the United States may ultimately decide whether to veto a bill or not, but the hegemonic discourse that shapes the President’s thinking on the subject is just as much an important site of power. Why, then, is this view of power coercive in deliberative terms? In the previous chapter, we introduced the concept of noumenal power, a view that emphasises the space of reasons as a space for power. When the public sphere is constrained by theocratic or technocratic fundamentalism, unquestioned tradition or over-bureaucratisation, the space of reasons is sealed off from discourses that challenge domination. When spaces for deliberation are closed off from new ideas, democracy’s epistemic dimension suffers. Polities also fail to practise reflexivity or identify shortcomings and learn from their mistakes (Dryzek 2009: 1393). Structural power, therefore, is coercive in as much as it constrains the scope for discursive will formation and penalises deviations from established order. Karen Ho’s (2009) ethnography of Wall Street provides a powerful illustration of how the undisputed vocabulary of ‘shareholder value’ has become central to capitalist ‘myth-making’ (Ho 2009: 179). Ho argues that the ideology of maximising value for shareholders has given investment bankers and market actors the power to recommend mergers, acquisitions, and massive layoffs, which in turn developed a ‘habitus of NORMS 31 downsizing’ in corporate America (Ho 2009: 252). Even though these rarely increase shareholder value, they are discourses that have been arrogated the status of ‘truth’, which legitimated market actors’ control over corporations. There are many lessons to be learned from this ethnographic study. A pertinent one for deliberative democracy is about the perils of the closed space of reasons in Wall Street. An exclusive club of Ivy League graduates socialised to believe in ‘money meritocracy’ and ‘personal exemplariness’ cushions the ‘fat cats’’ space of reasons from critical interrogation from differently situated actors (Ho 2009: 112, 41). Peter Evans and Martha Finnemore (2001) refer to this as ‘intellectual monocropping’ or the lack of intellectual diversity enforced by recruitment and career patterns within organisations. This creates a ‘tightly shared paradigm’ which compromises the cognitive richness of the industry (Evans and Finnemore 2001: 11; also see Stevenson 2016). One can infer that the global financial crises could have been averted had these work cultures and capitalist myths been punctured by inputs from robust deliberations within the financial system. But Ho also locates the epistemologies of Wall Street bankers to their own precarity. ‘Overwork is a normative practice’ in this industry, and jobs are insecure as one only earns by cutting deals. Instead of solely pinning blame on investment bankers, as an agentic view of power would, Ho’s work demonstrates how modern financiers are also objects of ideological power of free markets and unbridled capitalism. The scope of opinion formation is limited in this economic order. Epistemic View Epistemic injustice occurs when an agent is dismissed as a knower (Fricker 2007). We consider epistemic injustice as a manifestation of coercive power, situated at the intersection between the structural and the agential view. There are two aspects to epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s testimony is not considered or when there is an unjust ‘deficit of credibility owing to the operation of prejudice in the hearer’s judgment’ (Fricker 2007: 1319). This is the agential aspect. Miranda Fricker uses the example of The Talented Mr. Ripley to illustrate this concept. She narrates Marge’s struggle in trying to communicate to Herbert Greenleaf, Dickie’s father, that it was Ripley who had killed his son. Mr. Greenleaf ignores Marge’s testimony. ‘Marge, there is a female intuition…,’ he said (Fricker 2007: 87). 32 N. CURATO ET AL. Mr. Greenleaf’s dismissal of Marge’s testimony is epistemically harmful, not only because it humiliates Marge, but also because Marge’s credible piece of information was ignored because of the existing prejudice against women. Meanwhile, the structural aspect rests on hermeneutical injustice. This unfolds when epistemic resources are not available for understanding and communicating a speaker’s experience, or when there is an unjust deficit of intelligibility. Fricker cites the example of the transformation of the sexual harassment discourse. Prior to the 1980s, there was no such thing as ‘sexual harassment’, not because no one was abused prior to the 1980s, but because the concept of sexual harassment was collectively unavailable. Feminist theorists articulate how sexual harassment came about: a group of women got together for counselling and while they were talking about their experiences of abuse, they shared with other women their similar experiences. This case demonstrates that the women were effective agents in bringing about a change in a societal norm and fighting the structural deficits of language. The informal discussion that women had around the kitchen tables contributed to the transformation of the cultural, social, and political milieu of their society. The transformation occurred not only in the concrete decisions made through legislation and court decisions, but in the transformation of discursive practices. From a deliberative perspective, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice are problematic in that they both interfere with an agent’s ability to exercise noumenal power in the space of reasons. Kristie Dotson refers to this as epistemic oppression: Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. Epistemic exclusion, here, will be understood as an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers. Epistemic agency, in this analysis, refers to the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given community of knowers in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources. (Dotson 2014: 1) Epistemic oppression raises two issues for deliberative politics. First, it bars a person from exercising self-determination into the good life. Autonomy is at issue where individuals cannot perform their role as authors of collective decisions. This is coercive power at work insofar as individuals are forced to conform to a certain conduct without their input. Second, epistemic oppression is corrosive for knowledge production. NORMS 33 Polities cannot effectively produce knowledge if particular perspectives are misrecognised, ignored, or silenced. No polity can claim to act on behalf of the people’s interests if the people are not heard. Excluding the voices of prisoners on criminal justice reform is an example of epistemic oppression. Prisoners—disproportionately coming from minority groups—are bearers of experiential knowledge about policies on crime and punishment. They suffer from epistemic harm of not getting the status of knowers who should have the chance of shaping the space of reasons. Albert Dzur and Rekha Mirchandani’s (2007) work on the participatory criminal justice system highlights how punishment ‘is something for democratic citizens to “own up to”’ in the sense that civic participation is what legitimates coercion or punishment in a democracy. Responsibility for punishment is a civic enterprise, as offenders owe communities the assurance that they have been reminded of the reasons for following the law, while the community treats offenders as citizens willing to take responsibility for their offences and provide avenues for reintegration in the society. This paradigm of criminal justice posits an alternative approach to coercive power. Promotion of Productive Power Deliberative democracy offers an account of power that challenges its illegitimate, coercive forms. At the heart of deliberative theory is the idea that ‘deliberation promotes communicative power’ which can neutralise both overt and subtle forms of domination (Hendriks 2009: 174). By putting collective decisions on the footing of public reason, arbitrary preferences can be interrogated and held to account (see Cohen and Rogers 1995). The deliberative concept of productive power is consistent with the positive view of power, often described as ‘power to’ or ‘power with’ or ‘generative power’. This kind of power emerges when people come together to reason with one another, such that collective decisions derive authority from the best argument. This view of democratic citizenship, of course, is not unique to the deliberative tradition, but it is different from democratic theories influenced by rational choice theories, for example, which consider voters to be rational actors in pursuit of maximising utility. Voters know their selfinterest and exercise their rationality through their electoral choices. Similarly, bargaining is hinged on the notion of a citizen with clear preferences who accomplishes his or her goals by exchanging demands backed by promises, threats, or exit. In this context, agency is defined by the desire to maximise one’s preferences as much as possible (Risse 2000). 34 N. CURATO ET AL. Deliberative theory departs from this conception in a fundamental way. The philosophical basis of the productive concept of power begins with the concept of human beings as free agents. Immanuel Kant views persons as free and rational agents; that is, a person is free as long as he or she exercises the rational will in accordance with his or her reason (Kant 1999). John Rawls regards democratic citizens as ‘self-originating sources of valid claims’ (Rawls 1980: 543). This means that citizen claims ‘carry their weight on their own without being derived from prior duties or obligations owed to society or to other persons’ (Rawls 1980: 543). Rawls argues that democracies must create conditions of freedom where citizens can practise their agency by determining what must be done. Democracies must not appeal to religious or natural claims, for these constrict the space of reason. Moreover, Rawls asserts that ‘citizens recognize one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good’ (Rawls 1980: 544). The same argument can be found in Habermas, when he argues that democratic citizens are ‘co-originators of laws’ (Habermas 1996: 122).6 Habermas argues that democratic citizens should be the sources of the authority of laws they produce for themselves. This conception departs from the models of citizenship influenced by rational choice theory by placing emphasis on the ‘co’ in Habermas’ concept of ‘co-originator of laws’. Productive power is an emergent property of public deliberation. It comes from deliberative procedures that determine the common good and facilitate collective self-authorship. Unlike the private act of voting, in which citizens are under no obligation to justify their preferences to their peers, deliberative agency demands of individuals to step out of their parochial self-interest and put forward other-regarding reasons to defend their views. Practising agency in a ‘deliberative way’ thus requires citizens to construct arguments that appeal to the common good instead of making choices that have a ‘desirable fit’ with personal preferences alone (Cohen 2003: 347). Deliberative politics, therefore, is not just about the freedoms of an autonomous and agentic self, it is also about reciprocity—the obligation to argue using terms others can accept. As Gutmann and Thompson argue, [t]o justify imposing their will on you, your fellow citizens must give reasons that are comprehensible to you. If you seek to impose your will on them, you owe them no less. This form of reciprocity means that the reasons must be public, not merely in the privacy of one’s mind. (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 4) NORMS 35 The principle of publicity—expressing reasons in public—is central to the pursuit of the common good. To determine shared interests and forge collective decisions, citizens must be able to scrutinise these reasons. This speaks to the moral powers of citizens to exercise their power of justification in the space of reason and to justify their reasons to another. Moreover, justification of reasons results in the epistemic gains for the collective—democratic reason, as Hélène Landemore (2017) puts it—as it allows individuals to clarify their own preferences. Aristotle, the earliest defender of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ thesis, argues that deliberation amongst many is epistemically superior to deliberation amongst few (Aristotle 1998). Rawls further elaborates this insight: The benefits of discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining knowledge and enlarging the range of arguments. (Rawls 1971: 358–359) This view is consistent with Landemore (2017)’s suggestion that deliberation can make correct decisions by harnessing the cognitive diversity amongst citizens. This view is also consistent with the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) from social choice theory. The CJT asserts that if a proposition has a binary choice, if people are more likely to get things right than wrong, and if their judgements are made independently, then a larger group can track (factual) truth better than a smaller group (Cohen 1986; Coleman and Ferejohn 1986; List and Goodin 2001; Anderson 2006; Estlund 2008; Landemore 2012). Herein lies deliberative democracy’s account of legitimacy. The source of legitimacy is not the predetermined will of individuals but the very process of its formation through deliberation. We thus agree with Cohen that ‘outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals’ (Cohen 1997: 73). We also agree with Bernard Manin that ‘at the risk of contradicting a long tradition, the legitimate law is the result of general deliberation, not the expression of the general will’ (Manin 1987: 352). Laws, political principles, and policies gain legitimacy when citizens see themselves as authors, not subjects (Cooke 2000: 65). Collective deliberation generates productive power as it creates outcomes that are justified based on terms that all, even those who did not get their way, can reasonably accept. 36 N. CURATO ET AL. The abortion debate in Ireland illustrates the power of deliberation in generating productive power by overcoming intractable conflict. For decades, public conversations about abortion in Ireland have been fraught. Lisa Smyth describes the subject as one that is ruled by a ‘coercive antiabortion regime’ that had operated through nationalist constructions of Irishness anchored on patriarchal, traditionally familial, and conservative Catholic terms (Smyth 2005: 2). The discussion has ‘“descended into cruelty” in a way similar to explicitly undemocratic and tyrannical states’ (Smyth 2005: 1). As a way forward, Ireland convened a Citizens’ Assembly which brought together a representative sample of the Irish population composed of pro-lifers, pro-choicers, and undecideds. They discussed the issue over five weekends from November 2016 to April 2017. Most of the proceedings were streamed online. In these discussions, speeches and stories about liberalising abortion laws were exchanged. Citizens also had access to medical, legal, and ethical experts, as well as women who faced crisis pregnancies (see The Citizens’ Assembly 2017; also Chalmers 2018). The outcome of the Assembly was a vote in which 87 percent voted in favour of not retaining the Eighth Amendment in its present form. The Eight Amendment states: ‘The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.’ This provision is interpreted to equate the life of a pregnant woman with that of an embryo, effectively placing a constitutional ban on abortion. This vote mirrored public opinion polls. Participants explained that it was ‘the arguments’ that persuaded them to vote the way they did. Access to non-partisan experts who had time to explain facts to the assembly served to clarify issues beyond emotional and adversarial statements (McGreevy 2017). The process was not perfect, but it demonstrated deliberative democracy in action. It demonstrated the productive power of deliberation by cutting through the lies and propaganda that have marked adversarial debates in Ireland. It created conditions where citizens would have access to credible information and ample time and opportunity to process, discuss, and reflect on various positions. too Powerless, too Powerful: critiques of Deliberative theory Deliberative theory is not without its critics. On the one hand, it has been accused of lacking an empirical bite. To imagine politics to be driven by rational consensus is to be naïve about politics. Even in democratic systems, NORMS 37 politics is a site of struggle amongst self-interested actors competing for power. Deliberative theory’s vision is powerless in the real world. We refer to this as the realpolitik critique. On the other hand, deliberative theory has been accused of perpetuating the privileged epistemology of liberal, Western, masculine traditions of political theory. The feminist and cultural critique takes issue with the virtues deliberative theory valorises, and instead argues for the decentring of deliberative theory’s roots in the Enlightenment tradition. Deliberative theory, in other words, is complicit in, if not actively contributing to, the hierarchies of knowledge in normative theory if it fails to acknowledge the particularistic character of the Western Enlightenment and projects its vision to all human societies. Put differently, for these critics, it derives its noumenal power from sealing off the space of reasons based on dominant paradigms of thought. In what follows, we discuss both of these critiques and map the ways in which deliberative theory has responded to them. We argue that deliberative theory has been a dynamic normative project which has been reflexive enough to evaluate and adjust its normative assumptions based on criticisms. Realpolitik Daniel A. Bell’s (1999) critique of deliberation begins with an acknowledgement that political philosophers often make a distinction between conceptualising morally desirable political principles and conceptualising how to implement them. Taking this distinction on board, he raises an issue about the link between normative theory and practical politics: what are the preconditions for the implementation of deliberative theory’s moral principles? Many critics of deliberation share this line of enquiry. Often, these criticisms arise from different starting points about the nature of power and politics. While deliberative theory is committed to generative forms of power, its critics tend to emphasise a zero-sum view of politics. Ian Shapiro best articulates these criticisms in a series of pieces he has written, from ‘Enough of Deliberation’ in 1999 to an article subtitled ‘Against Political Deliberation’ in 2017. While Shapiro is certainly not the only critic of public deliberation, the issues he raises provide a snapshot of deliberative theory’s perceived shortcomings. We focus on three criticisms in this section. 38 N. CURATO ET AL. 1. ‘Deliberation attends too little to the degree to which moral disagreements in politics are shaped by interest and power’ (Shapiro 1999: 29). Shapiro raises this issue in relation to Gutmann and Thompson’s work on deliberation and moral disagreements, where they argue that ‘when citizens or their representatives disagree morally, they should continue to reason together to reach mutually acceptable decisions’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2003: 18; emphasis added). Critics of deliberation take issue with how the ‘should’ translates to ‘could’. For Shapiro, the principal obstacle in public deliberation is not the lack of people’s willingness to deliberate, although empirical political scientists like Diana Mutz (2006) argue that this is the case, but that there are powerful players who are in the business of shaping public debate (Shapiro 1999: 34). Democratic institutions easily fall prey to lobbyists, corporate interests, political consulting firms, and multimillionaires running self-funded campaigns, all of which have economic interests in hijacking deliberations. ‘Unless and until that challenge can be addressed’, Shapiro argues, ‘debating what deliberation can add to politics is little more than a waste of time’ (Shapiro 2017: 82). In this critique, Shapiro foregrounds the limits of generative power without enabling conditions in place that make political competition and argumentation meaningful. Deliberative democrats can easily concede Shapiro’s criticism. This, after all, is the main argument Habermas put forward in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989), where he narrates the deterioration of the bourgeois public sphere as a space for rational deliberation to a sphere of mass cultural consumption and administration of corporations and state elites. In his later work, Habermas recognises five types of actors who make an appearance in the public sphere: lobbyists (as Shapiro points out), advocates, experts, moral entrepreneurs, and intellectuals (Habermas 2006). Ideally, deliberation can serve as a ‘cleansing mechanism’ that filters out ‘the muddy elements’ of the legitimation process. This, of course, is rarely the case, as these actors wield different levels of influence. But instead of considering this as a criticism to deliberative theory, we argue that deliberative theory presents a critical lens by which the impact of money politics on discourses in formal political arenas and the public sphere can be examined in the first place. Whether it is through the quality of news coverage on controversial issues or the drift of parliamentary deliberations on NORMS 39 high stakes legislation, deliberative norms are heuristics that critically expose the obstructions these power asymmetries create, and propose reforms that can democratise aspects of public life that concentrate power. 2. Deliberation ‘only works for those fundamentalists who also count themselves as fallibilist democrats. That, I fear, is an empty class, destined to remain uninhibited’ (Shapiro 1999: 31). This critique draws attention to the complexity of realising deliberative theory’s vision in complex, multicultural societies experiencing deep disagreement. Moral disagreements require deliberators who are open to be persuaded by public-spirited reasons. For liberal philosophers, arguments about religion or tradition must be offlimits in these discussions. Yet, as such, so the criticism goes, deliberation offers little in making sense of intractable conflicts. The deliberative account of consensus renders the theory even more vulnerable to criticisms about deep disagreement. Cohen describes ‘rationally motivated consensus’ as the aim of ideal deliberation in which participants find reasons persuasive to all (Cohen 2003: 347). Habermas (1996) also considers consensus as the ideal deliberative outcome, as it indicates the success of deliberation in generating intersubjective understanding. Many critics of deliberation find consensus an objectionable outcome, for it is both impossible and undesirable. How can consensus be reached when deliberating with a fundamentalist—someone whose personal biography and political identity are tied to an obstinate view of the world? As Alison Kadlec and Will Friedman put it, viewing consensus ‘as the goal and terminus of deliberation … naively yet quite dangerously implies that there are no irreducible conflicts of interest at work in any given issue of common concern’ (Kadlec and Friedman 2007: 13). For this reason, agonistic democrats prefer to keep political contestations going, recognising the fact of pluralism. This form of contestatory action has its own normative criteria, such as a commitment to fight but not obliterate the other side. Conflict, not consensus, is the heart of the political (Mouffe 2000). Moreover, deliberative theorists remain silent on the prospects of the powerful conceding power. Deliberative democracy is founded on the assumption that armed with good reasons, the powerless stand a chance of persuading the powerful to relinquish their privileges. But people with power are often unwilling to give 40 N. CURATO ET AL. up their power. This is the reason why minority groups often resort to confrontational forms of political action—from occupations to revolutions—to grab power from those who refuse to give them up. Reason-giving only works when there is willingness to listen, but why would one pay attention to those who seek to undermine one’s status? There are several ways in which deliberative democrats respond to these critiques. The first is to argue that it is in fact perfectly possible for deliberation to be plural, not consensual. ‘The ideal of consensus has long been rejected by most deliberative democrats’, Dryzek argues, ‘even those sympathetic to the Habermasian tradition where consensus once played a central role in the counterfactual standard of the ideal speech situation.’ The trouble, he continues, is that ‘opponents have not always noticed’ (Dryzek 2001: 661). Contemporary deliberative theory recognises that some conflicts take more time to resolve, while others are best left unresolved, albeit managed. For Niemeyer and Dryzek (2007), meta-consensus is an ideal outcome of deliberation, where participants recognise the range of legitimate preferences without necessarily reaching consensus. Mansbridge (2010), on the other hand, introduces four ‘noncoercive’ forms of communicative agreement: a. Convergence or deliberations where participants agree on the same outcome for the same reasons, although these deliberations started with no significant conflicts of value or interest. b. Incompletely theorised agreements where participants concur with a single outcome for different reasons. Deliberations begin in this context with different conceptions of the common good. c. Integrative negotiation where, similar to incompletely theorised agreements, participants agree on the same outcome for different reasons. The starting point, however, is differences in self-interest. d. Fully cooperative distributive negotiation where participants end up giving up a part of what they want in order to reach agreement. Niemeyer and Dryzek’s and Mansbridge’s theoretical interventions, amongst others, illustrate deliberative democracy’s compatibility with pluralistic society, marked by competing interests and value commitments. NORMS 41 As deliberative democrats move towards this direction, one caveat is worth noting. Deliberative democrats may celebrate pluralism but must be careful not to rely too much on the comforts afforded by pluralism. Eva Erman makes an important intervention in this regard. She argues that conceding incommensurable conflict may lead to the unintended consequence of ‘mystifying’ the other (Erman 2009: 1057). If little effort is made to collectively ascertain the extent to which conflicts are intractable, a deeper understanding of conflicts, how they emerge, and of what they consist might remain elusive. Erman takes the position that a pluralistic public life cannot start with the presupposition of ‘incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines’. Ethical conflicts, she argues, are not irreconcilable, but can be the subject of deliberation if we invest in institutions that promote cross-cultural dialogue and inter-ethical understanding. In the next chapter on deliberative forums, we provide empirical examples of how this is manifest in practice, particularly in the form of mini-publics implemented in deeply divided societies. 3. ‘There is no particular reason to think deliberation will bring people together, even if they hope it will and want it to’ (Shapiro 1999: 32). The final practical objection to deliberative democracy relates to its assumption of citizens as agents of deliberation. That citizens are rational beings capable of processing complex information and exchanging reasons is a view that has been the target of critique of late. From Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’ (2016) Democracy for Realists, which provides empirical evidence challenging the ‘folk theory’ of democracy about thoughtful citizens who can make decisions, to Jason Brennan’s (2016) Against Democracy, which makes a case for epistocracy—the rule of the knowledgeable— arguments that put down the role of ordinary citizens as capable of making rational choices seem to be increasingly trendy. Brennan’s work is particularly intriguing, for he devotes an entire chapter on how ‘political participation corrupts’ (Brennan 2016: 54–73). Through a selective reading of empirical literature, Brennan makes a list of deliberative democracy’s failures to generate positive outcomes. He concludes that ‘people are too hooliganish to deliberate properly and that deliberation makes them more hooliganish’ (Brennan 2016: 66; emphasis in the original). He notes the increasing gap between what citizens ought to do in deliberation and what 42 N. CURATO ET AL. they in fact did, which, to him, suggests that citizens become more defective moral beings than they were before they took part in deliberation. There are several ways for deliberative democrats to respond to this critique. One is an empirical route, which is to demonstrate the methodological flaws of Brennan’s unsystematic inventory of deliberative democracy’s failings. The next chapter on forums provides empirical evidence of deliberative democracy’s achievements in various contexts, while also recognising aspects where empirical practice can indeed do better. A theoretical response to Brennan’s argument, on the other hand, takes a systemic view of deliberative citizenship. Deliberative democrats have recognised the demanding criteria for deliberative citizenship. While it is desirable that individuals take a deliberative stance when faced with differences of opinion, it is also recognised that citizens cannot simultaneously perform well in roles of justification, reflection, and respect. A lot of this depends on background conditions that prime participants to behave a certain way, as well as their capacities to practise deliberative virtues. Dryzek’s solution to this is to suggest the distribution of deliberative labour within political systems (which we will come back to in more detail in Chap. 4). Drawing on research on parliamentary deliberation and mini-publics, he finds that these forums exhibit ‘very different deliberative virtues and deficiencies’ (Dryzek 2016: 6; also see Pedrini 2014 and Mansbridge et al. 2012). Parliaments show higher levels of justification and lower levels of respect, while the opposite dynamic takes place in mini-publics. It is therefore impossible, if not unfair, to think that all deliberative virtues must be realised by all citizens in all forums. Dryzek cites the example of a jury trial where it is unreasonable to expect lawyers to reflect on the case of the opposing party. Their role is to argue based on evidence and to champion the interest of their clients. Jurors, meanwhile, are tasked to be reflective and decisive. A good deliberative democracy, therefore, is one that is not judged based on the discrete capacities of individual citizens, although it remains important for their deliberative capacities to be harnessed. Instead, different sites of deliberation must be connected, in the same way that the jury system procedurally links the chamber of justification and chamber of reflection. NORMS 43 These responses and developments in deliberative theory demonstrate the field’s dynamic character, especially when addressing issues of power. Theoretical modifications in terms of what we can reasonably expect from deliberative norms in empirical practice have been put in place, which makes normative deliberative theory a relevant and applicable lens that can help us navigate even imperfect speech situations. And yet, deliberative theory faces another set of challenges beyond questions of realpolitik. In the next section, we interrogate deliberative principles using the lens of feminist and cultural studies, to lay bare the kinds of power with which deliberative theory has been inadvertently complicit. Feminist and Cultural Critiques The origins of deliberative democracy can be traced to the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. As feudal powers of the church and nobility declined in eighteenth-century Europe, aristocratic society and bourgeois intellectuals left the private domain and came together as a ‘public’. In Habermas’ account, this public was formed in English coffee houses, French salons, and German dining societies. These served as spaces for deliberation on matters of common concern. Parity was enforced as the better argument meant more than social hierarchies. Discussions were held with tact befitting equals. These ideals were not always realised in earnest, but their desirability had nevertheless become institutionalised (Habermas 1989). While there are many attributes of the bourgeois public sphere worth celebrating, there are also many attributes that warrant critique. A quick glance at paintings of these cafes and salons show images of white, ablebodied elite men, their privileges left unchecked, far from being ‘woke’, to use the twenty-first-century millennial vocabulary. The Habermasian public sphere, as Nancy Fraser argues, is hinged on a ‘masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule’ (Fraser 1990: 62). It is a historical shift that did not lead to democratisation but, rather, to a transformation of the character of political domination from a repressive to a hegemonic rule. The Habermasian public sphere renders markers of status inequality invisible. Feminist scholars argue that women of all classes and ethnicities were excluded from participation by virtue of their ascribed status.7 Plebeian men were excluded too for failing to meet the property qualifications. Ethnic minorities were excluded on racial grounds. 44 N. CURATO ET AL. On this account, deliberative theory can be accused of having questionable origins. Valorising the norms of the bourgeois public sphere and its speech styles, decorum, and rationalities associated with a privileged European experience reinforces an exclusionary view of how politics ought to be conducted. These legacies of deliberative theory’s historical origins remain relevant today, whether it is in the form of methodological frameworks that assess ‘discourse quality’ based on Habermasian standards of rationality derived from the bourgeois public sphere, or our implicit notions of the best model for deliberative behaviour. Deliberative theory can respond to these critiques by reorienting the theory’s origins to critical historiographies which focus on the emergence of non-bourgeois public spheres. Another is to learn the lessons from these historiographies when theorising the normative standards by which we assess deliberative practice today. Mary P. Ryan’s work (1992), for example, finds that Habermas not only left women invisible in his account of the public sphere, he also marked its decline at the time when women were beginning to gain political power. While Ryan recognises the normative value of the European public sphere in ‘evok[ing] aspirations for an arena where women can strive, along with men, for empowerment and justice’ (Ryan 1992: 12), she makes a case for the ‘more pluralistic’ decorum of the American public sphere with its rambunctious qualities. Plazas, theatres, and streets served as spaces in nineteenth-century America for women to enact ‘every day and festive citizenship’ and assert their role as civic actors (Ryan 1992: 315). Ryan’s depiction of collective will formation with vigour and passion emphasises the multiplicity of ways in which public spheres are constructed, beyond the European experience of liberalism. Elsa Barkley Brown (1994) extends this analysis in the context of African Americans’ construction of the ‘black public sphere’. Contrary to accounts of secularisation in Europe that gave rise to the public sphere, Brown considers the church to play a foundational role in African Americans’ democratic notions of political discourse. Church buildings served as meeting halls, educational facilities, and venues for social engagements. This was a space occupied by men and women, adults and children, literate and illiterate, ex-slaves and formally free. Speech cultures in the black public sphere were as diverse as its members. ‘Engagement through prayer, the disregard for formal rules for speakers and audience, the engagement from the galleries in the formal legislative sections’ all subverted the bourgeois notion of public discourse.8 NORMS 45 Why do critical historiographies matter for deliberative theory? We find these valuable in that they renegotiate the legacy of Enlightenment ideals in normative theorising. While fields such as global social theory and cultural studies have gained inroads in pluralising the histories of their theoretical constructs, deliberative theory—or comparative political theory more broadly—could do more in anchoring the field’s origins to multiple public spheres that serve as inspiration for theorising what counts as ideal deliberation. There is good reason to think that deliberative theory is headed towards this direction. An increasing number of scholars have started to recognise the role of carnivalesque, playful, militant, and affective forms of speech. These styles are similar to the speech cultures in black public spheres, and they are also attuned to the forms of claim-making in today’s digital age that has opened doors to a multisensory, transnational discursive experience (see Gordon et al. 2017). Increasingly, deliberative theory has also heard voices from scholars from the global south that introduce concepts that sharpen our normative understanding of public deliberation. Emmanuel Ani’s (2013) work on African consensus rationality, for example, introduces Kwasi Wiredu’s work to sharpen the concept of consensus. A Ghanaian philosopher, Wiredu, best known for his work on ‘conceptual decolonisation’ of African systems of thought, conceptualises consensus not as total agreement, but one that presupposes diversity. These developments in deliberative theory, we find, are necessary for the field itself not to be an agent of epistemic injustice and remain complicit with hierarchies of epistemologies in contemporary theorising that is very much weighed by sexist and racist legacies of its past. Without contesting the Western-centric origins of deliberative theory, it remains in the category of knowledge that subjugates rather than celebrates plural forms of historically situated theorising. navigating the ambivalence: a theory of Deliberative Power Thus far, this chapter has discussed how normative deliberative theory conceptualises its relationship with coercive and productive power. Simply put, deliberation seeks to confront and transform coercive power into its productive form, through deliberative citizenship and collective reason-giving. 46 N. CURATO ET AL. Conceptually, coercive power and productive power are at opposite ends of a spectrum. In practice, much of politics takes place in between these two. Transforming coercive power into productive power is a tricky process. Democracy is not the sum of ideal principles, but a product of choices, tensions, and contingencies in political practice. In a world where structural inequalities, intractable conflict, and stubborn differences are the norm, we argue that deliberative power must have a clearer account of its relationship with coercion. We also argue that left unchecked, deliberative power’s quest to promote productive power can lead to illegitimate outcomes. There are no guarantees that deliberative democracy’s attempts for empowerment will not fall prey to malicious political realities, and so it is crucial to get the categories right to make sense of grey areas in deliberative democratisation. We summarise our argument in Table 2.1. The two-by-two table goes beyond the poles of coercive and productive power by introducing the dimension of justification. In our account of noumenal power, it is justification that sets apart the legitimate and illegitimate practice of power. In other words, there is a distinction to be made between (a) power of justification and (b) justification of power. Whereas liberal political theory has focused much of its attention on the justification of power, noumenal power has to do with the power of justification. We introduce four typologies of deliberation’s relationship with coercion to situate the faces of deliberative power in an imperfect world. Brute Force Brute force is the instantiation of illegitimate coercive power. It may take a physical quality, when bodily harm is imposed on a citizen, or a psychological dimension, such as when another person’s agency and freedom are compromised by emotional and cognitive trauma. In both cases, brute force goes against the ethos of deliberative politics. It renders individuals as objects that must be controlled, contrary to the deliberative principle of Table 2.1 Justified Unjustified Deliberation and power Coercive power Productive power Legitimate coercive power Brute force Ideal deliberative outcomes Illegitimate deliberative outcomes NORMS 47 treating citizens as equals who are co-creators of political decisions. In practice, brute force silences the violated; they are robbed of bodily and linguistic integrity (Keane 2004: 38), effectively disempowering them from taking part in political life. Legitimate Coercive Power It is often taken for granted that democracies can only function when states have a legitimate monopoly of force. There can be no democracy when Parliaments are always at threat of terrorist attacks. There can be no democracy when goons stop voters from entering polling precincts. From a functionalist perspective, the armed forces and the police are agents of democratic order, for they secure the basic functioning of political life. On what basis can coercive power be justified in deliberative democratic terms? While it is easy to call out dictators that order the police to fire tear gas and stun grenades to protesters, or big corporations that hire thugs to intimidate labour leaders, the issue gets complicated when states as well as non-state actors exercise coercive power against a threat portrayed to be deserving of violence. Government is a coercive institution. Political theorists in the modern period—Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Kant—sought to justify the coercive institutions of the state. The fact that there is a high level of coercion in government is intuitive enough. If you drive above the speed limit, you will pay a fine; if you do not pay taxes, you might go to jail. The issue is not whether the government can coerce, but whether the coercive power can be justified. There are two main justificatory apparatuses here. The first is the consent view. According to consent theories, the governed must consent to the use of political power to make coercion legitimate. Modern liberal political thinkers theorise what it means to consent to the use of political power differently. Locke, for example, argues that the exercise of political power must be approved by the people by transferring their natural rights (as prescribed by the laws of nature) to the democratic majority (Locke 1988). It is sometimes thought that the consent view is antithetical to deliberative democracy, but as Simone Chambers (2003) points out, deliberative theorists are not against the consent view; they give a more nuanced view, seeing consent as given only under the demanding deliberative conditions. 48 N. CURATO ET AL. The second is the public justification view, which is a subspecies of the consent view. One of the central normative ideals for deliberative democracy is the fundamental belief that any laws or policies must be mutually justifiable to all (see Rawls 1993; Habermas 1996; Bohman 1998; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 2004; Dryzek 2000; Chambers 2003; Thompson 2008; Bohman and Richardson 2009; Dryzek 2010; Chambers 2010; Lafont 2015). Democracy demands that the laws and policies must be acceptable to all citizens whose lives are affected by them. According to some theorists, laws resulting from robust deliberation in which everyone had the chance to participate are justifiable to all those living under them (Cohen 1996; Chambers 2003). There are broadly three questions to this discussion: (1) When is political power appropriately exercised? (2) What are the criteria of acceptability/justifiability? (3) To whom is acceptability/ justifiability granted? Rawls poses and answers the question ‘When is [political] power appropriately exercised?’ thus: Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. (Rawls 1993: 137) Rawls argues in this quote that the necessary condition for the exercise of political power is the acceptability of all citizens as free and equal. He indicates that the second question constitutes only the constitutional essentials. For this reason, Rawls famously argues that the United States Supreme Court is the seat of public reason, where the justices exercise their reason in a way that is publicly acceptable to all. His answer to the third question is free and equal citizens. Citizens are free in the negative sense of having rights and liberties to be protected from the interference of the state. Citizens are equal in the sense that they have the equal opportunity to access primary goods. The boundary of a demos for Rawls is restricted to a nation state. The state can exercise political power within the boundaries of a nation state. Gutmann and Thompson, take the second question further and argue that there are three procedural principles of deliberative democracy, which are reciprocity, accountability, and publicity. Gutmann and Thompson (1996: 54) write: ‘Reciprocity involves making a proportionate return for good received.’ Reciprocity is having the civic virtues NORMS 49 of tolerance to give reasons that all can accept from the standpoint of public reason. Reciprocity is the most important of these procedures because it is from reciprocity that the other two procedural principles are derived. Hence, ‘in deliberative politics, the primary job of reciprocity is to regulate public reason, the terms in which citizens justify to one another their claims regarding all other goods’ (Ibid.: 55). Accountability implies that government representatives (i.e. presidents, elected officials, public servants, and ordinary citizens acting publicly) are accountable for the decisions and actions made on behalf of their constituency. Because each is accountable to all in a deliberative democracy, both government officials and citizens are required to provide publicly justifiable reasons for their decisions. Publicity, lastly, is the condition that the reasons have to be public reasons; that is, reasons that are acceptable to all who are similarly motivated and situated. Gutmann and Thompson argue that publicity of reasons not only ensures reciprocity, but also promotes the moral value of openness in government. In addition to these three procedural principles, Gutmann and Thompson specify three substantive principles of deliberation. There are three regulations of practices—basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity—that govern the content of policies (Ibid.: 12). These three substantive principles are constitutional constraints on acceptable decisions. In Gutmann and Thompson’s words, they are ‘constitutional principles that both inform and constrain the content of what democratic deliberators can legislate’ (Ibid.: 200). Basic liberty, for example, is interpreted, in part, as a negative conception. Basic liberty implies minimal inviolable rights of physical and mental aspects of a person that constrain the limits of a constitutional decision-making. Suppose that deliberation results in an outcome that permits discrimination against a minority group. This is not an acceptable outcome because it violates the basic liberty of the members of a group. The other founder of deliberative democracy, Habermas, answers the three questions differently. Habermas answers the question ‘When is political power appropriately exercised?’ in the following manner: The democratic principle states that only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1996: 110) 50 N. CURATO ET AL. The discursive process of legislation models rational discourse, which is supposed to be public and inclusive, to grant equal communication rights for participants, to require sincerity and to diffuse any kind of force other than the forceless force of the better argument. This communicative structure is expected to create a deliberative space for the mobilization of the best available contributions for the most relevant topics. (Habermas 1999: 3) The acceptability criteria are outlined in the discursive process, which is procedurally fair because it presupposes publicity, inclusivity, sincerity, and equal communication rights. The discourse is also rational; if the discourse is intended to ‘diffuse any kind of force other than the forceless force of the better argument’, then this means that the agreement is reasoned and rational. The rationality of the procedure is a constitutive feature of an idealised discourse. The reasoned public opinion generated in the informal public sphere relates to the formation of will in formal decision-making bodies like the legislature. Legitimate laws derive their authority from the assent of democratic citizens; for it is this ‘force’ of reason that best guards against what would otherwise be the use of coercive force by those in power. Cohen explicitly connects these deliberative ideals with public reason. According to Cohen’s influential formulation, ‘outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals’ (Cohen 1997: 77). Thus legitimacy is a function of satisfying procedural considerations of freedom, equality, and rationality. These procedural considerations are captured by the ideal deliberative procedure, which ‘captures the notion of justification through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens, and serves in turn as a model for deliberative institutions’ (72). Justification (or legitimacy) of laws—that is, what is mutually agreeable to everyone based on reasons that all can accept—depends, in part, on the rational quality of deliberation. Deliberative democrats express the relationship between legitimacy and the quality of deliberation in various ways. Habermas (1996: 110) puts it as follows: ‘The democratic principle states that only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted.’ Mansbridge et al. write that ‘the last several decades have seen growing agreement among political theorists and empirical political scientists that the legitimacy of a democracy depends in NORMS 51 part on the quality of deliberation that informs citizens and their representatives’ (Mansbridge et al. 2012: 1). They all express the basic point that the legitimacy of a democracy depends, in part, on the quality of deliberation (Peter 2010). Summing it up, Cristina Lafont writes: ‘According to the deliberative approach, the quality of deliberation has a direct impact on the legitimacy of deliberative outcomes. Therefore, improving the quality of deliberation is a non-negotiable aim for the realisation of deliberative democracy’ (Lafont 2015: 46). Based on these normative discussions, we offer three criteria by which coercive power can be legitimated in deliberative terms: 1. Reason. ‘Assertions of power and expressions of will’, argue Gutmann and Thompson, ‘though obviously a key part of democratic politics, need to be justified by reason’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 3). Decisions to go to war should not be determined by logrolling or a referendum but must be a product of public deliberation about the ethics and politics of inflicting violence towards others. In the same way that courts can take away the freedom of convicted felons, coercion can be justified if it passes the test of reasons. 2. Accountability. Mansbridge correctly argues that democracies ‘will often need to use coercive power’ to implement decisions ‘no matter how closely the process of decision approached the deliberative ideal’ (Mansbridge 2010: 83). For agreements to have weight, sanctions must be imposed against those who deviate from them. The challenge lies in ensuring that coercive power is not prone to abuse. Its application may be disproportionate to the violation, or it may be an arbitrary decision of political authorities. Systems of accountability ensure that these abuses do not take place, or, when they do, that perpetrators are held to account. Democracies need non-violent mechanisms to publicly check and regulate the police, the military, secret intelligence bodies, and private security contractors, to ensure that there is no surplus of violence (Keane 2010). Demands for accountability may take place in the public sphere, when authorities respond to citizens’ queries about the imposition of force, in ad hoc bodies like Truth Commissions, or formal institutions like courts and parliamentary enquiries. 3. Contestation. The concept of noumenal power, as discussed in the previous chapter, focuses on the meanings associated with coercive power. Military officers deploying a tank to scare protesters may not 52 N. CURATO ET AL. be objectively coercive if protesters stopped fearing physical threats. If coercion or violence does not have an objectively definable meaning, then it is important to ‘always try to understand the motives and context of the violent’ (Keane 2004: 167). Violence can be democratised insofar as citizens ‘denature violence’, interrogate its meanings, and reflect on the extent to which the use of force has inflicted cruelty and suffering towards others. The same can be said with other forms of coercion, such as the exercise of authoritative power. Contestation of coercion may take various forms, whether it is citizens protesting against the end of the Vietnam or Iraq War, women reshaping the discourse on domestic violence, or workers challenging oppressive labour arrangements. Coercive power can take a legitimate status if it is open to these contestations and, as the first criterion suggests, is able to satisfactorily justify its use. Ideal Deliberative Outcomes Implementing deliberative outcomes does require the threat of coercive power, but ideally its exercise is not necessary. Throughout this chapter we narrated how deliberative democracy generates productive power through the process of coming together and collectively solving problems by exchanging views. We argue that these decisions, whether taken up in the parliament, or mini-publics, or corporate board, need to be justified to the broader polity for them to secure legitimacy. We agree with Erman that ‘every actual agreement is impregnated with power’, but it does not follow ‘that all agreements are equally impregnated with power’. It is the process of ‘open-ended critical public deliberation’ that renders some agreements more legitimate than others (Erman 2009: 1055). Illegitimate Deliberative Outcomes It is possible that even the most ideal implementation of deliberative forums can generate illegitimate power if its outcomes are not justified in the broader polity. We develop this argument in the next chapter on forums. For now, it is enough to emphasise that deliberative procedures are not discrete forums but must be meaningfully linked to all affected by the outcome. Otherwise, these same forums can impose their own illegitimate forms of power. NORMS 53 conclusion We have argued that coercive power is inevitable in an imperfect democracy, and so the goal is to minimise coercive power or to justify coercive power deliberatively. The process of justification requires deliberation, in which all citizens have expressed their opinions and viewpoints and were considered in the ‘opinion-making’ stage in the public sphere. The procedural norms of deliberation such as reciprocity, accountability, and publicity contribute to the legitimacy of decisions. Productive power functions to curb coercive power, and this empowers citizens to use their power of justification. This demanding normative principle will not be fully achieved in a world characterised by inequalities of political, economic, and cultural power. We have articulated regulative ideals in this chapter. Regulative ideals are those that regulate an imperfect world; that is, these ideals serve as an approximation of what is possible, so that the imperfect world can be evaluated as such. We believe that these ideals are important. However, given the Humean principle of ‘ought implies can’, or what Habermas (2006) dubs deliberative ideals meeting the ‘sobering is’, what ought to be the case should also be possible in an imperfect world. Yet instead of thus relaxing the standard, we should look to the empirical world to see to what extent the regulative ideals can be satisfied in different ways and different contexts. Because the way deliberative democracy addresses power is not as straightforward as ‘let’s implement the deliberative ideal’, a nuanced and sophisticated look at deliberative practice is crucial. In the next chapters, we turn to a discussion of deliberative forums and systems to shed light on these empirical questions. notes 1. We acknowledge that the power concept in philosophy, political theory, and sociology is multifaceted and varied. We explore primarily how ‘power’ is used and invoked in the deliberative democracy literature, which spans philosophy, political science, and sociology, among other disciplines. Additionally, we use two ‘concepts’ of power rather than ‘faces’ to distinguish our view from the classic debate between Robert Dahl and Bachrach and Baratz. By two ‘concepts’ of power, we are distinguishing between ‘concept’ and ‘conceptions’ of power. There are two concepts of power, coercive and productive, but there might be multiple conceptions 54 N. CURATO ET AL. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. of coercive power and multiple conceptions of productive power. The distinction between ‘concept’ and ‘conception’ comes from Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Rawls writes that it is ‘natural to think of the concept of justice as distinct from the various conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of principles, these different conceptions, have in common’ (Rawls 1971: 5–6). Lukes (2005) discusses this distinction as it is applied to power in chapter 5 of Power: A Radical View. In using two ‘concepts’ of power, we acknowledge the similarities between power operative in the feminist literature between ‘power over’ vs. ‘power to’. We acknowledge that Dryzek (2006) offers a wider classification of power, arguing that there are four types of power relevant to deliberative democracy. Finally, we acknowledge that the concept of power appears in other domains, even in a field like accounting. According to Steve Albrecht et al.’s (2012) discussion of power in fraud examination, power is defined as ‘the probability that a person can carry out his or her own will despite resistance’ (Albrecht et al. 2012: 53). Albrecht et al.’s (2012) conception of power directly appeals to Max Weber’s theory of power. See Weber (1947). Further specification of the Weberian concept of power comes from French and Raven: ‘A’s power over B is determined by (1) A’s ability to provide benefits to B (reward power), (2) A’s ability to punish B if B does not comply with A’s wishes (coercive power), (3) A’s possession of special knowledge or expertise (expert power), (4) A’s legitimate right to prescribe behavior for B (legitimate power), and (5) the extent to which B identified with A (referent power).’ They further argue that ‘it is the perceived power, rather than actual power, that affects the desired outcome in any given situation’ (Albrecht 2012: 54). See French and Raven (1959). Classical liberalism is usually associated with this kind of freedom. Cf. Mill (1861) and Berlin (1952). Classical republicanism is usually associated with this kind of freedom. Cf. Taylor (1972). See Pettit (1997) for this kind of view. Lee Morgenbesser’s (forthcoming) work on ‘sophisticated authoritarianism’ demonstrates how modern dictators keep power by exemplifying virtues of democracy (e.g. accountability, representation, and participation) without making institutional reforms for democratisation. Also, ‘[a] legal order is legitimate to the extent that it equally secures the co-original private and political autonomy of its citizens; at the same time, however, it owes its legitimacy to the forms of communication in which alone this autonomy can express and prove itself’ (400). NORMS 55 7. Mary P. Ryan notes classical republicanism as ‘overtly disdainful of women’ (Ryan 1992: 12); one can only think of Rousseau’s portrayal of salon women as distractions to serious deliberations. 8. Many white observers considered these unorthodox ways of speaking as indications that African Americans continue to be unfit for political life. references Achen, Christopher, and Larry Bartels. 2016. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Albrecht, Steve, Chad Albrecht, Conan Albrecht, and Mark Zimbelman. 2012. Fraud Examination. Mason, OH: Cenage Learning. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2006. The Epistemology of Democracy. Episteme 3: 9–23. Ani, Emmanuel Ifeanyi. 2013. On Traditional African Consensual Rationality. The Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (3): 342–265. Appadurai, Arjun. 2004. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition. In Culture and Public Action, ed. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, 59–84. 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