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Justification, critique and deliberative legitimacy: The limits of mini-publics

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

I contend that the popular ‘mini-publics’ approach to implementing deliberation in practice is unable to realize deliberative democracy in a way that fulfills the deliberative democratic standard of legitimacy. Deliberative democratic legitimacy requires citizens to actively claim their right to justification against government authorities, which the capacity of mini-public deliberation to serve authorities sidelines or even undermines. I propose an alternative account of deliberative democracy with an eye specifically to legitimacy: deliberative democracy as a political culture. On this view, it is cultural aspects (the ethos, social norms and self-understandings that shape and constrain political processes), not institutional specificities, that are decisive for deliberation fulfilling its legitimacy ambition. Deliberative democratic theory ought to conceptualize ways of opening up social and political space for widespread citizen-led engagement and critical scrutiny of authorities, rather than striving for the development of institutional short-cuts.

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Notes

  1. Note that, based on this definition of democratic legitimacy, legitimacy may not be the only norm democratic polities would or should be striving for. In particular, while the dimension of deliberative democracy I have outlined deems a certain degree of interrupting, indeed unsettling state authority to be imperative as a basic precondition for the (never fully achieved but temporarily acceptable degree of) legitimacy of this authority, this may simultaneously be undesirable from the perspective of ‘getting things done’, that is, responding to urgent political issues and ensuring a ‘smooth’ running of politics. This poses the question what the right balance ought to be between the norm of legitimacy and other norms such as efficiency or effectiveness of governance; a question which is, however, beyond the scope of this particular article and argument. Here, it suffices to note that in as much as legitimacy ought to be established in democratic polities, it demands critical scrutiny of authority by those subject to it; and where this may be seen to disrupt policymaking in undesirable ways, this opens up the question of the right balance between legitimacy and other norms, rather than implying (based on this reason alone) a need to revise the definition of legitimacy.

  2. Note that this ideal description refers to the overall cultural character of the polity; I am not here making an argument about whether specific instances of deliberation or justification ought to conform to the ideal type of not. Even if specific instances might take, for instance, activist (Young, 2001), partisan (White and Ypi, 2011), non-public (Chambers, 2004), or interested (Mansbridge et al., 2010) forms, they might, as these authors have highlighted, still contribute positively to a deliberative culture overall. However, since my argument is precisely that what matters is the overall cultural character of a society as a whole, considering such questions relating to specific instances of deliberation is beyond the scope of this article.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Nicole Curato, John Dryzek, Fabian Freyenhagen, Bob Goodin, Avia Pasternak and Hugh Ward for valuable comments on previous versions of this article; as well as to all participants at the Australian National University Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance and the Sydney Political Theory Workshop (SPTW) seminars, especially Lyn Carson, Paul Patton and David Schlosberg, for their generous feedback on her presentations. She would also like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Political Theory for their very helpful remarks.

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  1. Keele University, School of Politics, Philosophy, International Relations and Environment, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK

    Marit Böker

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Böker, M. Justification, critique and deliberative legitimacy: The limits of mini-publics. Contemp Polit Theory 16, 19–40 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2016.11

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