Introduction

Democratic theorists, concerned about the quality and legitimacy of voting-based collective decision-making, originated deliberative democratic theory with a contrast between aggregative and deliberative approaches to democracy. Aggregative collective decision-making works by aggregating individual preferences through voting. Deliberative decision-making works through deliberative formation of individual preferences and collective wills (e.g., Young 2000, pp. 18–26; cf. Bächtiger et al. 2018, p. 2). Of course, real world decision-making in democracies often combines both processes, although rarely ideally. Robert’s Rules of Order details procedures for discussion and debate, closing discussion with a vote, and then proceeding to vote on the motion on the table. Parliamentary processes refer bills to committees for discussion, debate, and hearings in advance of final votes. General elections are preceded by campaigns, during which candidates (and sometimes advocates for ballot initiatives) seek to persuade voters. Many democratic innovations, such as deliberative minipublics, use combinations of voting and deliberation to formulate proposals and arrive at recommendations.

The field of deliberative democracy now generally recognizes this co-dependence of deliberation and voting, nicely summed up by Goodin’s phrase, ‘first talk, then vote' (2008, chap. 6). The field now tends to emphasize what deliberation accomplishes for vote-based decisions. With deliberation, voters are more likely to know their interests and values, as well as those of others, in such a way that voting reflects more informed and thoughtful processes. When deliberation precedes voting, the results are more likely to reflect both what individual preferences really are upon consideration (Fishkin 2018), and what a collectivity really wants. Deliberative clarification of interests and preferences can also bring dimensions of conflict to light, placing them on a single spectrum such that vote cycling is not the issue that rational choice theorists claim (Knight and Johnson 1994; Dryzek and List 2003).

ln this paper, we reverse this now common view to ask: In what ways does voting benefit deliberation? To theorize this question, we distinguish deliberation, which is a kind of influence based on the making and receiving of claims, from voting, which involves distributed powers to make decisions. Deliberation and voting are, mostly, orthogonal concepts, and do not trade off in the same conceptual dimension, so we should be asking about complementarities. We discuss seven ways voting can complement and sometimes enhance deliberation. First, voting furnishes deliberation with a feasible and fair closure mechanism. We argue that although consensus is a background ideal to deliberation, it cannot function as the default closure point for actual deliberations. Deliberation that is decision-oriented, whether in a legislature or minipublic, must involve a closure rule, and voting is almost always that rule. Second, the power to vote implies equal recognition and status, both morally and strategically, which is a condition of democratic deliberation. Third, voting politicizes deliberation by injecting the strategic features of politics into deliberation—effectively internalizing conflict into deliberative processes, without which they can become detached from their political environments. Fourth, anticipation of voting may induce authenticity by revealing preferences, as what one says will count. Fifth, voting preserves expressions of dissent, helping to push back against socially induced pressures for consensus. Sixth, voting defines the issues, such that deliberation is focused, and thus more likely to be effective. And, seventh, within contexts where votes are public—as in representative contexts—voting can induce accountability, particularly for a representative’s claims and positions. These potentially deliberative enhancing functions of voting manifest themselves in different ways in different institutions, which we illustrate with a brief discussion of four general types of institutions that combine deliberation and voting. In many of our familiar institutions, deliberation and voting trade off rather than complement one another. It is common to note, for example, that general elections only rarely capture the benefits of deliberation, because talking and voting are often disconnected processes. Nevertheless, elections can perform important deliberative enhancing functions that track some of the seven complementarities outlined above. Legislatures too often fail to produce really good deliberation because representatives have strategic incentives to represent their positions to audiences not included in deliberation or voting. Legislatures can, however, (depending on their design) combine voting and deliberation in more or less complementary ways. Deliberative minipublics, which often involve internal voting, are more promising, because they are designed for complementarity. From the perspective of combining voting and deliberation, the most interesting locations are electorally embedded minipublics which use minipublics to improve referendum or ballot initiative processes. These kinds of analyses, we conclude, should help us to imagine democratic innovations and reforms that underwrite the positive synergies between voting and deliberation.

While we are intent on pointing out ideal complementarities between voting and deliberation, as well as pointing to some cases where voting seems to positively enhance deliberation, we do not deny that there are many cases where voting and deliberation might work against each other or at least on different tracks, as for example when voting is highly strategic. However, the tensions and contrasts between voting as a strategic undertaking and deliberation as a communicative undertaking have been well documented (Johnson 1991; Mackie 2003;  Heath 2003). What has not been theorized are the potential ways in which deliberation might be enhanced by voting—important because, in practice, voting and deliberation are almost always co-present in political processes.

Voting and Deliberation as Concepts

Considered as pure ideal types, voting and deliberation are orthogonal concepts. Voting is a way of making decisions based on distributed bits of power. At the end of the day, votes are counted and depending on which mathematical threshold is employed (such as majority rule, super majority, or plurality), a decision results. Deliberation is a different kind of thing. It is a medium of interaction that generates persuasive influence, as the social consequence of offering and receiving of claims and arguments. It excludes communications which simply convey incentives or threats that are not, in themselves, cognitively persuasive. Persuasive influence in this sense can include bargains and negotiations, but only if they depend upon the commitments of parties to fair procedures and their outcomes—that is, to rules that can themselves be justified by reference to claims to fairness or other normative validity claims (Habermas 1996; Warren and Mansbridge 2015; see also Habermas 1987; Rawls 1993). What is essential to deliberation is that it generates influence through clarification and persuasion, independently of quid pro quos, threats, power dependencies, traditions, or other non-cognitive media of power and influence. For these reasons, decisions that reflect deliberative influence carry with them an intrinsic legitimacy of the kind that reflects freedom, autonomy, and democracy as self-determination.

However important deliberation may be to the legitimacy of a vote-based decision, deliberation is about discovery, clarification, and persuasion, and is not in itself a decision-making procedure (Goodin 2008, p. 108). Political deliberation is often decision-oriented in that it is usually about taking a practical decision, but it is not obviously a decision rule that dictates when a group has closure on a question. Indeed, many of our most important deliberations are about what rules we will choose to take various types of decisions.

Voting is primarily a distribution of powers of decision. Democratic means of empowerment include the rights and opportunities to vote for political representatives in competitive elections, and sometimes to vote directly for policies, as in referendums and town meetings. In addition, democratic means of empowerment include representative oversight and accountability bodies, the rights to speak, to write, and to be heard, rights to information relevant to public matters, rights to associate for the purposes of representation, petition, and protest, as well as due process rights against the state and other powerful bodies. Thus, deliberative democracy is a term for arrangements that combine democratic means of empowerment and decision with deliberative influence, such that it provides the legitimacy to decisions made by democratic means, along with other goods, especially (a) the autonomy for the self that follows from clarification of interests and values, the (b) ethical robustness that follows from inclusions, and (c) epistemological robustness that follows from testing validity claims and incorporating them into procedures.

Now, consider voting as a means of communicative influence. First, as deliberative democrats have long noted, voting by itself is an expression of individual preferences. Voting may not induce reflection, so that preferences may not be considered, and so may not even express or reveal an individual’s interests or values (Fishkin 2018). Second, as deliberative democrats have also emphasized, voting by itself does little in itself to develop public opinion: an aggregation of preferences does not tell us what we ought to do. Third, voting is a poor linkage between public opinion and individual preferences. Voting is not devoid of communication influence: people are certainly revealing something about their preferences. But in itself—separated from deliberation—voting is a low-information signal, so even the old idea in political science that voting ‘reveals preferences' overshoots. We can see this problem in the outcomes of elections: winning candidates often have little information about why they won. They will, typically, claim a mandate: ‘the people have spoken'. But, of course, an aggregation of votes is not equivalent to a high information act such as speech, with its propositional content. Winning candidates usually read a mandate onto an environment with weak information, which often returns to haunt them as they overplay their hand.

What Voting Brings to Deliberative Processes

These considerations suggest that deliberation and voting are orthogonal concepts, with deliberation belonging on the register of communicative influence, and voting on that of decision-making. Generally speaking, we should not be talking about ‘deliberative decision-making' or voters ‘speaking' through the vote. It is better to ask about complementarities: What does deliberation accomplish for voting? And what does voting accomplish for deliberation? As noted above, the first question is now extensively theorized. But the second question has not been (cf. Mackie 2018)—hence the focus of this article. In what follows we discuss seven possible ways that voting can promote deliberation or work in tandem with deliberation for a more democratic outcome. Our discussion is ‘in principle'; of course many real-world cases will fail to live up to these possibilities.

Closure

Voting furnishes an essential closure device for deliberation. It might be thought that rational consensus is the default decision rule for deliberation. The idea here is that, if the essential driving force of deliberation is the persuasiveness of arguments, then the natural end of this sort of activity would be when everyone was persuaded or everyone was in agreement. Furthermore, we would have to add some requirement of authenticity meaning that the default decision rule would be when everyone was genuinely persuaded, and not simply conceding or acquiescing under threat or inducement. Authentic persuasion is one where participants base their agreement on reasons, arguments, and considerations that they find acceptable. This, then, is the idea of a rational consensus or consensus based on reasons.

There has been a great deal of debate within deliberative democracy theory about whether consensus is the proper end or telos of deliberation, with several theorists abandoning the ideal (Martí 2017). We do not wish to revisit that debate. For now, we focus on closure mechanisms. Even theorists who retain consensus as the telos of deliberation understood it as a regulative ideal that does not translate into either a default empirical decision rule or a requirement that all participants take consensus as their subjective goal in real empirical encounters. We want to distinguish consensus as a counterfactual end or telos of deliberation from consensus as a decision rule to conclude deliberation. These are two very different ways that consensus functions in deliberation. The latter is almost never a good idea in real political and deliberative contexts, while the former has an important philosophical counterfactual role to play in explicating ideals of mutual justification.

As a regulative ideal, a full rational consensus cannot be achieved in real-world contexts. Nevertheless, we can and should use that ideal to regulate and guide our actions in this world. The regulative ideal gives us counterfactual standards against which we can evaluate better or worse practices and outcomes (Neblo 2007). Our procedures, as we all know, will never be perfectly inclusive, or exhaustive, or anticipate all dimensions of a question. Furthermore, we are never perfect reasoners, and we often do not even know ourselves if we have agreed or disagreed with a proposal on purely reason-based grounds. These ‘failings' are unavoidable and part of the human condition as we know it. Thus, all deliberations are in principle partial, fallible, corrigible, and so open-ended, suggesting that a rational consensus is always and in principle out of reach. The regulative ideal points to the idea of a process of persuasion but with no possibility of a conclusive end point or moment of closure. Even the counterfactual ideal cannot envisage closure because that would mean a process not open to question, challenge, or correction, and that would violate the ideal itself.

But we do need to take decisions, whether we are participating in a minipublic or engaging in mass democratic politics. Those decisions are often (and for good reasons which we outline below) taken in the form of majority voting. Although this might sound like voting is a sort of second best, a necessary evil because we cannot talk forever, or as much as it would take to get near a consensus, this is not the case. Rather than seeing votes (or any closure mechanism short of consensus) as failures to reach consensus, we should note that, if it is to be political and practical, all deliberation needs to be consciously and reflexively connected to a closure mechanism. This means that closure rules are an open question and must themselves be subject to deliberation and justification. While consensus can function as a closure mechanism, its more important role is to operate as a vanishing point that helps articulate the intuition that, when we engage in arguments, justifications, and reason-giving, we are seeking to persuade others to agree with us, or to find points of agreement. This intention (or counterfactual telos) is definitive of deliberation as a medium of interaction, and essential to its legitimacy. It points less to closure than it does toward perpetual openness. Consensus, far from being a default closure mechanism for deliberation, is one among many closure mechanisms that we can deliberatively choose to employ given the circumstances. Only rarely and in small groups will it be appropriate (Chambers 2021).

Although consensus is usually not the appropriate closure mechanism for deliberative decision-making, does some hope of consensus need to be a subjective goal of participants in order to motivate deliberators to offer reasons and justifications? The argument here would be that individuals need incentives to offer genuine reasons and justifications rather than, say, strategic game playing and deception. That incentive is furnished by the goal of consensus. On this view, individuals must take the achievement of a consensus as their purpose or motivation in order to engage in reason-giving. This seems to us neither true at the face-to-face level nor at the systems level. Deliberative minipublics, for example, often end in votes. That closure mechanism is usually in place from the beginning and not introduced as a fallback when consensus has not materialized. We have strong empirical evidence that participants in deliberative processes engage in genuine reason-giving and justification even knowing that consensus is not the goal (Curato et al. 2021). Furthermore, having consensus as the end of real-world conversations can have perverse anti-deliberative effects by, for example, motivating people to suppress their arguments or go along with the majority even if they do not fully agree. At the system level, citizens who engage, for example, in contestation and disruptive demands to be heard do not appear to be seeking consensus in any immediate sense. But from a systemic point of view, we might think that they are setting out to publicize the unfair conditions of the present political dialogue, and so contributing to deliberation or the possibility of inclusive informed public opinion and will formation.

Deliberative democracy is compatible with and furthered by many different sorts of empirical decision rules and does not privilege consensus, even if the ideal itself points to consensus as a counterfactual telos and ideal of legitimacy. Reverse engineering rational consensus gets us to an idea of mutual justification, which in turn gets us to procedural conditions of the equal inclusion of all voices, circulation of information, and the exchange of reasons. These are the procedural guidelines governing how we ought to come to important political decisions and not rules for how we take those decisions. How we take decisions in the sense of action and will is a question that we must decide. Voting (especially majority rule voting) is the closure mechanism that is usually the most supportive of deliberative democracy.

Political Equality

A second key contribution of voting to deliberative processes is to democratize them through equality. A right to vote, among the other rights that comprise liberal-democratic citizenship, brings with it moral recognition of the personhood, as well as the recognition that the person is, in principle, competent to express and represent their own interests (Dahl 1998, chaps 6–7; Habermas 1996, chap. 3; Mackie 2018, pp. 225–226). The equal right to vote is not dependent upon a specific moral theory: it can claim at least the support of deontological (including its development into discourse ethics) and utilitarian theories, feminist ethics, and even some religious moral theories. While most of the discourse around the right to vote focuses on who should be enfranchised and what kinds of duties it brings, few note that rights also count as reciprocal recognitions (cf. Gutmann and Thompson 2004, pp. 98–110; Dahl 1998). Within democratic contexts, a right to vote signals ex ante that each is recognized as having the moral status of one who is entitled to participate in a decision. The related right to speak, which empowers deliberation, involves a reciprocal moral recognition that each one counts as a speaker who can give and receive justifications. As Rawls puts it, each person should be recognized by every other as a ‘self-originating source of valid claims' (1993, Lecture II.2; Forst 2011). Positive political rights signal that each brings their own perspectives and experiences to the table; and it signals that each is the best advocate of their own interests and values. That is, a right to vote brings with it moral recognition and standing. It is no doubt because of this moral content that proposals for multiple, stratified, or weighted voting—e.g., the kind proposed by Mill (1995[1861], chap. 19)—have nowhere found political traction outside of those few authoritarian regimes that seek meritocratic justification.

Political deliberation depends on voting as a visible affirmation of political equality. We have suggested that legitimacy-conferring deliberative practices stand in an instrumental relationship to various mechanisms of closure and decision. Although specific closure thresholds and rules might be chosen for instrumental reasons, the underlying principle of one person one vote is not of mere instrumental value. The public recognition of political equality enshrined in voting rights is essential as the foundation and prerequisite for the more robust view of full political equality embodied in public processes of opinion and will formation. There can be no democratic persuasion without the recognition of equal status, and that recognition needs to be articulated and protected in constitutional principles of political equality which include free speech, freedom of association, and above all the equal right to vote. The equality of one person one vote is an important foundation of basic political respect, on which to build the more robust political equality envisioned in a well-functioning deliberative system (Chambers 2023, pp. 33–54).

The other key feature of the right to vote with respect to equality is that it brings a kind of equal power, widely recognized in utilitarian theories of democracy going back to Bentham. Of course, rational choice theorists have also long noted that, in mass contexts, the power of the vote is vanishingly small. And republicans likewise tend to view the strategic features of voting with liberal-individualistic justifications, in contrast to common good justifications (Michelman 1989). Within deliberative contexts, however, the vote provides enough power to each participant to motivate others to address them, as their arguments may need an extra vote to carry the day (Mackie 2018). Where equal votes exist, claims are more likely to be addressed to everyone who has decision-making power, helping to ensure that equal moral recognition translates into equal status, which in turn incentivizes participants to address everyone required to make a decision. It might also be the case that decision rules introduce a threshold of justification: once a majority has been persuaded in a majority rule vote, then incentives to address the minority are weakened. But the equal status of the minority does not disappear upon losing a vote and, as we discuss below, their claims and positions still have standing in the public sphere. A minority's voting power can make it difficult to ignore.

Voting equality can also make the difference between deliberative processes that are merely consultative, and those that are democratic. Deliberative processes can be used by elites to gain information, float trial balloons, judge potential opposition to a proposal, or sometimes just ‘democracy wash' decisions that have already been made elsewhere. Although there is an elective affinity between deliberation and democracy, there is nothing inherently democratic about deliberative processes in themselves (He and Warren 2011). However, pairing deliberation with voting powers will shade processes toward democracy, all other things being equal.

Politicization

Following Habermas, deliberative democratic theory often distinguishes between communicative and strategic action: communicative action is distinguished by participants’ intentions to use speech to coordinate actions through the ‘force of the better argument'. Strategic action includes uses of speech that seek goals that are extrinsic to the cooperative search for truth or rightness. But because politics is defined, in part, by conflict, it will almost always include strategic elements: partisans want to win, to further their interests, their cause, their values, or their identity. Politics is that part of social life in which everyday cooperation and coordination breaks down (owing, for example, to latent injustices becoming manifest), or is insufficient to emerging challenges that require the energies, intelligence, investments, or sacrifices of people within a collectivity. So deliberative democracy cannot be modeled directly or exclusively off a pure or ideal picture of the force of the better argument (as might be embodied in a face-to-face minipublic) without depoliticizing issues and undermining its political purposes. Of course, the force of arguments brought to the public sphere by social movements, for example, can be understood as the force of the better argument. But in democracy, we want those arguments to influence public opinion formation, which will in turn translate into public will formation, in large part evidenced and empowered by voting.

One way of ensuring that politics is not externalized from deliberative processes is to distribute to citizens/participants the bits of power represented by votes and ensuring that decisions are the result of votes. One effect is strategic: when everyone has a vote, speakers/deliberators are more likely to keep in mind that winning in the face of conflict requires bringing a sufficient number of participants on board to prevail. Deliberation conditioned by the anticipation of voting is likely to have this kind of strategic valence, which should help to ensure that the political context is not neglected, forgotten, dismissed, or otherwise externalized. That is, voting should help to keep deliberation relevant to the political context at issue. This said, the encompassing context of electoral rules can either encourage or discourage deliberation. As Gerry Mackie notes (2018, pp. 226–229), single member plurality systems tend to reward politicians who take particularistic, often extreme positions. Electoral systems such as ranked choice and proportional representation provide incentives for politicians to negotiate and deliberate, either to capture second-choice votes, or to form majority governments (see also James 2004, chap. 5).

Authenticity

One of the worries within theories of communicative action (Habermas 1987) is that features of politics that load onto strategic interaction will suppress truthfulness, sincerity, or authenticity. Voting can, of course, be strategic. Strategic voting is sometimes taken as the paradigmatic case of inauthenticity. However, the strategic voter who holds her nose and votes for candidate X only because it will mean that candidate Y is blocked is still acting on an authentic preference to exclude candidate Y from power. We are concerned with the way that deliberation might push toward conformity and conversely the way voting might be a mechanism to counter that conformity. Thus, in some circumstances voting can increase the chances that a deliberative process incorporates sincerely held views, and truthfully expresses them, as we noted in our discussion of consensus above. In speech, people often minimize disagreement for the sake of social approval. These effects exist even when participants are formally and substantively equal. Faced with others, it can be difficult to voice perspectives or opinions that go against the group, not least because of disapproval or even social ostracism. As Moore and O’Doherty (2014, p. 309) nicely put it, authentic deliberative processes require the ‘live possibility of refusal'—and voting is one mechanism that enables refusal to be a ‘live possibility'. Voting—secret voting in particular—makes it easier for those who are not persuaded by the direction of a deliberative process, to register their disagreement anonymously, without having to face the social penalties of overt disagreement. This point is especially important when an apparent consensus follows a socially hegemonic consensus, with the weight of disagreement often falling on minorities or those who disagree with dominant positions. Voting can be used to ensure that deliberation does not fall prey to false consensus. This use of voting is actually quite common. Moore and O’Doherty argue that voting within the context of deliberative processes such as juries, deliberative minipublics, and expert committees can be used as a communicative device—for example, in straw polls—to indicate points of agreement and disagreement. The value of voting ‘within deliberation is not principally about making binding decisions at all … Voting serves rather to make explicit the reasons for going along with a deliberative acceptance that has already—and only provisionally—been achieved' (Moore and O’Doherty 2014, p. 312). Secret votes in particular can signal to a group that what may have appeared as movement toward consensus is not, in fact, authentic: that the consensus is a false one, dependent upon the silence of those who disagree; and that there is more deliberative work to be done, and more effort needs to be put into drawing opinions into the conversation. Voting can in this way preserve and deepen the authenticity of deliberation.

Dissent

Short of consensus, majority or super-majority voting decision rules will produce winners and losers. Voting, of course, measures not just the margins of victory for winners, but also the strength of dissent. In a democracy, how dissent is handled is important for both legitimacy and epistemic reasons.

With respect to legitimacy, democracies can only survive if decisions are revisable, so that losers can continue to make their cases, and perhaps win in the next election, the next referendum, the next deliberative process, and so on (Thompson 2004). Without this opportunity, and without the belief that voting systems are free and fair, losers can, and often do, move outside of democratic processes, with tactics that range from obstruction to taking up arms. Within deliberative processes, voting likewise both enables and preserves dissent (Moore and O’Doherty, p. 311; Beatty and Moore 2010, p. 209). Voting allows dissenters to register their disagreements, and to gauge the extent to which others also disagree. They can return to the issues in the next iteration, as long as the process seems fair and transparent, and as long as they believe that they can continue to make their case. Participants who are able to register their dissent are, probably, more likely to view the processes within which they have failed to be legitimate. Democracies generally need this kind of commitment to survive; it is no less so with deliberative processes.

That voting registers and preserves dissent is important for epistemic reasons as well. Within deliberative processes, dissenting votes are almost always attached to articulated positions and rationales. Courts of appeal in common law jurisdictions both vote and issue opinions. The opinions are the results of extensive deliberative processes that occur throughout appeal processes. Each dissenting opinion becomes part of the legal record, available for use not only through appeals processes, but even after a supreme court has made a final decision. Dissenting opinions remain, and often become important when an issue is revisited. The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (now suspended owing to lack of funding), a process that attached a citizens’ jury to some ballot initiatives, provided pros and cons for the voting public. In some versions of the process, the recommendations were accompanied by jury votes, so that voters could then gauge the relative strength of the arguments within the jury (Gastil and Knobloch 2020).

Issue Definition

As deliberative theorists now often emphasize, a key point of deliberation is not consensus, but issue and opinion clarification, so that participants/citizens come to know what they want, and are able to justify their positions to others. As already noted, deliberative processes with interest clarification as a goal can help to overcome vote cycling. But it is also the case that non-decision voting within deliberative processes can help to define the issues, so that the processes can become productive. Moore and O’Doherty (2014) helpfully refer to 'deliberative voting'—voting which functions as communication, because it is linked to deliberative processes, and because counting such votes is a clarification device rather than a way of making decisions. These kinds of voting procedures are familiar in meetings in which a chair, convener, or facilitator will call for a straw vote to ‘get a sense for the room', which in turn helps to keep deliberation close to what participants view as important, as well as close to important cleavages or disagreements. Likewise, deliberative voting can be used to close a topic when issues have been clarified to a majority of participants, and most are ready to move on. Robert’s Rules of Order exemplifies these deliberative functions of voting.

Discursive Accountability

When voting is public—as in legislatures, for example—it can support discursive accountability, that is, confidence by citizens that their representatives say what they mean so that citizens can judge the extent to which their interests and values are being represented by those who hold power (Mackie 2018). This deliberation-supporting function is less important in deliberative contexts that are face-to-face (or virtual equivalents), in which participants are accountable to one another. In these contexts, discursive accountability works directly through the forces of speech. Following Robert Brandom’s speech act pragmatics (2000; see also Habermas 1987, 1996), when social actors make claims, their content is conveyed just insofar as each participant in a conversation can assume that every other participant knows how to continue from the commitments that follow from claims. What enables a speech act to have impact—for speakers to move one another—is that each act brings with it a social fabric of commitments of authorization and responsibility. In making a claim—undertaking a commitment—speakers accept a responsibility to demonstrate their entitlement to that claim. Face-to-face and similar virtual contexts have these characteristics, so that accountability is, as it were, built in. In these contexts, the advantages of secret voting (working against social pressure, alleviating fears of being the only one with a contrary opinion, and so on) outweigh the advantages of public voting, in which the vote expresses a position. Discursive accountability should usually be doing most of the work.

Deliberative bodies that are also representative, however, add another dimension. Bodies such as deliberative minipublics that are constituted by stratified random sampling (or equivalent methods) are, of course, demographically representative of a relevant public. But in these cases, the bodies are accountable to the broader public as a collective entity, The results—typically, a public recommendation or a recommendation to some government entity—usually just carry persuasive influence (Warren 2008). So discursive accountability should usually be sufficient. In the cases of elected deliberative bodies, however, the accountability problem is different. Citizens do not usually interact with elected representatives in ways that allow discursive accountability to work directly, and so must count on public statements. But even then, elected representatives have incentives to speak strategically, and to dissimulate in order to retain voters while (perhaps) doing the bidding of campaign contributors. Indeed, the deliberative functions of legislative bodies are truncated by representative linkages. For these reasons, citizens need additional means for holding representatives to account for the content of their speech. John Stuart Mill’s famous argument for public voting finds its place here, as it provides a key condition for citizens to hold their representatives to account (Mill 1995, chap. X). When representatives must go on record with votes that support what they say, it is likely that they will take care to say what they mean. Of course, public voting is never sufficient, given the many ways in which legislative processes can be gamed so that votes, though public, are not transparent in their meanings. And voting-supported discursive accountability comes with costs: representative linkages can make it difficult for representatives to respond to their colleagues, reducing the internal deliberativeness of representative bodies. The presence of cameras, for example, makes it much more likely that representatives will be addressing their (attentive) constituents rather than one another, probably decreasing chances of compromise-oriented deliberation (Warren and Mansbridge 2014).

Institutions that Combine Voting and Deliberation

These last considerations raise the question: What kinds of institutions best combine voting and deliberation in ways that capitalize on the strengths of each?Footnote 1 And given the centrality of both practices to democracy, how might institutions be reformed in ways that synergistically combine both?

General Elections

Elections for representatives combine deliberation and voting, where deliberations in the run-up to elections involve candidates and parties making their cases to voters, with the winning arguments reflected in the outcomes of votes. Of course, ‘deliberation' in electoral contexts is often of poor quality, owing to the fact that elections are high-stakes strategic contexts, where the giving and receiving of reasons is often swamped by the goal of mobilizing a sufficient number of votes to win. So ‘communications' include images, sound bites, ads targeting cognitive biases, epistemic bubbles supported by social media algorithms, and so on.

Despite the low quality of deliberation in most election campaigns, especially in comparison to deliberation within minipublics, elections and majority rule perform four important functions within the system that complement deliberation. First, if we think of deliberatively structured opinion and will formation as an ongoing, open-ended process through which a political community publicly and collectively hashes out issues and solves problems, then regular voting and elections are important moments to take stock and reflect on the direction of the conversation (Rummens 2012). Elections punctuate the ongoing underlying democratic discourse of a community. In this way, they can contribute to discursive accountability by structuring and demanding regular justifications of platforms and policy proposals. The competitive adversarial structure of elections need not diminish the deliberative potential of these moments. Partisans will disagree about what is the best course of action. It is important that the public gets to see and think about these disagreements. Opposition and dissent are the catalysts of productive public debate just as they are a necessary component of legislative debate. It is not partisanship and competition per se that undermines the deliberative potential of the public sphere (Rosenblum 2010). Rather, it is toxic polarization that turns disagreement into hate and exclusion, and transforms adversaries into enemies. The possibility that elections can positively contribute to the circulation of reasons is severely hampered, perhaps destroyed, without strong and sensible regulation of the public sphere, especially the role of money and disinformation in politics. And because electoral systems vary in the ways they structure deliberative incentives, it we should pay close attention to opportunities for electoral reforms that move polities in more deliberative directions (Mackie 2018, pp. 225–229).

As we noted in our discussion of dissent, elections install the winners in power, and record that there were losers who won votes. General elections are the most visible institutions within democracies that serve this function. No matter how the votes are counted, elections make disagreement, pluralism, and minority views visible in a way that consensus, unanimity, or super majority rules do not (Manin 1987). Elections record that there were reasons and arguments that were persuasive even if they did not win the day. ‘The process [majority voting] … institutionalizes the admission that there were also reasons not to desire the solution finally adopted' (Manin 1987, p. 359). We often need to be reminded of the minority views. Sometimes, even if the minority view did not persuade the majority or gain a plurality, it nevertheless contains views or positions that might be incorporated into majority views in future elections. Note that this defense of a voting rule short of consensus is premised on good deliberation preceding that vote. Indeed, public deliberation in which electoral losers feel like their case was addressed and considered is one of the strongest defenses of various types of majority-rule voting (Schwartzberg 2014). As Stefan Rummens (2012, p. 33) puts it, electoral politics can furnish a stage upon which to display and make visible disagreement. Whereas on an aggregative view of democracy, the important point is that next time around the minority might win the day, in a deliberative view, the visibility of the minority means that those in power need to justify their actions to the minority between elections. Majorities elect governments, but governments ought to govern on behalf of the whole people and therefore their reasons and justifications should address the people in its multiplicity.

A third deliberative function of voting in general elections is to introduce a necessary decisiveness and partial accountability to the process of public debate. Voting without deliberation is difficult to defend. But deliberation without voting is also problematic. In a small meeting, an individual might be able to get the sense of the room after lengthy deliberation and act on that sense without a vote. And political representatives do something similar when they attend to public opinion (ear-to-the-ground, finger-on-the-pulse, etc.), listen to public debate or protest, and shape public policy accordingly. But deliberative legitimacy could not be maintained in a regime in which elites were simply attuned to the interests, concerns, and claims of citizens articulated in a public sphere, but which had never had elections. Regular free and fair elections are a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for sustaining a deliberatively robust democratic system.

Finally, as suggested above, we need to be attentive to relationships between the kinds of electoral systems and the quality of deliberation leading up to an election (James 2004, chap. 5). Electoral systems structure incentives for deliberation in different ways. Theoretically, electoral systems such as proportional representation would be more likely to produce better deliberation, because parties and their candidates must usually anticipate coalition governments, and demonizing opponents may make it less likely that a party will be viewed as a reliable coalition partner. Ranked-choice balloting may also increase the quality of deliberations, as candidates will want as many second- and third-choice votes as possible, and so they are more likely to avoid campaign tactics that alienate voters whose first choice is another candidate. These possible effects have not been sufficiently studied (cf. James 2004). Proposals such as ‘Deliberation Day' (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004) and experiments such as Michael Neblo’s work to directly connect members of Congress with constituents within deliberative contexts are promising, though probably only weakly supported by electoral incentives (Abernathy et al. 2019).

Legislatures should, in principle, be institutions that combine voting and deliberation, though they often fail (depending upon their design) because representatives have strategic incentives to represent their positions to audiences not included in deliberation or voting. This said, as suggested above, voting by elected representatives is particularly important for accountability: votes represent a bottom line, in which representatives go onto the public record, backing what they say with how they vote, which can focus public deliberation, usually in the form of media editorials and advocacy.

Legislatures differ in the extent to which their incentives and cultures support deliberation. Steiner and his colleagues (Steiner et al. 2004) studied four different legislatures—Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US—to gauge their relative levels of deliberativeness. They found that the German and Swiss legislatures were more deliberative than those of the UK and US. The reasons probably have to do with the combinations of distributed powers and proportional representation in Germany, and a culture of doing politics under conditions of weak centralization in Switzerland. It is likely that legislatures in countries with single member plurality electoral systems would be improved by changing to proportional representation, which changes the kinds of incentives legislators bring to their jobs. At the very least, parties in proportional representation systems must anticipate coalition governments, which should result in incentives to engage in good faith deliberative negotiations.

Deliberative Minipublics

Deliberative minipublics will, typically, use voting as part of their deliberative processes, much like juries, and for most of the reasons detailed above. Importantly, like juries, members of deliberative minipublics will have few strategic incentives beyond coming to a recommendation or a decision, depending upon their mandate. Within deliberative minipublics, voting should usually function as ‘deliberative voting', used to get the sense of the room, push back against false consensus, signal disagreements, identify places where more deliberation is necessary, and end discussions (Moore and O’Doherty 2014; Serota and O’Doherty 2022). Majority-rule voting to reach closure is common in deliberative minipublics, especially in the larger Citizens’ Assemblies.

Electorally Embedded Minipublics

However, more complex mixes of voting and deliberation occur in cases where deliberative minipublics are combined with ballot measures—usually ballot initiatives or referendums—thus combining public voting with a focused and representative deliberative process. Cases include the British Columbia and Ontario Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform (Warren and Pearse 2008; Fournier et al. 2011), the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (Gastil and Knobloch 2020), citizens’ assemblies in Ireland on abortion and gay marriage (Farrell and Suiter 2019), as well as some recent processes in Switzerland. In these cases, deliberative minipublics—either the larger, long format citizens’ assembly model, as in the Canadian and Irish cases, or smaller, short format citizens’ juries, as in the Oregon and Swiss cases—precede a ballot measure. In the Canadian cases, citizens’ assemblies were convened to assess provincial electoral systems, and, if the citizens’ assemblies thought the systems should be improved, to formulate a ballot question. In the Oregon and Swiss cases, the ballot questions were already on the table (placed there by citizens’ initiatives), and the task of the citizens’ juries was to learn about the issue, hear from advocates and experts, deliberate, and formulate a recommendation to voters.

Two kinds of results are notable. First, when members of deliberative minipublics know that their results will be judged by broader publics, they tend to view themselves as representing the broader public and being accountable to that public (Warren 2008). This awareness in turn affects both the agenda and the pressures for consensus within the minipublics. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly included a three-month period in which members of the assembly were instructed to return to their ridings and consult with citizens as widely as possible. After learning about electoral systems, the assembly had been leaning toward a mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system. But they heard from citizens that they distrusted parties, and did not want to empower political parties to constitute the party list part of the MMP system used to attain proportional representation. When members understood that an MMP electoral system would be unlikely to pass, the assembly modified another proportional representation system, single transferable vote (STV), so it would be workable in British Columbia. Interestingly, the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly did not have a public consultation period and followed electoral system experts in recommending an MMP system. Whereas the BC referendum produced a 58% ‘yes' vote (which still fell short of the legislatively mandated 60% threshold), the Ontario proposal went down in resounding defeat (around 38% ‘yes')—in part, probably, because Ontario citizens disliked the idea of further empowering political parties just as much as BC citizens.

Second, when members of a minipublic know that their recommendations will be judged by a broader public, it likely increases pressures for a consensus recommendation within the minipublic. This was certainly the case with the British Columbia case in which the last three months were devoted to deliberations and adjustments, with straw poll after straw poll. It is probably the case that the citizens’ assembly was motivated to avoid both a false consensus as well as a split result, knowing that after the assembly and before the referendum members would act as advocates for the recommendations, and each would have to own the results to be effective (Warren and Pearse 2008).

Although research remains somewhat thin, it appears that voters who pay attention to deliberative minipublics like what they see, and are likely to either treat the minipublics as a trusted information proxy that informs their vote, or as an inducement to learn more about the issue (Suiter and Reidy 2020; Warren and Gastil 2015; Warren and Pearse 2008). Much of what passes for ‘deliberation' in campaigns leading up to a vote is treated by citizens with distrust and cynicism—as ‘just politics'. In stark contrast, citizens tend to view the deliberative investments of ‘regular people' as highly credible, probably because the members of deliberative minipublics are not professional politicians and are not running for election, and often, as a group, have no apparent ideological agendas. Seeding publics with deliberative minipublics in advance of voting appears to be one of the most promising ways of combining mass voting with deliberative interventions.

Conclusion

Voting and deliberation belong together, and should not be viewed as competing models, as they were by early formulations of deliberative democracy that contrasted ‘aggregative' and ‘deliberative' democracy. Voting and deliberation are different kinds of processes; democratic institutions and practices should identify the democratic strengths of each, and then seek ways of combining so their strengths are complemented and their weaknesses minimized. Although deliberative democratic theorists have convincingly shown that deliberative processes can improve voting, they (we) rarely ask how voting improves and democratizes deliberation. Here we offer some suggestions. Voting provides rules for closure, enabling deliberation to result in decisions. It can help to ensure equality among deliberators. It can ensure that deliberative processes remain attentive to political issues. It helps to keep expressions of positions and opinions authentic (sincere and truthful). It enables and preserves dissent. Deliberative voting can help to clarify issues, focus discussions, and mark the end-points of topics. Finally, public voting, especially in representative bodies, can improve accountability. In many cases, institutions already combine voting and deliberation, including in general elections, legislatures, juries, and deliberation minipublics. This said, most of the familiar institutions in developed democracies do not combine voting and deliberation in optimal ways. Of the institutions which we survey, deliberative minipublics are the best examples of optimizing the strengths of each kind of process. While deliberative minipublics cannot carry out every political task (Lacelle-Webster and Warren 2021), with respect to voting and deliberation we could make much better use of this democratic innovation. But we should also be pressing for reforms of electoral systems and legislative processes so that voting can improve deliberation, just as we know that deliberation improves voting.