Introduction

Cultural sociologists and deliberative democrats are both interested in the progressive democratization of society, beyond the simple achievement of constitutional government and elections. Both now worry about democratic decline. They are home to the two most prominent macro-level approaches to democratization in these terms. Both enable analysis across not just the formal institutions of government, but also the larger public sphere. This shared interest and scope notwithstanding, the two approaches have rarely engaged each other. For cultural sociologists, democratization can be understood as inclusion, as marginalized groups are symbolically incorporated into the civil sphere and recognized as equals (Alexander, 2006; Kivisto and Sciortino 2015).Footnote 1 While symbolic inclusion can be advanced incrementally, it is forged most powerfully by social movements that promote a marginalized group’s particularistic claims in universalistic terms. Where claims of this kind are successful, segments of the wider society come to view the group’s exclusion not as the inevitable consequence of the group’s deficits but as a deficit of the polity itself—one demanding correction. Inclusionary episodes thus entail a shift in the socio-cultural self-understanding of a society, where the meaning of civil ideals is enlarged to accommodate new claimants. Cultural sociologists view the symbolic aspects of democratization as primary. To be recognized as equal, marginalized groups must re-represent themselves symbolically, challenging prejudicial representations that justify their exclusion by aligning themselves with enduring civil ideals. Performance, understood in dramaturgical terms, is a key means of achieving this alignment (Alexander, 2004; Hajer 2005). By their public conduct, movement leaders disclose injustice while revealing themselves to be democratic heroes, such that their claims to equal inclusion become hard to resist. One might consider the well-known performances of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King on these terms.

For deliberative democrats, now the most pervasive voice in democratic theory, democratization means a growth in the deliberative capacity of society, whose three dimensions are authentic, inclusive, and consequential deliberation (Dryzek, 2009; Warren, 2017). Authenticity means freedom from domination, strategizing, and deception, such that deliberation can induce reflection upon preferences in a non-coercive fashion, involving communication in terms that others can accept. Inclusion refers to both the presence of different affected individuals and groups (or their representatives) in deliberation, be it in formal institutions or the larger public sphere, and the degree to which they are heard once notionally present.Footnote 2 Consequentiality can be assessed in terms of the impact of deliberative participation on collective outcomes such as public policies, but also on social norms, and on the nature of the relationships between different social groups. We allow that there is more to democratic theory than inclusive deliberation, and will at several junctures point to both lessons for and implications from cultural sociology for alternative approaches, such as republicanism, agonism, pluralism, and formal institutionalism.

While cultural sociologists emphasize the symbolic, deliberative democrats stress the reasonable (while recognizing that reason and emotion can be intertwined; see Neblo, 2020). Indeed, cultural sociologists might point out that in societies characterised by deep and persistent exclusion of certain groups, prejudices and biases are pervasive, such that deliberative inclusion cannot be secured via philosophical fiat or guaranteed by clever institutional design. However, institutional designs may help ameliorate deep conflicts—think of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland—and laws can be passed to solidify and promote the fact of inclusion. Authentic inclusion, to which cultural sociologists are committed, presupposes a foundation of symbolic inclusion, and explaining how this foundation is built is among their key aims.

These two schools have barely communicated with one another, despite what we consider their common and defining concern with democratization. Here we will argue that they can be joined to provide an account of democratization that is more powerful than either can muster in isolation. In this light, democratization entails the co-evolution of culture and reason (and institutions), the elements of which we set out here. As will become clear, culture and reason are not opposites, they are entangled and interdependent with each other (as well as with emotion) (cf. Nussbaum, 2003, Helm, 2001; Jasper, 2018; Neblo, 2020).

It would be easy to characterize the two sides as reflecting a divide between culture and rationality, one dealing in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of particular social contexts, the other in a universalistic rationality that transcends contexts. But such a contrast fails to hold up on closer scrutiny, and may obscure the key differences that do exist. To begin, cultural sociologists are not simple communitarians: they are not guided by whatever characteristics, values, and norms happen to define a particular society. While suspicious of any transcendent standard, leading cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander wants to maintain a normative vantage point grounded upon an immanent solidaristic ideal. For Alexander (2006: 44), the civil sphere is based on a ‘we-ness’ that can foster a universalizing form of socio-political solidarity.

For their part, theorists of deliberative democracy have mostly shed the universalistic and rationalistic traits that some of its adherents (and critics) associated with Habermas and Rawls. Deliberative democrats today rarely insist on rational argumentation as the only valid form of political communication, being instead (conditionally) open to personal stories, performance, and rhetoric (Young, 2002; Sass, 2018). They recognize that emotion and reason are not opposites; and indeed, emotional reactions provide crucial information for deliberative reasoning, while certain emotions (empathy in particular) can broaden the perspectives of deliberators (Neblo, 2020: 924). Deliberative democrats have mostly discarded rational consensus as necessarily the political goal of deliberation (it was only ever seen as essential in a few early stylized statements such as Elster, 1986: 103). And deliberative democratic normative theory has its own contextual historical anchors—for example, in Habermas’s (1989) account of the early bourgeois public sphere.

Rapprochement is facilitated, then, because cultural sociology is not so contextually constrained and deliberative democracy not so transcendent as they might seem at first sight. In addition, both care deeply about the wellbeing of civil society. However, significant differences remain, for they see different things in civil society. Cultural sociologists mostly treat it as one feature of the ‘civil sphere’, which also includes communicative institutions and regulatory institutions of the state. In these terms, civil society hosts binary discourse, the ceaseless process of categorization by which groups symbolically demarcate civil and uncivil conduct and thereby build and break solidaristic ties (Alexander, 2006: 53; 57–62). Deliberative democrats stress the politicized aspects of civil society via the concept of the public sphere, which is oriented toward (but remains separate from) the state, even as it may influence the exercise of state power. Deliberative democracy is today a broad field that encompasses people who put their faith in designed citizens’ forums or conventional institutions of government rather than the larger public sphere. Here we emphasize deliberative democracy as an orientation to the political system as a whole, which as such stresses the macro public sphere rather than micro forums.

This common focus on civil society means that we are concerned here with democratization in a broad sense, as involving the progressive recognition of the political standing and capabilities of social groups– indeed, of all those affected by collective decisions. Where cultural sociology and deliberative democracy forge a rapprochement, their contribution promises to reshape our understanding of societal democratization involving the co-evolution of culture and reason. Co-evolution begins with the constitution (and iterative reconstitution) of the demos, which is essentially performative in the terms established by cultural sociology, and yet these symbolic processes require a deliberative background to unfold in democratically defensible terms. A common normative foundation shared by these schools of thought is found in the idea of moral emotions. We argue that the kind of listening and responsiveness that is central to deliberation requires motivations that are often in short supply. These motivations are fostered by performances that evoke moral emotions. Since moral emotions can also lead people astray, the beliefs and actions they inspire must be subject to scrutiny in deliberative terms, whether by observers or via processes of inclusive deliberation. Once this way of interpreting democratization is established, the synthesis can sharpen a normative stance for assessing the depth of democracy and its capacity to yield justice.

Forming the demos

Democratic theory in general has failed to come up with a convincing way to define the demos in a fashion that is itself democratic. The “people” should rule in democracy, but how do we decide who the people are? The two main responses to this question are the all-affected and all-subjected principles: in the first, all those affected by rule should have a say in it; in the second, all those legally subjected to rule should (likewise) have an equal say in it (see Näström, 2011). But even those fail to explain how the authority that makes the relevant decisions might take shape.Footnote 3 Dahl (1989: 209) suggests that such definition is ‘far more likely to come from political action and conflict, which will often be accompanied by violence or coercion, than from reasoned inferences about from democratic principles and practices.’ Whelan (1983) summarizes what is probably the majority view among democratic theorists that boundaries of a democracy cannot be defined democratically. In this light, most democratic theorists take the demos as given, usually as coterminous with the boundaries of a state, and move on.

This failure may indicate that we should treat defining the demos as an empirical rather than normative question. For example, it could be noted that, historically, many states that eventually democratized were heirs to previous episodes of homogenization of their populations in religious or ethnic terms by state-building elites, often involving genocide, forced conversion, or expulsion of those not in accord with the emerging identity of the state (Rae, 2002; and as Dahl also suggests). Recognizing this paradox casts a shadow on the democratic ideal, suggesting that the preconditions of democratic rule are deeply undemocratic. Civil sphere theory challenges this view. While not denying the historical events that preceded the founding of democratic states, civil sphere theory focuses rather on the constitution of peoples, and reconstructs a process by which a demos can be expanded democratically, a process that we argue is at once symbolic and deliberative. On these terms, the founding of the United States represents a crucial moment in the evolution of the civil sphere. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, with which the American Declaration of Independence begins, is a key performative moment (Honig, 1991: 100–101, discussing Arendt) that establishing the grounds for the legitimacy of the new republic. It is a bold statement that allows for no dissent, though the ‘we’ in the declaration (subsequently validated as ‘We the people’ in the preamble to the constitution) evokes a people that does not yet exist but rather is created by the declaration itself (Honig p. 104, discussing Derrida).

In the terms established by cultural sociology, performative moments of this kind are central to the symbolic evolution of the civil sphere. They do not necessarily arrive out of the blue, and may build on preparatory performative and political work (in the American case, that of the people who became revolutionaries). Nor do they settle the matter once and for all. ‘We the people’ did not include women, slaves, or those without significant property—indeed, ‘the people’ were a minority group. But over time, and via a series of symbolic contests, this ‘people’ became more extensive. Cultural sociologists have attended closely to the symbolic actions that various groups have made as they sought recognition as equals within the civil sphere (and, as agonist democratic theorists might stress, adversaries to be engaged in lively contestation rather than enemies to be defeated). Alexander (2004: 547) emphasizes that these performances succeed where they appeal to values and symbols venerated by their audience and where their audiences see these values and symbols embodied by these actors, such that they identify with the performers and experience cathexis (i.e., the investment of emotional energy in another). When Martin Luther King’s movement is beset with racist violence, his followers sought revenge but King, expounding a Christian ethic and exemplifying civil virtue, counselled peace. As Alexander (2006: 312) argues, King: “insists on the contrast between black civility and white southern anticivility. ‘There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery,’ King affirms, referring to the intimidating tactics of the racist Ku Klux Klan. ‘There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered,’ he predicts. He promises that ‘there will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.’”.

As the wider Civil Rights movement accepted King’s heroic counsel and example, white Americans identified with the movement, whose members they could now accept as moral equals. This instance reveals both rhetoric and performance at work. The rhetoric comes in the form of King’s ethos (revelation of his virtuous character) and in his appeal to the emotional commitment of white Americans to the Constitution and nation. The performance is in demonstrating civility in the face of violent intimidation.

This emphasis on the role of symbolic performance in politics may arouse suspicion among some deliberative democrats. The cases Alexander and others discuss are mostly selected on the dependent variable—African Americans, women and Jews are indeed worthy groups and movements. But might not symbolic performances lead the polity in an antidemocratic direction, or sacrifice breadth of solidarity for the sake of depth (think of white nationalism in the United States); might they not exacerbate exclusion, or worsen divisions based on race or ethnicity? Discourses of democracy and appeals to civil ideals can indeed serve all of these purposes—after all, ‘the people’ is routinely invoked by authoritarian populists (Mounk, 2018). As noted above, democratic theory suffers from indeterminacy in its definition of the demos, which could weaken its defenses against such moves.

Why performative inclusion needs a deliberative background

Given these varied possibilities (including undemocratic and violent ones), how are we to make normative sense of particular performances that seek to reconstitute the demos? From one angle, performances may seem like a form of manipulation. Like propaganda and advertising, they seem to target the emotions of some audience in order to shape their beliefs and actions; as such they appear profoundly undemocratic as they treat their audience members as objects rather than subjects. A last line of defense for such practices may be instrumental, which would involve asking whether a performance served a justifiable end. In fact, such an evaluation of symbolic performance would miss the mark. Indeed, performance can be used to communicate and transparently persuade. Democratic performances engage their audience to open possibilities for reasoned persuasion (anti-democratic performances do just the opposite). Martin Luther King’s advocacy of non-violence alone did not persuade white Americans that African Americans deserved civil rights. Rather, his non-violent performance convinced many of them (not all; he was still reviled by many at the time of his death) that he was virtuous and deserved a fair hearing. In this respect, democratic performances are normative interventions that can activate core values and extend these values in new directions. It is because societies can be morally blind to historically excluded groups, and even if they are formally present fail to listen seriously to their claims, that symbolic performance is necessary. By fostering identification, democratic performances render their target audiences more open to hearing the claims of others who have been marginalized on this basis. The premise here is that an openness towards the claims of disadvantaged groups is not a reliable feature of democratic societies, not least given the prevalence of ignorance, bias, and prejudice and the uncomfortable fact that a non-deliberative psychological stance may be easier to maintain than a deliberative one (Owen and Smith 2015; Smith and DeCoster 2000). In this light, symbolic performances by populist rhetoricians are generally not democratic. Such performances seek not to induce reflection but rather foreclose it; while they aim to bind a people together, they discourage reflection on why they are being bound up.Footnote 4 Populists by definition invoke an authentic people against corrupt elites. But the people so invoked is just one version of the (true) people; and often requires for its emotional appeal the exclusion of other groups (Jews in Orban’s Hungary, non-Whites in Trump’s America), asylum seekers, or immigrants. The corrupt elites for their part rarely include plutocrats, more often they include other members of the society who fail an ideological test.

As noted above, for deliberative democrats, democratization means a growth in the deliberative capacity of society, whose three dimensions are authentic, inclusive, and consequential deliberation. The kinds of performances which cultural sociologists view as the engines of inclusion are dependent for their persuasive power (as well as evaluation in democratic terms) upon a more basic deliberative context, enabled by basic rights and institutions that foster public communication (Alexander, 2006: 69–92). So while civil sphere theory explicitly rejects deliberation, implicitly the theory depends on a deliberative context, which in turn can be facilitated by a constitutional structure. The translation of symbolic performances into law and policy, often necessary for civil inclusion, also depends upon formal institutions that foster deliberation. In this respect, the deliberativeness of the communicative architecture of a society is crucial for the symbolic inclusion of excluded groups. As such, it matters a great deal the extent to which a society’s political system guarantees free speech, its media are (relatively) free of commercial and oligarchic domination, its education system prizes active citizenship, and its welfare provisions enable wide political participation.

During founding moments, a society’s deliberative institutions may be weak; at other times, they may be insufficient— consider the challenges that misinformation poses to democracies today. But formal institutions are complemented by political culture, where deliberative practices foster mutual understanding and collective learning. Indeed, the universal competence to reason collectively, prized by deliberative democrats, is manifested variably across societies. In this light, ‘culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage one another in discourse’ (Sass & Dryzek, 2014: 3). Deliberative cultures are not necessarily (or even often) coterminous with nation-states. They may be the preserve of elite factions; of oppressed classes; of localities; of ethnic groups; of religions; of oppositional movements (think Eastern Europe pre-1989). In the specific case of the American founding, the relevant deliberative culture was arguably that of the anti-colonial elite (“Patriots”), developed after 1764 in the Committees of Correspondence.

Here, it is possible to identify the deliberative potential of particular cultural practices; Sass and Dryzek discuss (among other things) religious interventions in the public sphere in Egypt, and public officials appearing before qat chews in Yemen, that open up possibilities for deliberation in otherwise authoritarian societies. The early bourgeois public sphere (as described in deliberative terms by Habermas (1989) can be seen in retrospect as a wellspring of receptivity to persuasion by deliberative reason and symbolic performance, again in an otherwise inauspicious institutional context dominated by monarchy and theocracy. We might also note the obstacles to persuasion (and so inclusion) posed by a cultural system in which to disagree with someone positioned higher in a finely-differentiated social hierarchy implies challenging the entirety of the social order, as per the Merina in Madagascar, or women in the United States of the 19th century.Footnote 5 Or in noting that settings featuring high levels of social capital might maintain these bonds by ruling particular topics (such as politics) out of acceptable conversation, as Eliasoph (1998) finds in her studies of anti-deliberative group cultures in the suburban United States. The attention deliberative democrats have afforded to questions of culture suggests that the putative gulf between cultural sociology and deliberative democracy is receding. The broader point is that performative inclusions depend upon a deliberative background, but that this background can be formal or informal in character—preferably both.

Why deliberation needs performative inclusion

Deliberative institutions and practices alone do not guarantee that citizens will listen to the claims of marginalized groups. Prominent theorists of deliberative democracy emphasize that deliberation should be reciprocal, which for Gutman and Thompson (2009) means reasoning in terms that can be shared by others, and treating them with respect as equals. The difficulty, however, is that in unequal and divided societies, the claims made by members of different groups are weighed unequally and those made by members of certain groups are widely ignored. In liberal democratic societies, citizens owe reciprocity to each other, receiving each other as moral equals, but obviously this is not always honored. Reasoned appeals made by marginalized groups often struggle to elicit moral concern in the majority. Laws may presume and protect some notion of human equality, but if members of an outsider group are thought as lacking autonomy, as rationally deficient, or as congenitally immoral, arguments that appeal to their moral status are often seen as misplaced. Historically, the greatest barrier to women’s claims being heard in political discourse was the norm precluding women from participating in public life, one fiercely upheld because women were widely represented as dependent, vulnerable, and emotional (Rabinovitch, 2001).

While deliberative democrats can recognize that emotions such as anxiety about an issue can motivate people to deliberate (Neblo, 2020: 925), cultural sociology tackles the question of motivation to listen to and deliberate with specific others more thoroughly, by explaining how symbolic barriers to inclusion are overcome at the societal level and how these processes reinforce liberal and democratic traditions. Above we noted Alexander’s account of Martin Luther King’s commitment to non-violence, even in the face of violent attacks. Numerous moments of this kind can be observed within the Civil Rights movement and, still earlier, in the anti-slavery movement. Perhaps the most iconic of the former was seen in the non-violent resistance of Rosa Parks, as she refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger (Sparks, 1997). That defiant act conveyed profound moral courage exercised in support of a value embedded in the Declaration of Independence. In cultural sociological terms, Parks caused (mainly Northern) white Americans to identify with her (over Southern whites) and to identify the Civil Rights movement with American civil ideals. Parks was not merely (eventually) accepted as a political equal but as integral to America’s story of democracy.

In her study of the anti-slavery movement, Kimberly Smith also draws attention to the relationship between deliberation and performance (though she does not use cultural sociological theory) (Smith, 1998). As for the Civil Rights movement, Smith’s historical research demonstrated how reasonable appeals made on behalf of slaves by the abolition movement repeatedly fell onto deaf ears. As abolitionist newspaper editor Horace Greeley stated:

“Is it in vain that we pile fact upon fact, proof on proof, showing that slavery is a blight and a curse to the States which cherish it? These facts are multitudinous as the leaves of the forest; conclusive as the demonstrations of geometry. Nobody attempts to refute them, but the champions of slavery extension seem determined to persist in ignoring them.” (quoted in Smith, 1998: 358).

Despite abolitionist appeals being framed in the language of the constitution, of equality and rights, of human decency and New Testament ethics, they could not find an audience. Smith argues that because African Americans were held in contempt, white Americans resisted any argument presuming that slavery contradicted a commitment to equality—because African Americans stood outside the moral circle. It was for this reason that abolitionists shifted tactics and, in place of reasonable appeals, promoted the narrative testimony of released slaves. It was by allowing slaves to share their stories directly with audiences, suggests Smith, that a feeling of sympathy could be cultivated among whites, an emotion necessary for overcoming the moral blindness that had long prevented them from caring about the cruelty suffered by slaves. This sympathy in turn facilitated receptivity to reasonable appeals to morality. As Neblo (2020: 926) points out, emotion may need to be called upon to enable recognition of disadvantaged groups when reasoned deliberation has failed to do so.

The experience of identification that is central to theories of symbolic performance depends upon emotional experiences like those described by Smith.Footnote 6 Not sympathy alone but a wide range of moral emotions can play this role, among them anger and outrage, as well as awe and pride, often in combination. When King calls for non-violence, white Americans simultaneously felt awe towards him and outrage towards his attackers. (If King responded with violence, they may have felt ambivalence towards King and his attackers, or may even have written off both groups morally). Casting these relations more broadly, the strength of the emotions we feel towards the suffering of others is an index of their integration within our moral community, i.e., that group of persons to whom we feel morally accountable (Helm, 2001).

There may be some baseline emotional response people can feel towards the suffering of distant strangers who stand well outside of our moral communities; to far away victims of famine, for example, those more fortunate may feel pity and a variety of moral responsibility that takes the form of charity.Footnote 7 The form of responsibility cultural sociology is concerned with, however, is more symmetrical—it comprises the solidaristic ties that bind equals, of exactly the kind prized by civic republican democratic theorists. Civil sphere theory addresses performances that evoke this symmetrical relationship and are thereby civil in character. This idea helps explain how figures such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were able to appeal to white Americans (at least outside the South)—their performances were premised on foundational principles within the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not least their evocations of the universality of equality and freedom. Their performances aimed to persuade white Americans that their core values needed to be reinterpreted and extended to apply to African Americans. To generalize; just as symbolic dehumanization is a precursor to genocide, symbolic equalization is a precursor to democratic inclusion.

The centrality of performance to democratization may not be welcomed by deliberative democrats (or civic republicans), some of whom are suspicious of emotion-laden politics. Habermas, for one, aimed at the reconstruction of democratic politics in the wake of the collective irrationality fueled by emotional identification with Volk and Reich of Nazi Germany (Verovšek 2020). However, many deliberative democrats have since accommodated emotion (including empathy) into their accounts (Morrell, 2010; Neblo, 2020), and they have increasingly seen emotional speech as welcome to the degree it promotes political inclusion. One version of such arguments is that citizens incapable of reasonable speech justifiably resort to emotional displays, among them women, people of color, and the poor (Young, 2002). Theories of cultural performance, however, suggest a different relationship between reason and emotion. It is not that emotional displays are admissible in deliberation due to the weak verbal capability of some groups (as Young implies); the deficit is not found in the speakers (who are often capable of reasonable speech) but rather in their audience, whose members are capable of deliberation but morally disengaged, i.e., unmotivated to respond to appeals made by outsider groups.

But if cultural sociologists have demonstrated the centrality of symbolic and emotional dynamics to societal democratization, their denial of reasoning as an essential component of democratic politics is overhasty, not least given (as we argue) that reasonable deliberation is actually implicit in their theory. For cultural sociologists, audiences evaluate political performances with reference to tacitly understood symbolic dichotomies, which include good/bad, pure/impure, truthful/untruthful, civil/uncivil and, indeed, reasonable/unreasonable. On these terms, democratic performances are not guided by reason itself—their logic is rather one of symbolism, affect and aesthetics. For Alexander, the defining challenge for any political actor (in a democracy) is to demonstrate their alignment with the positive side of these binary oppositions. In counselling peace, Martin Luther King demonstrated his civil character, his control and, indeed, his reasonableness. He thereby drew a clear boundary around his opponents, whose violence, lack of control, and unreasonable outbursts reveal them to be uncivil. While analysis of this kind certainly sheds light on the symbolic conflicts that animate democratic politics, there are risks in any theory of democracy predicated on modes of persuasion that operate behind the backs of citizens.

Cultural sociologists believe emotions are foundational to the creation, preservation and extension of moral community—they are the lifeblood of democratic inclusion. But our moral emotions are not always appropriate, nor the actions they inspire justifiable (Nussbaum, 2003). Further, a single event can give rise to divergent emotional responses. As such, a normative account of political performance cannot (and need not) sideline the crucial role of reflection and deliberation in assessing moral emotions. Politics as performance is surely central to the inclusive dynamics of modern democratic societies, but where aesthetic and emotional experience crowds out reflection and deliberation, citizens are liable to act in contradictory, self-defeating, and unjustifiable ways, not least because the very idea of justification loses all currency (as it does in post-truth politics). In this respect, the symbolic and emotional dimensions of democratic performance may foster moral emotions, but these emotional energies must be weighed and channeled.

To recap: societal democratization involves an interplay of symbols and reasons, performance and deliberation. The founding of any polity, and subsequent inclusions of different groups, involve performances that require some deliberative mediation for persuasion to take effect, but deliberation itself requires moral emotions, which in turn merit deliberative scrutiny.

Sharpening the normative position

We noted above the different notions of democratization held by deliberative democrats and cultural sociologists. Let us now examine the evaluative implications of the interplay of symbols and reasons, with a view to sharpening a normative position for the assessment of the trajectory of democratization.

We can begin by noting that while cultural sociology can go beyond description and explanation to subject history to scrutiny in normative terms, it has relatively weak normative resources of its own to do so. Honneth (2015) argues cultural sociology falls short here because it prioritizes social bonds over a substantive idea of justice, which is seen as useful only to the extent it serves solidarity. Whether or not one accepts all of Honneth’s critique, cultural sociology could certainly do with more clarity in its normative stance. Symbolic inclusion, and the institutional and cultural foundations of deliberation, may not suffice for deep inclusion. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile symbolic inclusion, and equal legal status, with gross economic inequalities and lack of consequential voice in public affairs. As Turner (2008) points out, the inclusion of Jewish and African Americans depended on the social organizations and material resources that these groups could marshal; impoverished citizens lack such organizations and resources, and as such are limited, in a structural sense, from democratic inclusion. For such groups, the ideal of the civil sphere falls short. The scope of inclusion may be broadening—new groups are being identified and drawn into the demos, afforded more rights and recognition. But questions of depth and efficacy cannot be ignored. By treating depth as deliberative authenticity and efficacy as consequentiality for collective outcomes, deliberative democrats are well placed to respond to the normative critiques that cultural sociology has attracted.

On the face of it, cultural sociology sees democratization in terms of broadening (through inclusion), while deliberative democracy sees it mostly in terms of deepening. There is some power in this contrast: consider for example how the two might evaluate the contemporary condition of American democracy. From the perspective of civil sphere theory, American democracy may appear near the peak of its perfection (though now threatened with retreat). After all, the largest categories of marginalized persons have now attained symbolic inclusion, not least women, African Americans, and various ethnic and religious groups. More recently, LGBTQ + groups are also securing inclusion (in part through the realization of marriage equality). Given that the absolute size of each group seeking inclusion has declined with each inclusionary cycle, the hard work might largely be done. (Native Americans are not so easily accommodated in this story, perhaps because they do not seek just seek inclusion in the civil sphere, which has formally been achieved, but also acceptance of their sovereign claims.)

From the perspective of deliberative democracy, the evaluation is less positive. Indeed, the deliberative institutions and practices comprising the public sphere now require urgent defence and perhaps even reconstruction. The growth of social media has been accompanied by informational over-supply, polarized echo-chambers, declining civility, and increased political vulnerability to malign interference, all corrosive to democratic rule. Rising economic inequality only adds to these problems. The more general point here is that deliberative democrats stress that inclusion requires more than recognition and cultural presence; it entails the ability to give equal meaningful voice and to be listened to attentively and reflectively once presence is secured. (Civic republicans would concur.) This implies that inclusion is a matter of degree that can be assessed, and that from a deliberative perspective, there is reason for concern about democratic rule in the established democracies.

But deliberative democrats urgently need to recognize the symbolic dimensions of democratization, just as cultural sociologists need to recognize the reasonable. Increasing the quality of public discourse does not involve replacing the ‘stage of performance’ with an idealized ‘seminar room of discourse’. These contrasting images of democratic action stand in a more nuanced relation. Deliberative democrats may accept that semiotic codes structure public discourse (as cultural sociology has shown), and that much political communication aims to position one’s opponents on the wrong side of symbolic binaries. And yet the quality of political communication can still vary enormously. A political actor can convincingly perform truthfulness, while casting their opponents as untruthful, and yet the question remains as to the validity (or indeed truth) of such claims! Donald Trump seemingly embraces truth too, routinely proclaiming the veracity of his own positions (even establishing ‘Truth Social’ as an alternative to Twitter) while accusing his opponents of lying and peddling fake news. His performances convince many people, while violating minimal standards of communicative integrity.

More generally, there is a crucial difference between democratic performance undertaken in a society inundated with false information as compared to one that is (relatively) truthful. To evoke the Founders of the United States, we can and should aspire to forms of discourse and exchange that “refine and enlarge” public opinion. Of course, contemporary deliberative democrats and cultural sociologists alike seek greater enlargement than the Founding Fathers, who feared an excess of democracy. If enlargement entails bringing more groups and voices into public discourse, refinement surely means enhancing the truthfulness of the voices, and the quality of listening and evaluation within their intended audiences. It is for these reasons that the depth as well as breadth of inclusion should be seen as integral to the democratization of democratic societies.

Sharpening further: justice

We now address what on the face of it is a problem for both cultural sociology and deliberative democracy: the question of justice. Critics such as Honneth (2015: 83) argue that cultural sociology’s normative position becomes ‘hopelessly entangled’ when it tries to navigate the competing demands of justice and solidarity, and indeed risks reducing justice to solidarity. Deliberative democracy for its part can perpetuate the historic division between the political theories of justice and democracy: in prioritizing procedure, critics have long held that democracy offers no guarantee of just outcomes.Footnote 8

Justice for cultural sociology involves the recognition and respect that comes with inclusion of once-marginalized groups, and their ability to establish the terms of their acceptance. Beyond resonating with the standard political theory option of ‘justice as recognition’, this kind of inclusion establishes a thicker conception of moral community, one whose members hold each other to account for their actions, and so think about what justice entails in these actions. Alexander (2006: 13) thus suggests his primary interest is in: “the democratic institutions and beliefs that can sustain justice in our massively complex and highly stratified world. Justice depends on solidarity, on the feeling of being connected to others, of being part of something larger than ourselves, a whole that imposes obligations and allows us to share convictions, feelings, and cognitions, gives us a chance for meaningful participation, and respects our individual personalities even while giving us the feeling that we are all in the same boat.” This particular form of solidarity is a necessary condition of both democratic participation and justice, where justice is understood as a collective undertaking, the scope of which expands, and the contents of which are refined, as it grapples with historical and contemporary injustice via processes of civil repair (Alexander, 2001).

The idea that justice is a collective project shares striking similarities to the deliberative democrat’s idea of justice. For deliberative democrats, multiple reasonable conceptions of justice are typically in play. These might involve rival conceptions of values such as freedom, equality, recognition; differences over what is to be distributed (welfare, opportunities, capabilities); and the principle by which such goods ought to be distributed (equality, sufficiency, priority for the worst of). Inclusive deliberation can assess the claims of plural conceptions of justice (Sen, 2009; Dryzek, 2013). Further, deliberative democracy can empower the agents (including the poor and marginalized) whose participation is necessary to specify what justice means and requires in particular contexts, and to join those agents in an effective system of cooperation. Here, deliberative democrats would welcome cultural sociology’s emphasis on processes of civil repair and extension (by which injustices are overcome), which depend upon excluded groups (and their allies) convincing others of the injustice of their exclusion. Deliberative democrats would add that a group’s overcoming this exclusion is just the first step in its members becoming effective agents who can participate in consequential deliberation about what justice means and requires.

In short: cultural sociology and deliberative democracy both examine the political conditions under which justice may be pursued, even as they resist any full specification of the substance of justice (along the lines of say Rawls’s theory of justice). Justice might be informed by the prescriptions of political philosophers about its substance, which can provide grist for public deliberation, especially if prescriptions can acquire social meaning and be translated into practical proposals. But the combined insights of cultural sociology and deliberative democracy suggest that more important here is the capacity of a society to work collectively and inclusively through specific cases of injustice, draw lessons from them, and then engage in consequential discourse about what should be done to remedy injustice and advance justice. Practical action of this kind should help refine the meaning of justice in particular contexts, especially in clarifying who gets included and how benefits and burdens should be allocated among them.

A hard case: indigenous inclusion as transformation

Our synthesis of cultural sociological and deliberative democratic accounts of democratization has been set out in general terms. In what follows, we hope to demonstrate how attention to the interaction of symbolic and deliberative processes sheds light on the political inclusion of Indigenous Australians; which in turn leads us to re-think some theoretical specifics. While most cultural sociological studies have focused their attention on successful processes of incorporation, we attend here to a process that is far from complete and remains widely resisted—it represents a particular ‘hard case’ because indigenous peoples are among the most excluded communities in liberal democracies. The case becomes harder still because (as we noted earlier in the Native American context) it is not obvious that ‘inclusion’ is even the right term for what is ultimately sought, as opposed to recognition of a sovereignty claim. If our synthesis helps illuminate this hard case, it should also work when applied to more straightforward contexts.

Indigenous Australians comprise more than two hundred nations and language groupings who have inhabited the continent for upwards of 50,000 years. When Australia was colonised by the British, the colonists declared the continent terra nullius—inhabited by humans but not humans of equal legal (or moral) stature—most importantly, humans not capable of owning land (Banner, 2005). Today there are approximately 800,000 Indigenous Australians, comprising around 3% of the Australian population and spread across the country. Their social and political exclusion is extreme. Indigenous Australians have incomes about half the national average, an incarceration rate ten times the national average, and life expectancies more than ten years shorter than other Australians (Australians Together, 2021). Their political exclusion is not now a matter of unequal legal status, as they possess the same legal and political rights afforded all Australians. Although Indigenous Australians have been elected to parliament, their legal responsibility as parliamentarians is to represent their own electorates (which are never majority Indigenous), not to represent Indigenous peoples or causes as such. State-funded Indigenous organizations have waxed and waned over recent decades, their political influence limited as their fate has been controlled by capricious governments sensitive to criticism. In sum, it due to the basic structure of Australia’s political institutions that Indigenous Australians form a permanent and highly marginalized minority in Australia and are thereby ‘constitutionally vulnerable’ since their specific and pressing needs find limited representation (Morris, 2018: 7).

Over the past century and more, government programs have been developed to facilitate different visions of inclusion of Indigenous Australians (Rowley, 1970). Such programs have seldom sought to confer political power to Indigenous people but have rather acted upon them in light of externally derived notions of their interests. At their best these programs have been assimilative and paternalistic; at their worst, they have been genocidal. In the early-mid 20th century, such programs included the forcible removal of mixed-race children from their Indigenous families, passing them to the care and ‘civilization’ of white families. The practice was intended to hasten the inevitable demise of a people thought unfit to survive in the modern world. This cruel current appeared again in 2007, with the ‘Northern Territory Intervention’, which involved coercive federal control (including deployment of troops) of remote communities, deemed necessary to protect Indigenous children from abuse (Altman, 2018).

The Northern Territory intervention drove home the lack of voice Indigenous people have had in the ways they are governed. Indigenous Australians remain in some respects strangers in their own land. There is widespread recognition that their colonial domination and spiritual connection to the land renders them profoundly different from other ethnic groups, and yet this status finds no special recognition in constitutional law. Indigenous groups have long considered what kinds of constitutional reform may afford them both symbolic recognition as well as political power, and might thereby prevent them from being treated as the passive subjects of state intervention. One possibility was to achieve formal acknowledgement within the preamble of the constitution, i.e., as the original peoples of Australia. In refuting terra nullius, this represented a necessary condition for pursuing reconciliation with the settler majority.

The quest for constitutional recognition intensified when a series of dialogues were held in Indigenous communities across the country, beginning in 2016 (Morris, 2018). The following year, representatives from these communities met in a National Constitutional Convention. The symbolism was powerful. The gathering occurred at Uluru, a stunning rock formation that towers over vast desert plains in central Australia, a thousand miles from the nearest Australian city. The Uluru “Statement from the Heart” emerged from this meeting and set out a program for constitutional recognition, reconciliation with settler Australians, and a new political status—a vision for inclusion that enjoyed consensus among Indigenous communities across the country. As such, the Statement described a plan to foster civil repair and political inclusion in three interlinked processes—truth, treaty, voice. The first process would focus on truth-telling, such that the historical and contemporary experiences of Indigenous Australians would be unearthed and communicated with the wider Australian community over a period of years; the second process would see the Australian government enter a treaty recognising the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. Together, these two processes would mark a profound symbolic shift, repositioning Indigenous Australians at the heart of the civil sphere.

The third element of the Uluru Statement is more explicitly deliberative. It would see the voice of Indigenous people drawn into the law-making process in a durable and consequential fashion via a permanent, constitutionally established First Nations ‘Voice to Parliament’. This body would be responsible for assessing all legislation and policy that directly affects Indigenous peoples. Analysis and advice provided by the body would not carry legal bearing—i.e., parliamentarians would not be bound to act on it, and Indigenous Australians would not be afforded a legislative veto. But the advice would carry moral authority and thereby demand from parliament a form of accountability that is deliberative in the sense of requiring sustained justification by government in dialogue with the Voice. The regional consultations, and the Uluru Statement, indicated the profound desire among Indigenous Australians not only to have their interests taken into account, but also for control over the way those interests are formulated and expressed.

To function as intended, the Voice to Parliament requires moral authority, such that parliamentarians feel accountable to the peoples for whom it speaks (Morris, 2018). Building and sustaining moral authority is only possible where a broader process of symbolic inclusion is well advanced, which again indicates the coevolutionary dynamics of cultural meaning and consequential voice. Inclusion, in this respect, involves more than equal rights and freedoms, more than parity of representation within public and cultural life. It involves, as Alexander would emphasize, feelings of equality, understanding, and mutuality. In Australia, this feeling could not emerge via the erasure of difference but rather depends on the cultural recognition of difference, not least those differences wrought of domination and injustice.

The most powerful form of recognition in this setting, however, is treaty-making. It is here that the special status of First Nations people is officially recognized as two peoples enter into a constitutional arrangement that fosters a shared form of sovereignty. The process Indigenous Australians seek to enter, and the principles on which it is based, is not unique in Australian history, for it closely reflects the formation of the country in 1901, when six British colonies joined in a system of shared government, their sovereignties fused but not their autonomy, which is preserved constitutionally.

The Statement from the Heart presents several further lessons for the synthesis of cultural and deliberative theories of democratization. The statement can be interpreted as an attempt to redefine two demoi and the terms of their historical and prospective relationship. The imagery of a single demos is not appropriate in this context, though we can speak of a single polity. In performative terms, this was a statement from the Heart, one delivered from the symbolic heart of Australia. It can be interpreted as the claim of one kind of sovereign entity to another that shares the same physical territory; it was also a deeply felt plea to rectify injustice and thereby enable two peoples to co-exist in greater harmony (hence a single polity). The symbolic performance was accompanied by an argued case for recognition, reconciliation, and a Voice to Parliament, all of which presumed a receptive deliberative context in both institutional and cultural terms. The Statement was not just an appeal to the federal government, but also to the peoples of Australia, as a way to reconstitute an historically troubled relationship.

In 2023 the centre-left Labor government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, signalled its commitment to hold a constitutional referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In the early stages of the referendum campaigning, opinion polls suggested a substantial majority of Australians supported the proposal. Although the level of understanding of what the Voice to Parliament entail was not generally sophisticated, the presumption of support in early polling revealed a cultural readiness to accept the institutional recognition and formal inclusion of Indigenous Australian in the polity. Even where it finds powerful support, however, constitutional change is rarely achieved in Australia due to the conservative bearings of its constitutional architecture. Passage of a constitutional amendment requires a double majority, that is, majority support from all voters, on a national basis, and majority support in a majority of the six States. These rules ensure that almost all referenda in Australia fail (although the last referendum held on Indigenous matters, in 1967, did indeed pass.) Since party allegiances inevitably influence voting at all levels, the success of a referendum in Australia depends on the express support of the nation’s two leading parties.

Because optimism around the referendum was high according to the initial polling the conservative Opposition party (ironically the “Liberal” party) was forced to choose whether to support the referendum (and risk granting a historic political win for the government) or to take a position that contradicted popular opinion. The conservatives chose the latter and quickly rolled out a doubt-based campaign arguing that the purpose and mechanics of the Voice were difficult to understand and that its practical benefit for First Nations Australians would be minimal. The “No” campaign’s slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” had a striking effect on support for the referendum in legitimating ignorance and channeling it in an oppositional direction. The “No” campaign also managed to recruit two prominent Indigenous figures who opposed the Voice, giving the impression that First Nations Australians were divided over the vote. With a turnout of 89.9% of voters, 39.9% supported the Voice nationally with no state securing a majority. Post-referendum polling indicated that a majority of Australians accepted that Indigenous and Torres Straight Islander people suffer from entrenched disadvantage and that government contributes to this disadvantage, and yet they were unpersuaded that the Voice was the best practical response to these problems. Seen in the light of symbolic inclusion, the striking absence of large-scale social and political mobilization around the Voice is notable. Even while the Voice was politically legitimated via an inclusive and deliberative process among First Nations Australians, and despite the apparent receptiveness in the non-Indigenous community to new responses to exclusion and disadvantage, the Opposition could successfully advance the “No” vote because they believed that commitment to this specific proposal was not deep and that a sizeable proportion of voters (especially conservatives) could be persuaded to reject it. While mass mobilization around First Nations issues has occurred many times previously, and is responsible for several of the largest political marches to have occurred in Australia, the case for the Voice was mostly carried by elites. As the theory of symbolic inclusion indicates, the political effects of popular mobilization are most powerful where the scope, scale, and content of mobilization successfully positions its opponents as standing on the wrong side of history and morality.

We have stressed that the readiness to listen to different and unequal others in deliberation necessitates moral motivations whose emotional source is redeemable in inclusive public deliberation. As a rough generalization, this kind of emotional readiness did exist (to a degree) in Australia’s non-Indigenous population and it could be redeemed in deliberative terms through reference to ideas about rectification of past injustice, political equality, and justice as recognition (Morris, 2018). But its emotional opposite also existed– most explicitly in the prejudices of white supremacists, more veiled among conservatives for whom the equality of all Australians indicated no special voice for any minority group, Indigenous or not. Backlash of this kind is not uncommon: think of continued resistance to African-American inclusion among Trump Republicans in the United States (Alexander, 2018).

When it comes to the sharpened normative position that we established earlier, clearly the Uluru Statement confirms formal rights and symbolic recognition, so inclusion as cultural sociology would see it. But it also seeks depth in terms of what we can recognize as deliberative authenticity; indeed ‘from the heart’ itself carries a claim to truthfulness and so authenticity. The meaningful voice and demand for attentive listening that deliberative democrats prize is embodied in the idea of a Voice to Parliament, which is also intended to be consequential in its impact on collective outcomes.

For justice in particular, the Statement from the Heart sought both autonomy in the right to voice and recognition, and solidarity with non-Indigenous Australians in the form of a treaty. These institutional reforms would not end the matter, but rather provide a long-term framework for working through specific cases of injustice and deliberating the practical steps that should be taken in response, thus determining what justice in practice should mean.

The model of civil inclusion being pursued in Australia differs from those in terms of which civil sphere theory was developed; and as we have indicated, ‘inclusion’ does not quite capture all that is at stake in this case. Rather than forging symbolic acceptance within the framework of the state, we see in Australia a more transformative movement—one that seeks to remake the polity. It is through this process that the difference of nations who share a territory and a state is recognised and preserved, this being necessary for their self-determination. It is in this respect that, as we have emphasised, democratization depends upon demoi-transformative processes of symbolic presence, the extension of capable voice to those now more effectively present, and better listening and reflection on all sides.

What does our synthesis capture that cultural sociology or deliberative democracy on their own would miss? Cultural sociology would miss the need for a receptive deliberative context in the non-Indigenous Australian political system, necessary for the three elements of the Uluru Statement to be accepted. The force of that acceptance depends upon not just symbolic recognition and psychological cathexis, but also on establishing durable deliberative relationships for working through the rectification of injustice. The substance of these relationships is specified by what the Statement itself says about truth-telling and the Voice to Parliament, and they can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they allow for the formulation, expression, and communication of interests by Indigenous peoples themselves, as well as accountability of government and public discourse to them.

Deliberative democracy for its part would miss the symbolic aspects of the Statement from the Heart, including its performative expression at the symbolic heart of Australia. The force of the Statement depends upon generalized feelings of equality, understanding, mutuality, and recognition– not just reasoned acceptance– and an emotional readiness to listen to different others on the part of non-Indigenous Australians (though as we have noted, these responses would also need to be redeemed in deliberative interaction). This requirement applies to the civil sphere as a whole, not just in matters pertaining to governance.

The Antipodean sources of the secret ballot and women’s suffrage indicate that democracy sometimes advances from periphery to center (Markoff, 1999). So it may be with the Voice to Parliament. The implications of the movement that backed the Voice, the process of symbolic inclusion from which it arose, and the institutional form it advanced, may extend beyond Australia, touching many states that are home to several nations or peoples, whether settler colonial or otherwise. Ironically, the cultural sociological theory of symbolic inclusion that we have sought to advance here was itself fashioned in a settler colonial society but left the problem of civil repair vis-à-vis the history and ongoing effects of colonization unaddressed (Hammer, 2020). Indeed, the challenge that the history and legacy of colonization presents to enduring narratives of exceptionalism in the United States, compounded by the distinctive nationhood status of American Indigenous peoples, may weaken the civil sphere model of symbolic inclusion, or direct its application to polities other than the one in which it was formed.Footnote 9 What is more, it may be asked whether Indigenous peoples, given their distinctive ways of knowing and being, could ever be heard and represented by political institutions that remain saturated with the cultural particularity of their colonial origins. No decisive judgment can be made here on these expansive questions. Nonetheless, we share the hope of those Indigenous Australians who, in fashioning the Voice, indicated their opposition not only to cultural annihilation but, equally, to cultural separatism. Their words and actions expressed a robust belief that Indigenous and settler Australians might forge a just means of living together, one predicated on articulating a shared understanding of their wretched historical entanglement alongside a deep commitment to their shared fate. Forging this just means of living together may require terms of association and institutions that have not been conceived in Australia or in any settler colonial or otherwise deeply riven society. Elsewhere, this just means of living together may require institutional differentiation and special accommodations to meet the particular needs of peoples whose exclusion and marginalization finds different origins and expression to those of Indigenous Australians. We leave it to another time or for others to consider, in these other contexts, what form such institutions might take to allow inclusive speech and listening and what forms of symbolic inclusion these institutions would require if they are to remake polities and peoples in their own image of justice.

Conclusion

From founding a polity to the democratic pursuit of justice, a synthesis of cultural sociology and deliberative democracy yields a more persuasive account of societal democratization than either can muster on its own. While symbolic inclusion is necessary but not sufficient for democratic inclusion, this concept underwrites a rich understanding of the emotional and symbolic dimensions of processes of discursive will formation, and the source of the moral emotions necessary to feel bound by the democratic process.