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Weber's Dilemma and a Dualist Model of Deliberative and Associational Democracy

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Abstract

If deliberative democracy is to be more than a critique of current practice and achieve the normative goals ascribed to it, its norms must be approximated in practice and combine its two elements, popular deliberation with democratic decision-making. In combining these, we come across a Weberian dilemma between legitimacy and effectiveness. One of the most popular methods for institutionalizing deliberative democracy, which has been suggested, is citizen associations in civil society. However, there has been a lack of precise and detailed discussion about how such a system could link macro deliberations in public spheres with micro and formal decision-making arenas. This paper aims to amend this and offers a dualist model, which ensures that deliberation and decision-making are linked, and an effective balance between the Weberian dilemma is achieved, through the same secondary associations fulfilling both roles. The first part of this strategy focuses on the informal public sphere and its networks and their potential to foster deliberative communication between secondary associations and between these associations and the state that helps transform preferences and set the agenda for decision-making. The second part is mediating forums, organized by quangos, with devolved powers, where representatives from secondary associations assemble to make decisions based upon the norms of deliberative democracy. If deliberative democracy can be approximated in practice then it becomes a more persuasive theory as it means the normative goals attributed to it could actually be achieved, which is why the dualist method is significant.

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Notes

  1. An alternative dualist model is offered by Habermas (1996), but this fails to provide a sufficient link between popular deliberation and decision-making; for a good discussion of these, see Bohman (1996), Leib (2004) and Hendriks (2006).

  2. In the dualist system here, this method would be reduced due to the devolved legislative forums that secondary associations could participate in.

  3. This is obviously a circular argument; however, what it is suggesting is that once an associational democracy has been achieved, the ‘outside initiative model’ of agenda setting will be much more predominant than it is now. The problem remains how to achieve the associational model in the first place, so that this phenomenon can occur. See Elstub (2008) for a more detailed consideration of transition.

  4. Subsidiarity is being used here in its more traditional Catholic sense of territorial and functional devolution (Kohler, 1993, 617), rather than in its current meaning in the EU of giving local bureaucrats the power to make discretionary decisions (Follesdal, 1999).

  5. This is not to say that secondary associations could not influence these decisions, as through participating in informal public spheres they should influence opinion and the agenda at national and transnational level. However, the problems of scale that affect deliberative democracy are most acute at these levels, and they are therefore unlikely to have the opportunity to make final policy decisions.

  6. Pettit (2003) demonstrates through a series of examples that this can occur even when all participant's preferences are internally rational and consistent.

  7. This is a disadvantage in terms of deliberative democracy, because if it is not an ongoing process, factors such as the ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’ do not pertain, to the same extent (see Mackie, 1998, 84–85; Dryzek, 2000, 46).

  8. Nevertheless, the delegate is still an intermediary, as it is inevitable that there is some scope for the delegate to act. Without this, collective decision-making would be impossible, or at least ridiculously time consuming as the delegate would have to continuously go and consult the represented and present them with the details of the debate so far so that they could provide her with a mandate of what to do next (Bobbio, 1987, 10).

  9. A point that Dryzek (2000) accepts, but dismisses as peripheral zones of public policy, which must still not transgress the state imperatives.

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  1. School of Social Sciences, University of West of Scotland, High Street, Paisley, Scotland, PA1 2BE, UK

    Stephen Elstub

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Elstub, S. Weber's Dilemma and a Dualist Model of Deliberative and Associational Democracy. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 169–199 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.2007.21

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