Equality by lot

A favorite narrative of “deliberative democracy” is what may be called the “deliberative transformation”. According to this trope many people emerge from deliberative forums radically transformed. They become more enlightened, more tolerant, and consequently they hold “better” ideas and positions. Importantly, the change in positions is not merely that people who had been consciously uninformed and have not had a firm opinion on a certain matter have become informed and developed positions based on the newly acquired information. Such a change is unsurprising and is a natural occurrence in any process of study and consideration. Rather the phenomenon of “transformation” is that people who had held firm opinions going into the forum emerge from it newly and firmly holding contradictory opinions to those they had held.

In fact, it often appears (and may or may not be stated explicitly) that as far as deliberative democrats are concerned the deliberative transformation is the main objective of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy frees the unenlightened masses from their brutish shackles and allows them to adopt correct ideas whose veracity they were previously unable to perceive in their pre-deliberation situation.

There are various factual questions that may be asked with regard to the deliberative transformation phenomenon. The first is about its existence (or prevalence): do many people in fact change firmly held views as a result of participation in deliberations or is this a fairly rare phenomenon. At least as important are the questions about the nature of this transformation. Are the post-transformation ideas determined by the “deliberation” itself, as the deliberative democrats assert, rather than an artifact of certain parameters of the deliberative setup. Could different setups, different ways to arrange the discussion, different ways to present information, different ways to phrase the topic of discussion, generate different patterns of change in ideas?

Beyond the questions about the existence of deliberative transformation, their frequency and their nature, the potential existence of deliberative transformation also raises an important question about the desirability of such a phenomenon. The deliberative democrats see this (presumed) phenomenon as an unmitigated good. However, it is far from certain that this is the case, even on the (rather dubious) assumptions of the deliberative democrats themselves.

Specifically, a serious problem arises if a deliberative transformation occurs within a decision making-body. When such a transformation occurs, a chasm is opened between the firmly held views of the members of the decision-making body with their newly-enlightened world view, and the firmly held views of those who did not experience deliberation, and who thus remain non-transformed. Some deliberative democrats envision a society in which the entire population is engaged in deliberation and thus could be transformed en-masse. However, the notion that an entire population would busy itself in deliberation that mirrors that of a decision-making body is, at best, utopian (and quite possibly dystopian). Insisting that a democratic society must be organized in this way is in reality no more than a way to postpone democratization to an indefinite far-away future.

In the absence of such a mass-transformation, the non-transformed constitute the vast majority of the population. A transformation of the decision-making body thus results in a chasm between the decision-makers and that vast majority. Under this situation a majority that holds a certain idea may very well find out that decisions by an allotted deliberative body do not reflect this idea since of the majority of members of the decision-making body who initially held the widely-accepted idea a large proportion have come to reject it by the time the decision was made.

If the political system enjoys a high level of trust then the population might see the decisions of the allotted, which are contrary to their expectations, as being due to the allotted being enlightened. Such a view could be bolstered by testimonials in which the allotted who underwent the transformation explain how the deliberation made them change their minds. In such a situation the transformation may not be problematic.

However, unless transformations are rare, or are somehow frequently retrospectively vindicated in one way or another, it seems likely that the population would come to suspect some form of manipulation. It would be quite difficult to disprove such suspicions. If this were the case, the entire sortition-based decision-making system might soon become delegitimized leading to a collapse and a return to some form of mass politics. Thus, far from being a liberating force, the deliberative transformation may very well be a threat to a sortition-based system.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition |