In a previous post I discussed the “deliberative transformation”, a favorite trope within the theory of “deliberative democracy”. I pointed out that whereas the deliberative democrats see this hypothetical phenomenon as an ideal (maybe the central normative goal of their theory, more important than any policy outcomes), such a phenomenon, if it were really a widespread phenomenon as the deliberative democrats imagine, would be a major obstacle to an allotment-based democratic system (which, it is worth mentioning, is the only theoretically well-motivated schema of a democratic system).
This post considers the ideological structure that is associated with the idea of the deliberative transformation.
It may be claimed that the rather obvious, but of course unadmitted, starting point of the deliberative democracy theory, is that the adherents of the theory are concerned by the fact that the mass of citizens often refuse to support certain ideas that are accepted by the adherents as truth. Classically the reaction to the fact that citizens cannot be depended upon to see things as they are seen by an elite group was to assert that government should be left to those who are enlightened enough to see things as they should be seen. However, in the modern democratic age such crude elitism is unacceptable. Thus, the deliberative democrats seek a cure for the popular disorder. According to this view, deliberation is nothing more than the treatment that the deliberative democrats prescribe to the recalcitrant masses. It is the process which will lead the masses out of the Platonic cave and into the dazzling light of rational thought. If applied correctly, this treatment will inevitably, indeed, by definition of correctness, make the masses accept the objective truths, those that will lead them to support the policy choices preferred by the deliberative democrats.
Deliberative democrats would, however, deny all that. They would solemnly proclaim that they do not seek to promote any specific ideas or policy choices, neither their own nor anyone else’s. Rather they aim to enlighten the entire citizenry, including themselves, through the transformative magic of deliberation. They would assert that they would accept as worthy and democratic any decision that a truly deliberative body would produce, and that a body being truly deliberative depends solely on its procedures rather than on achieving pre-determined outcomes. However, even on this account, the implications of the idea that many citizens can be expected to experience deliberative transformations is contradictory to the basic premise of democracy, which is that citizens are reliable, indeed, the most reliable, judges of their own values and interests.
If citizens’ understanding of the world can only be considered politically valid after they have gone through the transformative experience of deliberation then the typical citizen’s understanding of the world in existing society is invalid. In its pre-deliberation state the citizen is likely to misperceive reality around them. They thus cannot be trusted to represent their own values and interests. Again, this is not a simple matter of being consciously uninformed. According to deliberative democrats, the pre-deliberation state is not a situation in which the citizen reserves judgment or makes a consciously tentative judgment which they are quite willing to change as they seek and obtain new information or as they further contemplate the information they have. It is rather a state where the citizen strongly holds ideas that in their post-deliberation, politically-valid state they come to reject.
In terms of citizens’ values and interests, the transformation can be conceived in two ways. It may be that the citizens keep their interests and values intact through the transformation, but having been mistaken in their judgement before the transformation are now able to perceive their implications correctly and able to apply them correctly in decision making. Alternatively, the transformation causes the citizens to experience a significant change in their values and interests. In either case, the pre-deliberation citizen is unable to effectively represent their post-deliberation values and interests – and according to the deliberative democrats it is those post-deliberation values and interests that count as being the citizens’ true values and interests.
Thus, the adoption of the idea that citizens are transformed by deliberation runs directly against the democratic idea of self-representation, as does any idea that involves the notion that most people in society systematically misperceive reality, or misperceive their own values and interests. Such an idea leads directly to the need for an enlightened elite managing society – either as a permanent ruling class, or at least as an interim vanguard that leads the masses to the light, where finally they will meet the vanguard’s standards and win its approval for graduating to self-rule.
Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition |
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Interesting — as Yoram correctly states, deliberative democrats would deny this argument, claiming only to act as facilitators (which brings into play the Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? principle, examined in the recent JoS symposium on governing citizens’ assemblies: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/2026/00000002/00000001
Yoram is right to argue that the ultimate goal of deliberative democracy is the deliberative transformation of the full citizen body (the renewal of the Habermasian public sphere), and some critics might view this as a quixotic or antidemocratic project. The symposium on James Fishkin’s new book, Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? (which calls for a deliberative transformation), will be published in JoS shortly.
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Interesting, Yoram! But the key difference is whether you believe that “most people in society systematically misperceive reality, or misperceive their own values and interests” (a belief you attribute to deliberative democrats), or only that “some people, sometimes, misperceive…” If you believe the former, you’ll be tempted by elitist conclusions, be they technocratic or vanguard party. If you believe the latter, there’s no threat to the democratic ideal. In the end, it’s still individuals making their own call. The question is just whether we want a democratic procedure that has no chance of allowing participants to correct (by themselves!) their false or unjust beliefs, or one that could, perhaps, have this desirable effect. I can see no good reason to prefer the former.
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Pierre-Etienne,
It’s one thing claiming that people sometimes misperceive their own values and interests, but the language of “correcting” false and unjust beliefs involves a shift into epistemic and Rawlsian territory. The traditional case for democracy is simply that the beliefs and preferences of the demos should be reflected in public policy. Sure it would be better if the beliefs were well-founded and the preferences just, but there is a danger of throwing out the (democratic) baby with the bathwater.
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PS it’s interesting to still hear talk about the role of reason in correcting false beliefs. This is what Helene Landemore described in her 2013 book as the “classical” (Cartesian) model, which has been superceded by the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. According to the latter theory the role of reasoning is to persuade one’s peers, so it’s a branch of rhetoric.
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Let me share an example of citizen incompetence that I am familiar with. In America, the average citizen, even educated, does not understand why the World Trade Centers collapsed on 9/11. The average citizen has not bothered to read the publicly available NIST reports.
The average citizen is not an engineer with an understanding in solid mechanics and the behavior of structural collapse. It just so happens I am.
The knowledge needed to understand collapse just takes, time. You just need to learn some more stuff. With infinite stuff to learn, all people don’t learn everything. Very smart scholars and doctors and whoever will get things wrong in my niche because they’re just not specialized in it.
Obviously, the question of why the World Trade Center collapsed has huge implications on politics. It has implications in building codes. It has implications in foreign policy.
For slender structures, a constant worry is “buckling”. Buckling is a kind of structural instability when, given a constant load, the structure will continue to deform more and more. In the context of both towers, according to the NIST reports, all the towers collapsed because of **thermal expansion** of critical columns. They didn’t collapse because steel was melted or softened. When the critical columnns expanded, they were forced to carry more load over their capacity. Then they buckled. Because many buildings are designed differently, the WTC design just so happened to lead to a cascading “progressive collapse”. Collapses do tend to happen near free fall speeds because of the lack of stiffness following buckling.
To me then a huge part of “deliberation” is just citizens bothering to understand policy they have to approve or disapprove. Citizens are not “unenlightened” for not understanding everything under the sun. The elites don’t understand either!
As for an “enlightened elite” ruling over society, there’s a difference when citizens have power over the specialists. For example, a lot of laws in both Europe and the United States are developed by specialist engineers. Even kings have relied on specialists to give them advice on specialized topics. Yet because the king retains sovereign authority, the realm remains a tyranny.
It’s not different with democracy in my opinion. Citizens can and will choose to delegate specialized tasks to experts. Citizens will hire specialists to draft specialized legislation. Kings and corporations do exactly the same.
As far as “values changing”, the primary value that is typically changed is: “Oh, that white/black/gay/poor/rich/etc/male/female person is a lot less of an asshole I thought they were!” Literal closeness breeds real social cohesion.
Another huge advantage of sortition is that sortition enabled the manpower needed to make collective decisions. Oftentimes we hear about overworked legislators who delegate out the understanding to policy to party leaders.
With sortition, you have an amazing power to draw MORE people by lottery to construct new deliberative assemblies whenever you need them. The size of the legislator can expand and contract as needed to handle the policy need!
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Great comment by anonymous above.
And I think it shows up Yoram’s ‘gotcha’ style of argument. The fact is that if you’re thinking about how to improve our democracy there are many things to think about and many trade-offs. If one isn’t trying to ‘steel-man’ those with whom one disagrees, I don’t think you demonstrate much.
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Hi Pierre-Etienne,
> “some people, sometimes, misperceive…”
Sure. Everyone is mistaken occasionally. But if most people are able to represent their own interests and values well most of the time then the situation of people correcting themselves becomes a rare enough phenomenon to be of no great importance.
It can surely be expected that occasionally a significant portion of the decision makers will find that they changed their mind during the deliberation process. It can also be expected that sometimes important issues will be affected by these significant changes of minds. But these situations will be the outliers and will not reflect the way the system routinely behaves.
The fact that the notion of people changing their minds is so significant in the theory of “deliberative democracy” is due to the elitist mindset of its proponents.
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While technically I support what this article is claiming (as I understand it): power should be with the people and the magic of sortition is people can seek their own good. The techniques of deliberation are not the magic.
The way this article is written feels almost oppositional to deliberation, which is a little frustrating. In my experience, everyone I’ve talked to and every sortition advocate I’ve met, thinks there’s a big role for deliberation. I think it’s just so baked into humans “seeking their own good” to deliberate! Were we to convene a sortition assembly and put them in a big room without any facilitation at all, they would likely derive some kind of facilitation for deliberatrion themselves.
I’ve helped moderate LA’s charter reform assemblies and a few other events and been in lots of meetings about designing the process of deliberation. There is a temptation to think that our process design and our moderation are invaluable invaluable. Like anecdotes I hear about juries, I think assemblies themselves would demand deliberation.
It kinda feels like Yoram here is saying Deliberative Democracy people prioritize “thinking/deliberating about your choice”, while he says the essential value is “having a choice”. I’m on Yoram’s side, but just want to point out that most humans, when given a (real) choice, are going to think/deliberate about that choice.
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Anonymous,
> Citizens are not “unenlightened” for not understanding everything under the sun.
Obviously, and thus it is unclear to me what the fact that most people don’t understand structural engineering is aimed to imply.
> Citizens can and will choose to delegate specialized tasks to experts. Citizens will hire specialists to draft specialized legislation.
Again, I consider this obvious. If anyone is going to dispute this it is the deliberative democrats themselves who often imply that unless the “deliberation” process is properly organized by the professionals then the citizens would just make hasty uninformed decisions or would be too clueless to know who to ask for advice.
> As far as “values changing”, the primary value that is typically changed is:
Here is where you finally do stray into defending some aspects of the “deliberative transformation” trope. Although you are not making any assertions regarding the frequency of this transformation or its magnitude, you are asserting that you know the type of transformation that will be happening. And here you are on much thinner ice, both on matters of fact and on matters of the values you are expressing.
Regarding facts: How often do people really change their opinions materially at all (as opposed to filling in some information they did not have, and which they knew they did not have, or as opposed to giving some thought to issues they never gave much thought to before)? Are those changes really of the type that you so confidently assert they are? Would the changes depend on the many details of the deliberative setup? I’d want to see a variety of data before I am willing to accept the rather dogmatic view that people have a natural tendency toward liberalism and universal inclusivity, a tendency that is somehow artificially suppressed in our societies but is unleashed by “deliberation”.
Regarding values: I find the fact that you make your assertions on this matter so confidently to certainly be suspicious and to be an indicator of an unhealthy expectation that under “the right” conditions people will tend to see things as you do.
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Hi Max,
I think we are very much in agreement.
> most humans, when given a (real) choice, are going to think/deliberate about that choice.
I agree. I am all for thinking and deliberation.
What I oppose is the notion, implied or explicit in the deliberative democracy theory, that the main problem with the current system is the degraded state of the population (and a whole host of associated anti-democratic ideas).
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The JoS review symposium on James Fishkin’s Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? is now online. Unfortunately there’s a bug in some of the commentary links, but the claims about “deliberative transformation” that Yoram alludes to are in Jim’s response to the commentaries, see:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/pre-prints/content-impjos8
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the Palisades Recovery Coaliation held a community event a few months ago. one of the Coalition leaders had heard of sortition and civic assemblies just a few weeks prior to their community event. he asked my local sortition organization, PDLA, to provide some guidance and moderate the small groups, so that’s how i got involved.
26 people, two days of deliberation. the deliberation was led by the two leaders from the Coalition. they were not profesisional moderators and mixed advocacy with their moderation. i was dying inside the whole 8 hours of the first day, because i felt so strongly that the Coalition leaders were tampering with the purity of the deliberation. we, from PDLA, gave them feedback, and the second day of the event, there was an improvement.
OK! TO BE FAIR, the Coalition did not call this event a “civic assembly” and only last minute had tried to randomize invitations among the pool of people who had signed up online to participate. and last minute, invited PDLA (4 of us) to come help moderate.
in retrospect, other than taking away speaking time from the participants, i don’t think the personal views of the Coalition leaders had an outsized effect. their opinions were treated about like anyone else’s opinions in the group.
however! the Coalition leadership nearly committed what now might be the biggest sin a moderation team can commit in my book!
the report with the assembly’s recommendation was fundamentally inaccurate! the draft report was emailed out and we were like wait, what? one of the three components of the group’s recommendation was missing (indeed, it was the recommendation to include “citizens’ assemblies” going forward in the Palisades). a bunch of emails were sent back and forth, and we were able to get picture evidence of the whiteboard where the recommendation had been written down with all three components from the event.
after that was settled, i felt better, but then we were told (but never saw) that the one of the Coalition leaders had included a lengthy commentary of their own alongside the final report.
so…in some sense, i’ve come to believe event moderation technique isn’t as important as i once thought, but (and i suppose this is obvious) it is tremendously important that the recommendations be faithfully transmitted!!!
i blogged here https://almostinfinite.substack.com/p/the-miracle-in-the-ashes-of-los-angeles but this was before i had seen the flawed report.
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Max:> the deliberation was led by the two leaders from the Coalition. they were not profesisional moderators and mixed advocacy with their moderation.
OK, the problem I think is that we all (including professional moderators) have our own preferences and biases, and these may not even be conscious. Yoram referenced the view that “people have a natural tendency toward liberalism and universal inclusivity” — a perspective that might be characteristic of the kind of people who are attracted to deliberative democracy. But are Rawlsian values universal, or just the preferences of liberal arts professors during the last quarter of the twentieth century? In his response to Mark Warren’s observation that participants in America in One Room depolarized by moving from Trump to Biden, James Fishkin remarked that Deliberative Polls may well be of interest to “Post-Trump Republicans” (the implication being that 49.8% of voters in 2024 were simply wrong/deluded/brainwashed etc). https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/pre-prints/content-impjos8
I wonder if the move towards AI moderation is partly motivated by impartiality concerns, or whether it’s just a question of cost and scaleability?
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Hi Yoram,
There is a third way we can envision this.
I am a homeowner, and, as such, I know the various needs my home has. If my window is drafty, I am fully aware that it needs replacing. If my dishwasher breaks down, I’m aware I need a new one. If my lightswitch stops operating, I need to fix the wiring. I value a properly functioning home. However, I personally do not know how to replace my windows, I cannot install a new dishwasher, nor re-wire my home. I bring in various other people into my home to do these things for me. I don’t tell them how to do it, I don’t know the proper way to carry it out. Taking care of my home, therefore, is a callabortive project with many different perspectives involved.
People are generally quite knowledgable regarding what their needs are (like my home), but may not be experts on the best way to achieve their needs, nor of the needs of others.
Bringing an electrcian, a plumber, an architect, a roofer, etc into my home to discuss the best way to make reonnovations as a group will produce better outcomes than just making decisions on my own. Simiarly, bringing in different perspectives, trying to create a solution a group, requires some degree of synthethis of all their ideas and perspectives, which allows for greater nuance. It also leads to exposure of different perspectives, allowing for more people views to be taken into account.
It is not their values or interests that they misperceive, people generally understand the things that benefit them and the hurdles they face in their own lives. What deliberation achieves is to combine their own values and interests with that of others, and seek out solutions to carrying out their varying needs and values in a more whole and complete way.
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Jordan’s paper Electoral Lottocracy will be live on JoS shortly.
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The new URL for the Fishkin symposium is https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/2026/00000002/00000002
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But the server is down, will report back when it’s available again.
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Back to https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos click the fast track option. Apologies for all the chopping and changing.
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Hi Jordan,
The homeowner who needs the help of professionals for home maintanance is not being transformed by the experience. As you write – they have a goal in mind and they are quite aware at the outset that they need the help of professionals to achieve this goal. By the end of the project they have their original goal achieved, possibly with some minor unexpected modifications and improvements.
The deliberative transformation notion is about a homeowner who calls in the professionals to fix his electrical switch or his windows and by the end of the project they have become a dedicated naturalist, have had their house razed and the lot turned into a wildlife sanctuary. While this turn of events now makes perfect sense to the former houseowner, their family and friends now see them as unrecognizable and suspect that the professionals have somehow manipulated the houseowner into this new way of thinking for their own nefarious purposes.
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Hi Yoram,
It’s possible that deliberation may indeed be a transformative experience for some who participate, but I don’t see why one should assume that to be the case, or even that it’s a necessary assumption.
As a homeowner, I’m not wholly ignorant on maintenence. When calling in an electrician, I may offer some preferences for how I want things to be done, and the electrician may manage to convince me otherwise. Perhaps when I call in a repairman to fix my homes heating, they will convince me that I, in fact, need a whole new heater, and that a heat-pump would be the best choice for me today.
To change my mind about once decision doesn’t require me to become an entirely new person, nor do I change my underlying values. My understanding of how to best achieve them changes.
When engaging in deliberation in a political context, I am, similarly, presented with new information. We join together to attempt to solve a problem, and attempt to work out how to do that. I will bring my own values and experiences to the table, and they will contribute towards the final outcome in some way. However, I will also be exposed to experiences that I lack knowledge of, and those arguments may convince me. Or, alternatively, they may not. The group dynamics may leave the group, more or less, convinced while individuals may not be wholly commited to the outcome.
What deliberation requires of me, though, is to attempt to convince others of my perspective, while others attempt to convince me. What arguments I find convincing will depend on my values, certainly, as will the rest of the group. Still, having to be convincing is, itself, a different way of thinking than most everyday life. It forces the participants to more strongly consider their own views, why they have them, and to consider the views of others and how to take their view into account in order to convince them of yours.
That process doesn’t necessarily transform you, but it does cause you to, for the context in which you are deliberating, take on a more complete picture than you normally would when talking only to yourself or those who generally agree with you.
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Jordan:> having to be convincing is, itself, a different way of thinking than most everyday life. It forces the participants to more strongly consider their own views
I’m not so sure — the confirmation bias (necessary to persuade others) may also serve to reinforce one’s own prejudices. In his new book, Terry Bouricius notes that ‘once we have expressed an opinion, we develop a psychological investment in it and feel a prideful compulsion to defend it’ (Bouricius, 2026, p. 147). He also notes that a small minority (20%) of people are open to opinion change. If so then those pursuing the deliberative transformation are facing an uphill battle.
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Keith,
This is true, and I’m not suggesting that this process will necessarily change one’s mind. However, it isn’t always necessarily for participants to change their minds for the deliberative process to be successful.
Needing to be convincing to others requires entirely different skills than being convincing to oneself or those who agree with you. To successfully convince others, you first need to attempt to understand their own perspective, why they believe what they do, and then attempt to explain why your own solution addresses their concerns better than their own, or at least, better than they originally thought. In other words, to be convincing others first requires you to understand others.
People who deliberate are also consistently examining the strength of the arguments by others, and people are generally good at evaluating the strength of an argument, particularly from those they disgree with.
What I think will often happen is that people will end up in a position, after deliberating, where they recognize that the strength of the argument from the other side is strong, but, for various psychological reasons that we all experience, are not yet ready to change our mind. We hold onto the belief that while we cannot defeat the argument today, that given enough time we will be able to work out a reason the other side is wrong.
None the less, a person in this state may be more willing to “go along with the group”, as the argument, while not sufficient to convince them that it’s the best option, is sufficient to convince them that they can live with the decision.
What the result is is that the group’s final decision is one that has been scrutinized, and that the group has largely deemed to be the most defensible option, even if not every person truly agrees with it or has changed their mind.
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Jordan:> Needing to be convincing to others requires entirely different skills than being convincing to oneself or those who agree with you
You should have been a teacher of rhetoric, an attorney or a politician! Seriously though, having spent some two decades arguing on this forum, I’ve come to the view that once someone has a strong view on a topic (and, particularly, if they’ve expressed that view either verbally, or in writing), it’s very difficult for them to alter their fundamental perspective. Remember that the argumentative theory of reasoning proposes two distinct cognitive modules: persuading and evaluating. Whilst there is no reason why the two approaches cannot co-exist in a single reasoner, confirmation bias is more likely to infect the evaluation faculty. This is why I’m an advocate for jury, rather than deliberative, democracy.
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Keith: > Remember that the argumentative theory of reasoning proposes two distinct cognitive modules: persuading and evaluating.
This is true, but it’s true even for those deliberating. People are able to evaluate the arguments of those they are speaking to and determine the strength of their argument. This makes it easier for them to strike down weak arguments, and forces them to produce stronger arguments.
Also, remember, the argumentative theory of reasoning also predicts that the strength of argument production depends upon the need to convince others. Convincing people who agree with you requires no effort, and thus, argument production is weak. Arguing against people who disagree with you requires more effort, and argumentat production is stronger.
But further, context matters. When one debates in a forum, or at the dinner table at thanksgiving with the family, there are no consequences or accountability, beyond perhaps some food on the floor. The need to convince others is still relatively low, as the stakes are low.
When there will be actual action tied to your decisions, the stakes are higher, and therefore, the need to convince others also increases. The argumentative theory of reasoning predicts, as such, the strength of argument production should also increase.
So to see greater arguments, we need both variety of views and stakes that require an attempt to convince one another.
But my claim here is that even under these conditions, people may still not change their minds on what outcome they prefer, but they may change their mind on the merits of the other options. This sort of changed view is one you likely won’t really see play out in contexts where a decision doesn’t actually need to be made. So long as people can keep arguing, indefinitely, without the need to make a choice, people will continue to argue in favour of their preferred outcome.
But if a choice needs to be made, people who have done a better job producing convincing arguments will thus convince others of the merits of their view. This may not change their mind on their preferred outcome, but *can* change their minds on what outcomes they may agree to, *in spite* of their preference.
This change, in my opinion (and something I shall be arguing in future papers, once I have spent some time familiarizing myself with more literature) is democratically valuable.
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>So to see greater arguments, we need both variety of views and stakes that require an attempt to convince one another. [This] is democratically valuable.
I think we agree
a) that the variety of views needs (for practical reasons) to be finite and should reflect the preferences of the demos, and that this is best achieved by an electoral procedure.
b) that convincing a large quasi-mandatory jury is effectively the same as convincing everybody.
The question is the optimal way for getting from a) to b). Given your faith in the need for persuasive rhetoric and all the caveats regarding information cascades, confirmation bias etc. I’m not persuaded that intra-group deliberation is reliable. In a law court, nobody cares whether the advocates believe in the guilt or innocence of the defendant — all that matters is their ability to persuade the jury. Or are you suggesting the defence attorney needs to convince the prosecutor that she is wrong?
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A legal trial jury also deliberates, beyond the argument production produced by the advocates. And different members of the jury often come in with their own predisposed biases, before that deliberation begins, as to what the verdict should be.
The argumentative theory of reasoning suggests that the deliberation of the jury is a pretty fundamental process. Jury members may agree with one advocate over another based on their own personal biases, and will use confirmation bias even when listening. However, this exists overtop of their ability to evaluate the strength of arguments from others.
However, it isn’t until the jury members need to convince one another do they work on fully understanding the breadth of the arguments being made.
And studies show that a consensus jury produces jurors who are more satisfied with the outcome than non-consensus jurors, even when they initially disgreed with the consensus. The process of going through deliberation and being convinced of the merits of the arguments, makes justifying that outcome easier, even if that outcome doesnt’ align with your own preference.
The argumentative theory of reasoning encourages deliberation amongst the jury, as that is when they are required to construct the strongest arguments to justify their choice.
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The remit of small trial juries is to reach a unanimous verdict on the facts of the case, hence the need for jury-room deliberation. Large political juries exist to reflect the informed preferences of the target population. The wisdom of crowds (based on the law of large numbers) suggests that personal “biases” will cancel out. There is no need for individual jurors to justify anything to anybody, all they need to do is listen to the arguments and then register their verdict. The search for unanimity in political decision making is a symptom of epistocracy, or (alternatively) a fascist mindset.
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I know my last sentence sounded a tad hyperbolic, but this is a message I received from Nadia Urbinati yesterday:
“I am also very surprised by the vehement hatred of elections. Left and right together against elections. I think this is a dangerous time.”
I think Nadia is referring here to the common ground between lottocrats and populists. The transformation of the populace could deliberative or of a more unsavoury nature, but the search for political consensus is a dangerous one.
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I see the point you are raising, as well as your concern. I’ll start by noting that I’m not arguing in favour of strict unanimity, though I admit that the consensus I favour is, at times, close enough that that’s unlikely to quell your concern. However, let me be clear that my reasoning is not due to a desire for conformity, either towards elitest experts, nor in a fascistic sense. In fact, it’s entirely the opposite.
I strongly favour democracy, including elections. I do not advocate, as you are aware, of removing elections, and I would actually argue against it. My desire is to make elections *more* democratic, for which I believe the current setup actually interferes with. It’s my belief that a true pluralistic democracy would be one in which all elected representatives are free to pursue the needs of their voters, regardless of whether they are a large or a small party. My issue with current electoral systems is that voters either vote for the majority party, or they end up with a representative unable to actively pursue their inerests.
A true, pluralistic democracy, in my opinion, is one in which the population consider government a shared space in which the needs of all citizens are considered equally valid and worth pursuing.
The job of the jury in this context is not to vote in favour of their preference — that’s what elections are for. The job of the jury is to determine how to apply the shared space. Specifically, to listen to the arguments, to deliberate, and then to determine what decisions they can live with. If a jury member believes they cannot live with a decision, either for or against the legislation, they are encouraged to hold their position. A hung jury is an entirely valid outcome that provides it’s own signals for what should come next. However, if they feel as though the arguments by the group are strong enough that they can live with the outcome, then they don’t need to agree or prefer that outcome to go along with it.
This is inline with perspectives like Philip Pettit’s accouting of non-domination. We are not asking everyoen to agree, but we are asking for a greater level of consent. A jury that does not at least attempt some level of consesus is a jury that is free to ignore the arguments from the minority members, and, as a result, minorities remain dominated.
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Thanks for the clarification Jordan. We agree about the need for electoral reform, I just think you are taking the analogy between political and trial juries too far. My preferred model for political juries is the 4th century nomothetai and they have nothing in common with trial juries. In fact, in his new book Terry Bouricius claims that the provenance for the Anglo-American trial jury is the Viking and Norman occupation.
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I do understand. However, I do believe there is more in common between a legal trial and a political trial than it at first appears.
I think, for example, there is, indeed, a great deal of fact to review when examining policy. One can look at how successful a policy has been in other jurisdictions, how similar the jurisdicitions of those successes or failures were, how successful a pilot program has been, etc. One can examine the causual chains of a policy and see if they would work out as theorized. One can examine the factual motivation for the proposed policy. For example, if the government wishes to carry out the reduction of rights because of some criminal wave, one can examine how significant the wave is based on historical data, the nature of the crime, etc. Perhaps the government is overclaiming danger.
I would even argue that a lot of differences of values end up becoming differences of fact. People who deny climate change aren’t in favour of forest fires, famine and drought, but do not believe the evidence supports the fears.
These sorts of questions are, in my opinion, a common element of policy, and a perfect usage for juries.
But I think juries and deliberation can do more than just that. Young speaks about situated knowledge; Experiences that different people have access to that others do not, based on being differently situated. These can be expressed through narratives in a trial. It wouldn’t be just the facts presented that would need to accounted for in the deliberation, but these narratives as well. People would need to provide arguments to justify how the legislation does or doesn’t respond to these narratives and experiences, and the deliberative process is powerful for helping people work through these different perspectives.
The problem is that if my examination of beliefs above is correct, and people may refrain from changing their mind, but are willing to suspend their belief in order to accept a policy that they have come to believe has merit, a simple majority vote robs them of this opportunity to truly express it. If you ask people their preference, they will share it, and if you believe that people in general are unlikely to change their views, then why bother holding the trial at all? The views beforehand are likely to mirror those after. While you point out that people are better at evaluating the strength of the arguments of others, do note that this does not mean they are necessarily convinced by the stronger argument. I once went to a theology debate between an athiest and a Christian, and I believed the Christian produced stronger arguments in that debate, yet I did not leave a Christian. Those who favour one side but feel the other argued better are unlikely to change their mind based on a better performance.
However, if I’m right in believing that despite remaining unconvinced, a person may be willing to set aside their preference if they can be convinced an argument has *merit*, then this allows deeply held convictions from a minority the opportunity to convince weakly held preferences from a majority, something that is lost entirely with a simple majority vote.
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To respond to a different point regarding the cancelling of biases with a large N, this only works if we are taking an average of some sort. The law of large numbers tells us that as a sample size gets large enough, it’s average approaches that of the actual value from which it’s a sample of. The wisdom of the crowd tends to show that a lot of people have personal biases that do get cancelled out in the average. When guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, a lot of people overestimate, a lot underestimate, but the average tends to be extremely close.
However, that does not guarantee us that the *mode* will be close. A majority rules vote does not provide us an average, but simply gives dominating power to the largest answer. If a population has a certain bias to begin with, on average, then a large body will reflect that bias. If the body is large enough, the body will simply reflect the bias accurately.
It also tends to flatten the results. If 50+1% of the population weakly prefers A and the remainder strongly prefers B, the average of their views, in a sense, would lean towards B, but a simple majority vote gives us A.
These sorts of problems do get dealt with more cleanly with a higher level of consensus. We *can* get a greater sense of the actual “average” view, how strongly they hold those views, etc. Otherwise, we simply end up dropping the minority from the discussion altogether.
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I agree with all Jordan’s examples regarding the uncovering of facts, rather than preferences. However in both courtroom practice and (proposed) legislative trials the forensic exchange is between the advocates, rather than the jurors. In his new book Terry Bouricius outlines a fascinating example from his time as an elected member of the Vermont House of Representatives:
“On one occasion we had a panel of opposing lobbyists essentially conduct an organised argument in front of a committee for a bill on which none of us had prior stances. The lobbyists would call each other out, since they knew when an opponent was intentionally cherry-picking data or skirting an important issue, which none of us less-informed committee members could detect. . . . We learned more through that one brief deliberative session than we normally ever learned about any bill. (p. 148).”
No doubt the members of the committee deliberated between themselves afterwards, but the uncovering of facts was down to the adversarial debate between opposing teams of lobbyists.
>a person may be willing to set aside their preference if they can be convinced an argument has *merit*
Sure, but what deliberative democrats seem to forget is that it’s reflecting the preferences of the overwhelming majority of citizens who don’t participate in the minipublic that matters. If this is going to mean a “deliberative transformation” of the citizenry that strikes me as (at best) a quixotic project.
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For sure, and this is not something I look to change. However, while the evidence is presented during trial, deliberation is a massively important part of it’s synthesis. Different jurors will focus in on evidence that confirms their initial biases (confirmation bias), but during deliberation notes are then compared and a full, more thorough accounting of all the evidence is considered by the group.
Exposure to evidence alone is beginning of the process, and (assuming a adequitely diverse set of participants), the act of deliberation improves outcomes.
So, there are two ways I’d question this. The first is to appeal to the notion of the “will of the people” and the ever expanding scope of what that means. Clearly we would agree that how Athens interpreted “the will of the people” would be wholly inadequate to us today, as not all people with interests, or who had to live with the consequences of policy had a say in that policy. Women and slaves, for example, were not included in their interpretation of “the people”. Something that wasn’t rectified immediately in modern liberal democracies, for which universal suffraged was a hard fought battle.
I argue that a further expanding of the “will of the people” is still required. The will of the people should be the will of *all* people, not just a majority. Minority groups should be capable of achieving their will. If this is not the case, then they are a dominated population, subject to the arbitrary will of the majority. However, when the will of a minority should be given precedence of the majority cannot be arbitrary either.
My stance is that a jury (or, more accurately, a series of parallel independent juries), reaching a high level (but not necessarily unanimous) of consesus achieves exactly this. The majority of these juries are still free to reject the minority arguments, but may also choose, provided they come to understand the merit, to defer to that minority. This provides, in my opinion, a far more complete image of “the will of the people”, which accounts not only preference, but active deference. In a pluralistic society, deference is, in my opinion, foundational to a fully realized democracy.
The second way I’d like to address it is to point out that the majority is a minority. Elections, as they exist today, tend to flatten various groups into a singular “majority”, of which none of their wills are truly represented but are given a “close enough” treatment. Every person, though, is uniquely situation in a way in which they will fall into the majority in many respects, and a minority in others. Every person has interests that will, at some point, put them into a minority view. Providing a mechanism for minority groups to pursue their interests against a majority provides opportunity for all people. Deffering to a minorities interest today will open the doors for your own minority interests to be acknowledged and deferred to tomorrow.
For all this, I believe that limiting democrach to the preferences of the majority is too narrow a scope, and one of the needed reforms is to widen it.
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>The will of the people should be the will of *all* people, not just a majority. Minority groups should be capable of achieving their will.
Spoken like a true Rousseauian. Unfortunately J.-J. (who was vehemently opposed to intra-group deliberation in the sovereign assembly) thought that this was unachievable in large modern states (Corsica, c. 1768 was about the top limit). Whether multiple juries reveal the general will or the will of all is a moot question. Speaking as a majoritarian democrat, I’m not too bothered one way or the other — the key question is whether the decision outcome will be accepted by the vast majority of citizens disenfranchised by the aleatory coup. This means eliminating the factors that lead to variance in decision output.
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For sure. One of my projects is to demonstrate this, or, at least, provide plausibility to warrent interest for investigation. I already have some analysis done on this that I think lends credibility to the argument, though I’d want to discuss my work with a statistician.
Descriptively, my case depends on separating out positive verdicts, negative verdicts, and hung outcomes (indetermine), the third of which leaves the matter unsettled and represents it’s own signal. I argue that for a given jury, the odds of one jury producing a positive verdict and another negative is far less likely than a positive verdict and a hung verdict, or a negativer verdict and a hung verdict. In other words, once a positive or negative verdict is found, it is highly unlikely to be overturned were it to repeat again.
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Perceived legitimacy, imo, is the crucial factor. This means demonstrating in practice that it makes no difference which empirical citizens participate, the outcome would be the same. My jury proposed as an alternative for the Brexit referendum was some 6,000 strong. If this were split into 10 juries of 600 and (given the same advocacy input) recorded the same decision output (subject to an agreed margin of error) then citizens could relax in the knowledge that they were lucky not to be called up for jury duty. The huge cost of the exercise would be justifiable in this case, on account of the consequences of the decision. If the variance between juries was above the agreed threshold, then the losing part(ies) could call for a retrial.
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Certainly. How I would address this, I”ll set aside for now, as I feel I’ve already caused a great drift from the original topic already. I greatly appreciate the dialog we had here.
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