Defending democracy against technocracy and populism: Deliberative democracy's strengths and challenges

• Published in: Constellations (Oxford, England) England), 2020-09, Vol.27 (3), p.335-347
• Main Authors: Gaus, Daniel, Landwehr, Claudia, Schmalz‐Bruns, Rainer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anger; Collective action; Deliberative democracy; Democracy; Elitism; Ethnic relations; Governance; Legitimacy; Political elites; Political majority; Political systems; Politicization; Populism; Property; Representative democracy; Rules; Technocracy; Values
• ISSN: 1351-0487; 1467-8675
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12529

Any account of liberal representative democracy will more or less explicitly address the following three conditions for democracy to work.1 First, the legitimacy of democracy depends on some real link between the public will and the public policies and office holders selected. Yet this ideal is severely undermined when the will of the people is in large part manufactured by political elites (Fishkin & Mansbridge, 2017, p. 7). In this case, the causal arrow goes in the wrong direction—to the extent that large minorities or sometimes majorities of existing liberal democracies are dissatisfied with, and feel left out or alienated from, the democratic practices and routines they experience (Offe, 2017, p. 15). We may safely infer that this concern to a large degree fuels populist anger, protest, and contestation. A second condition, however, is meant to provide an answer to the question how to best make collectively binding decisions that from an anticipated future standpoint we have no reason to regret. You may call this the concern for the epistemic dimension (or the epistemic properties and characteristics) of the process, rules and procedures of political decision‐making and its modalities, a concern that feeds into another symptom of the malaise of democratic government and governance, that is, technocratic rule. Third, democracies should be regarded as self‐scrutinizing and self‐correcting political systems that can respond to externally induced as well as internal deviations from its normative ideals. This is why they face notorious and ongoing controversial demands for their own revision, development, and improvement—the challenge here consists in “a tricky recursive logic" (Offe, 2017, p. 14).Offering an attractive account of how these conditions are to be fulfilled in modern representative democracies, deliberative democracy has become a dominant school within democratic theory. Yet at the same time, and perhaps surprisingly, it has also become the culprit in a peculiar trial: Does deliberative democracy offer justifications for institutional reforms that effectively depoliticize decision‐making and erect an elitist, technocratic, "postdemocratic" order? And does it, in consequence, also bear responsibility for populist reactions against this elitist order that insulates decision‐making processes from "ordinary people"? In this paper, we want to show that this assumption is baseless. Neither does deliberative democracy justify depoliticization or tec