Democratic Deliberation and the Future

Abstract

There are different ways in which democratic deliberation can help future-regarding policymaking. Inclusive deliberative processes can foster greater understanding of the consequences of policies, develop more other-regarding views, and create joint commitment to future-regarding collective action (e.g. MacKenzie 2016). In practice, however, there are many open questions about the capacity of deliberative processes to actually enhance long-term thinking and action. In particular, future generations’ interests may not be properly articulated or considered in deliberative processes, especially on issues that involve intergenerational conflicts, i.e. tradeoffs between the welfare of currently living people and those who come after us. More generally, there is still limited understanding of how future generations’ interests can be weighed in the balance with our own and what kinds of psychological processes are required for proper consideration of future generations’ interests. Institutional design seems to be the key to future-regarding deliberation. Parliamentary institutions provide elected representatives with different kinds of (dis)incentives to consider future interests and to make representative claims on behalf of future generations. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that inclusive forums for citizen deliberation, e.g. in deliberative mini-publics or randomly selected second chambers, are less constrained by pressures towards short-termism than elected representative forums. Yet even here, there are also many open questions –for instance, what kinds of design features could enhance future orientation in mini-publics. In addition, it remains debatable whether the nature and challenges of future-oriented decisionmaking are such that we should seriously consider granting decisional authority to these inclusive forums. The paper invites both theoretical and empirical papers dealing with the relationship between democratic deliberation and future-regarding decisionmaking.

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