Between weak and strong publics: the place of representation in deliberative democracy

Abstract

Representative and deliberative models of democracy have been traditionally thought of as embodying two competing theories of political legitimacy: the former anchoring legitimacy in the process of authorisation of representative decision-makers; the latter regarding laws and policies as legitimate to the extent that they result from deliberation among free and equal individuals. When representative democracy is considered, instead, as a specific institutional form of democracy – the dominant form in contemporary democratic politics – and deliberative democracy as an ideal of political communication, the opposition between the two models appears as significantly less stark. In fact, it has been argued that following the so-called democratic “rediscovery of representation” (Urbinati, 2000) the normative link between deliberation and representation has been tightened “to the point that one can hardly be conceptualized without the other” (Landemore, 2017). In the face of the present crisis of representative democracy, reapproaching the normative, conceptual and empirical entanglement of deliberation and representation may yield important insights for political theory as well as for democratic design. In particular, we wish to invite reflections on the normative, conceptual and empirical role of representation in bridging the two communicative tracks of the public sphere: the “weak” public of informal deliberation where public opinion is formed, and the “strong” public where formal decision-making takes place (Habermas, 1996). The panel especially welcomes contributions aiming at: 1) exposing/valorising latent forms of representation in practices of deliberative democracy; 2) investigating the place of representation in relation to the educative/transformative potential of deliberative processes.

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