Enhancing Deliberative Participation

This study compares two widely different deliberative experiments: the Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Iniziativa di Revisione Civica. The former was a nationwide deliberative event held in 2009 in Australia whilst the latter was a local deliberative assembly held nearby Bologna (Italy). The paper argues that these events embody major differences in a way that is typical of the divide between small and large scale deliberative events at large. The first goals of this paper is to show that an adapted version of the idea of ‘deliberative capacity’ (Dryzek 2009, 2010) provides a most interesting means to assess the overall quality of almost any deliberative experiment. In particular, by applying the notion of ‘deliberative capacity’ this paper finds that, in spite of their major differences, these two case studies present similar shortcomings. Numerous problems can be identified and the relationship between the ‘inclusiveness’ of these events and their consequentiality receives particular attention. For instance, the paper argues that, in an effort to develop inclusiveness within the forum, deliberative democrats have overlooked issues of ‘inclusive governance’, with detrimental effects on these events’ capability to affect political life. Similarly, the promotion of deliberative experiments has relied on normative grounds rather than an analysis of the actual support for deliberative participation in given contexts. This paper is far from questioning the normative desirability of these events. However, the analysis suggests that endorsement for deliberative experiments (and their outcomes) in both public spaces and empowered institutions are fundamental in explaining deliberative reforms’ capability to affect political life. This aspect needs to be investigated before deliberative events are executed for practical reasons but also for normative ones. In fact, deliberative forums that are bound to be inconsequential or manipulated seem to have little normative purchase from a deliberative democratic standpoint.