Deliberative Democracy: Bringing the System Back in

The turn towards deliberative systems has come under attack on the grounds that it has emphasised deliberation's empirical dimensions at the expense of democracy's normative dimensions. This paper is divided into two sections. The first section rebuts this critique, arguing that normative criteria cannot be specified independent of the empirical character of deliberation. First, although the criteria for deliberation may be appropriate for the operation of a mini public, empirical research has long shown that everyday conversation has a critical role in processes of political opinion formation and the generative ground for meaningful conversation is a personal relationship where the application of such criteria would be normatively inappropriate. Second, insofar as democracy implies steering capacities, the democratic nature of deliberation can only be ascertained at a system level of abstraction. The second section of the paper draws upon Easton's systems analysis in elaborating interconnections between dispersed personal and political authorities.