Retrieving deliberative democracy’s normative role: New perspectives on ‘critical mini-publics’

As the ‘empirical turn’ in deliberative democratic theory unleashed nothing short of an explosion of both conceptual and applied work on its key innovation – the various types of ‘mini-publics’ –, many welcomed this development as the long overdue maturing of the theory into an actually workable model of democracy (e.g. Bohman 1998). Yet, notwithstanding the important advances achieved in this phase of deliberative theory, this institutional focus has increasingly sidelined the original critical norms of deliberative democracy, replacing the salutary normative revival they had sparked in democratic theory with much less ambitious institutional proposals. Tracing its critical role within the wider evolution of democratic theory over the past 50 years, this paper makes the case for the continued significance of deliberative democracy’s critical and normative elements, which must be further developed and refined alongside the new focus on practical innovations. Arguing that the initial move towards studying small-scale mini-publics and the subsequent focus on larger-scale ‘systems’ have both, in their own ways, served to undercut deliberative democracy’s normative function, yet both still offer conceptual room for a revival of critical normative theorising as well, I make the case for three ways in which these recent developments can be re-examined and ‘re-purposed’ to play the more truly democratic roles suggested by more ambitious normative conceptions of deliberative democracy: Mini-publics as but one component of a broadly conceived ‘deliberative system’ whose different parts democratically influence and check each other; both mini-publics and other institutions and actors as mere starting points towards a process of deliberative democratisation as a cultural, as opposed to first and foremost institutional, development from the bottom up; and, lastly, a new perspective on how deliberative democratic theory, to stay truer to its own normative core, must conceive the role of citizens in its institutional as much as its intellectual evolution as more critical, autonomous, and individualised in nature and purpose.