Meta-deliberation and decision-making: What should we do when talking stops?

The attractiveness of democratic deliberation as a method of decision making can be explained in terms of a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. In practice, however, democratic deliberation may sometimes appear unattractive, for example, for pragmatic reasons such as the urgency of action. But even in less urgent situations, deliberative processes will regularly need to be combined with non-deliberation decision-making mechanisms such as lot, voting or compromise. Deliberative theorists have argued that processes of meta-deliberation are needed for making decisions on the extent to which an issue needs to be deliberated and on how the ‘deliberative labour’ should be divided. Our paper focuses on another aspect of ‘meta-deliberation’, that is, on deliberation on the way in which a decision is finally made. In this spirit, this paper defines meta-deliberation as deliberation about what to do once we realise that deliberation cannot take us any further. Central to deliberation of this second-order sort is the question of what a commitment to deliberation logically implies about the choice of non-deliberative rules or practices for dealing with the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved.