Towards Deliberative Representation: Could Decoupling Judgement from Will be the Way?

Representative democracy, as we have theorized it, is clearly ailing in the context of heightened interconnectedness that characterizes current democratic polities and which disrupts the vertical chains of delegation and accountability which have secured the democratic legitimacy of our political systems and have given meaning to the democratic ideal of free and equal citizens. Rather, representation is refracted and dispersed and accountability becomes blurred and horizontal. In such a context, it is not possible to clearly tell the principals from the agents, nor to identify a demos univocally entitled to delegate decision-making powers to elected representatives, nor again to guarantee the absence of arbitrary interference from other demoi (or their representatives) or from impersonal institutions and principles (such as markets or balanced budgets). Solutions to these problems normally are sought in three directions: 1) by creating institutions in which grand bargains may be struck to compensate sovereignty losses on one side with favorable policy decisions on the other (intergovernmentalism); 2) by slowly educating each sovereign demos to fully factor, in its decision-making, the externalities that its decisions impose on others (demoicracy); 3) by repatriating as much as possible to the individual national demoi decision-making powers in order to (try to) re-establish univocal chains of delegation and accountability (nationalism/populism). All of these “solutions” have shown their limitations or are proving exceedingly difficult. One of the distinctive problems highlighted by the literature is that the institutions which represents the member states – Council and European Council – are formed by members of the executives of the member states, who are institutionally driven to act in the interest of their offices even more than in the interest of the people on whose behalf they negotiate. The opportunities for two-level games and blame shifting are plentiful, and the use of national discourses when reporting on EU-level decisions irresistible. In these circumstances, the opportunities for real deliberation are minimal. Could the solution lie in the decoupling of the formation of judgement from the expression of will? Could the various aspects of judgement – activating, proposing, receiving and surveilling – be entrusted to representative assemblies who have solid knowledge of the preferences and conditions of constituents on the ground, while the policy solutions – will formation – be entrusted to representative assemblies who should then only take responsibility to translate these inputs into actionable decisions? Rather than resisting the activation of citizens through a plethora of other participatory-deliberative channels, which remain suspect in the “delegation cum accountability” view of democracy, should we not welcome the redundancy of channels for registering citizens’ preferences and ideas and the opportunities for learning about other EU citizens’ interests and ideas through multilateral arrangements? The discussion will be inspired by a haptic notion of institutional architectures (cf. Pallasmaa 2012).