Deliberative Democracy for Realists

From the perspective of empirical studies of political behavior, the key normative ideas of deliberative democracy, such rational public discussion, appear to be quite demanding. There is ample of psychological evidence on various biases in people’s political reasoning. And as Achen and Bartels (2016) have recently pointed out, people’s political preferences and behavior are to a large extent determined by their basic identities. These findings seem to lend support to the view (e.g. Chambers 2009) that democratic deliberation is irreconcilable with mass participation. Recently, the idea of deliberative systems has been developed to reinstate the idea of deliberative democracy in large-scale polities. So far, the models of deliberative systems seem to have either stretched the concept of democratic deliberation or failed to address the challenges set by studies in political behavior. In this paper, we take these challenges seriously, and lay out a more realistic model of deliberative democracy. In line with Mercier and Landemore (2012), we conclude that democratic deliberation is ‘situational’, and that it does not necessarily arise spontaneously but may require specific institutional settings. However, we argue that this conclusion is compatible with a view of deliberative democracy as a political system where deliberative venues are combined with participatory opportunities and trust relations. Finally, we argue that, based on our knowledge about political behavior, this model of democracy may be more realistic than apparently less demanding models of representative and participatory democracy.