How and Why Deliberative Democrats Should Eschew Populism

Populism is the idea of the will of the people, and that this will alone should prevail in government policy. In one form or another, the will of the people also features in deliberative democracy—for example, in James Fishkin’s (2005) claim that deliberative polls can get us ‘the nation in a room’. However, this paper shows why deliberative democrats should eschew claims of this sort and how they should do so. They should avoid such claims because, in our dangerous age, ‘the will of the people’ is often used to close down rather than open up public discussion and debate—while one might think that deliberation is essential to the health of a democracy, populists argue that conformity to the ‘will of the people’ is the true test of a society’s democratic credentials (Weale 2017, 2018). Deliberative democrats should not give up on deliberative polls and other mini-publics. But they should resist the temptation to claim too much for them. Mini-publics can give us an insight into what people might think under favourable conditions, but they should not be equated the will of the people. What we need, therefore, is a theory that explains not just why mini-publics are normatively valuable but why the nature of that value is such that it needs to be carefully circumscribed. There are potentially many such theories, but this particular paper is motivated by the idea that mini-publics can inhibit representatives from uncritically bowing to ‘the will of the people’ or, worse still, from treating it as a vehicle of their own ambitions.