Disabled Lives in Deliberative Systems

This paper addresses the tension between disability and deliberative democracy. Theories of deliberative democracy are built upon the discursive participation of all-affected. As Habermas argues, “[t]he political public sphere can fulfill its function of perceiving and thematizing encompassing social problems only insofar as it develops out of the communication taking place among those who are potentially affected” (Habermas, 1996: 365). However, fulfilling this principle runs into problems when considering community members with cognitive disability. The democratic principle, therefore, is undermined by the discursive principle. While a key concern, this tension has largely been left unaddressed within the literature on deliberative democracy. An exception is Stacy Clifford’s work on embodied participation (Clifford, 2012). This paper takes Clifford’s contribution as a starting point. However, it argues that while it is important to think about ways in which deliberative democratic processes can be reimagined to take into account the challenge posed by disability, there are many tools within the literature on deliberative democracy which can be refocused on the issue of disability. While acknowledging that we cannot simply theorize ourselves out of this tension, this paper considers the ways in which the systematic turn in deliberative democratic theory has opened up avenues to think about disabled citizenship within discursive processes. In particular, this paper highlights four transformations within deliberative democratic theory as the result of the systematic turn which have opened up space to consider and include the contributions of disabled citizens. First, the systematic turn is much more receptive to an interdependent notion of citizenship and participation. Second, the systematic turn does not summarily dismiss non-deliberative or even anti-deliberative behaviour. In fact, it makes room for the probability that such behaviours, while non-deliberative at the micro-level, can nonetheless contribute to the overall quality of deliberation in the larger deliberative system. Third, the systematic turn recognizes the importance of sites of enclave deliberation and incorporates their contributions into the larger public sphere. Finally, the systematic turn is more amenable to a rich conceptualization of discursive representation as a way to get as close as possible to fulfilling the maxim of inclusivity and the all-affected principle.