'Flows of Communication' in Deliberative Systems: A Theory-Driven Concept of Transmissions for Evaluating Democratic Innovations

Empirical studies on democratic innovations such as designed mini-publics suggest that they have ambivalent effects on democratic quality: On the one hand, they are supposed to increase citizens’ sense of political efficacy and thereby contribute to citizen support for democratic systems. On the other hand, their effects often happen to be restricted to the fairly limited number of participants in designed deliberations and may increase citizens’ frustration and disappointment if decision-making institutions fail to implement their results. From the perspective of the systemic approach to deliberation, democratic innovations’ actual contribution to democratic quality crucially depends on the “uptake” of their results in institutions capable to make collectively binding decisions: A systemic approach to deliberation does not only acknowledge the plurality of deliberative spheres but also holds that the transmissions of deliberations’ results between these spheres(the “flow of communications”) is a necessary condition for the deliberative quality of a system as a whole. While the concept and operationalization of deliberation as well as the functions of real world-deliberations have been a topic of extensive debates among scholars, the conceptualization and the standards for empirical evaluations of “transmissions” represent a gap in current research. The paper’s basic aim is to provide such a theoretically grounded conceptualization of “transmissions” which can serve as a basis for systematic (qualitative and quantitative) empirical assessments. The paper aims at fulfilling this task by (1) drawing from the core ideal of deliberative theory as a theory of communicative democracy (Habermas 1984; 1996; Dryzek 2000). Against this background, the paper (2) fleshes out transmissions’ functions for democratic systems’ legitimacy and stability and identifies crucial communication channels within democratic systems. This concept of transmissions is (3) applied to evaluating two exemplary mini-publics’ contribution to democratic quality. It is argued that taking into account these different functions and channels of transmissions has merits (a) for explaining democratic innovations’ ambivalent effects and (b) for providing guidelines for effectively upscaling the effects of deliberations in mini-publics.