While democratic theory is full of considerations of ‘process’, it is remarkably unaware of the time that democratic processes take, or the sequences in which democratic processes move. This has been especially true of economic-inspired theories of democracy, focused as they are on the mathematics of democratic preference aggregation and not the processes by which participants come to be in a position to express their preference. But it is also true of many deliberative conceptions of democracy, especially those that idealise rational, face-to-face argumentation and consensus-seeking. This paper seeks to correct this by discussing the emerging ‘deliberative systems’ approach to democracy, which idealises not individual deliberative moments, but different kinds of institution sequenced together over much longer stretches of time. The implications of this approach are potentially far-reaching. It provides reasons to think that the standard modus operandi in institutional design and normative political analysis is likely to misidentify the nature and seriousness of institutional problems, simply because it tries to apply systemic ideals to particular moments within those larger systems. Even then, however, there is a risk that the deliberative systems approach will degenerate into an atemporal pluralism, and the paper offers suggestions for escaping that.
