What Makes a Democratic Public Encounter? A Systems Approach

In a democracy public institutions should be guided by democratic norms (Schwartz and Bertelli, 2022). This includes public encounters, which are primary means through which citizens come face-to-face with the democratic state. But what does it mean for a public encounter to count as democratic or not? And are there other ademocratic norms that may legitimately underpin these encounters? This paper will approach these questions from a democratic systems approach. It builds on the revival in deliberative and democratic systems theory that has pointed to the importance of public administration with a democratic system but, as yet, failed to engage in any deep way with public administration scholarship (e.g. Warren, 2017; Mansbridge et al. 2012). This leads existing approaches to impose the functions they developed to understand to legitimacy of law-making and legislative politics upon administration. It creates several confusions about what role administration should play in democratic systems (Dean, 2023). If a democratic systems approach is to be applied to understanding public encounters it needs to be developed much further. This paper attempts to extend the theory in two directions by distinguishing between the normative and operational ends of a democratic system. First, it returns to the idea from traditional systems theory that systems theory is a form a general theory (Easton, 1965), providing a means for articulating what Amartya Sen called a ‘plural grounding’, which recognises the possibility of contestation over the competing principles for normative judgements about how a social system is operating. It uses this insight to develop a set of democratic norms that are compatible with multiple traditions in democratic theory, rather than provide a single normative perspective on democratic administration. Then it distinguishes these democratic norms from the good governance norms that provide an alternative normative basis for the legitimation of state action. The second extension is to expand our understanding of the operational ends of a democratic system by articulating the specifically administrative functions of a social system that accompany the political functions of existing democratic systems approaches, enumerating the most important types of functions. This new framework, by separating between operational and normative ends, is intended clarify what functions we expect public officials to perform and how we can assess if they perform them in a democratically legitimate way. It therefore aims to provide a powerful analytical framework for assessing the democratic characteristics of public encounters.