Arctic MSCA-IF Program Proposal

Arctic MSCA-IF Program Proposal

Dr Christopher Thompson

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education

Research field: Philosophy/ Political Science

Short project description:

Deliberative democracy and good political decision-making

Until recently, democracy went unchallenged as the ideal form of political decision-making. Recent developments, including the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, and the recent US election, undercut this complacency. Democratic institutions (and their associated checks and balances on power) are under threat, many voters feel disenfranchised from political processes that are supposed to represent their interests, and reasoned political debate seems supplanted by ‘alternative facts’.

There is an immediate need to reassert the virtues of democratic decision-making, and to make the arguments that support democratic decision-making over other forms of government more accessible to a wider audience. The proposed project will investigate how democratic deliberation can be improved to make it more inclusive, and more likely to lead to good political decisions.

Longer project description overleaf:

Deliberative democracy and good political decision-making

1. Introduction

Until recently, democracy went unchallenged as the ideal form of political decision-making. Recent developments, including the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, and the recent US election, undercut this complacency. Democratic institutions (and their associated checks and balances on power) are under threat, many voters feel disenfranchised from political processes that are supposed to represent their interests, and reasoned political debate seems supplanted by ‘alternative facts’.

There is an immediate need to reassert the virtues of democratic decision-making, and to make the arguments that support democratic decision-making over other forms of government more accessible to a wider audience. The proposed project will investigate how democratic deliberation can be improved to make it more inclusive, and more likely to lead to good political decisions.

2. Background

What is so special about democratic decision-making? What arguments could we present to ordinary citizens to support our existing democratic frameworks? To address these questions, we need to begin by drawing a distinction between procedural and non-procedural justifications of democracy. Procedural justifications of democracy claim that it is certain intrinsic features of the decision-making process itself that justify democracy. For example, we might say that political decisions typically involve different impacts on different sorts of people, and as a result are subject to widespread disagreement. If there is no political decision that will satisfy each and every individual, then at least democratic decisions give each individual’s interests a fair hearing.

David Estlund[1] has convincingly argued against these procedural justifications for democracy. If all we care about is a fair process, then why do we need democratic deliberation and voting? Surely the most procedurally fair way of making any decision is to flip a coin (or where there are more than two alternatives, to hold a fair lottery). But the idea that important political decisions should be made by a fair lottery is ridiculous. Therefore, the value in democratic decision-making cannot reside in its procedural fairness.

Non-procedural (or instrumental) justifications of democracy claim that it is not the intrinsic value of the democratic process that is important. Rather, the value in democratic decision-making comes from its capacity to generate certain outcomes. Here we need to make a further distinction between the preferences of citizens and the beliefs of citizens; are political views an expression of what an individual would prefer to occur, or an expression of what an individual believes is best? If the former, then the virtue of democratic decision-making is in its ability to deliver policies that suit the preferences of all or most citizens (as opposed to, say, policies that are merely in the interests of a dictator or oligarchy). If the latter, then the virtue of democratic decision-making is in its ability to deliver policies that are correct, according to some procedure-independent understanding of a correct decision.

The position that the value in democratic decision-making comes from its ability to satisfy all or most of the preferences of citizens faces several problems. Among the most challenging problem for this view is that it seems to confuse the ‘forum’ with the ‘market’.[2] The satisfaction of our individual preferences or self-interest is what we ought to expect from a commercial market. The political domain (or forum), by contrast, is limited to issues of public good and justice where individual preferences ought not to be the primary focus.

The most plausible route for defending democratic decision-making institutions, which we are left with, are accounts that point to the non-procedural (or instrumental) ability of democracies to deliver policies that are correct. Epistemic democracy is comprised of two claims: firstly, that some political decisions are about matters of fact and therefore can be correct or incorrect; and, secondly, that there is some feature of democratic decision-making that makes for reliable decisions.

Most accounts of epistemic democracy fail to focus on arguments in support of the first claim. But there are some obvious examples of political decisions with correct answers. Whether a nation has weapons of mass destruction or not, whether decriminalizing drugs will reduce drug-related deaths, which of the Presidential candidates will create the most jobs, are all political decisions that have correct answers (even if it may be difficult to ascertain what the correct answer is).

Establishing the mechanism that makes democratic decisions correct or reliable is less straightforward. Almost all existing epistemic defences of democracy point to majority voting and the classic Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) as providing the mechanism that makes for reliable democratic decisions. Very roughly, the idea is that lots of citizens have little bits of information that indicate what the correct policy choice is. By expanding the democratic franchise and allowing these citizens a say on policy matters via their vote, democratic decision-making procedures pool together the truth-conducive information dispersed across the electorate. There is now a substantial literature in epistemic democracy that further refines how different voting rules, under different conditions, can be better or worse at aggregating dispersed information.[3]

But the existing literature on epistemic democracy ignores the fact that there is more to democracy than merely voting. In the early 1990s there was a ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory, led by authors such as John Dryzek[4], who argued the focus on voting rules in democratic theory missed some essential features of democracy: the discussion, debate and reason giving seen in democratic deliberation.

While deliberative theorists have considered the role of deliberation in procedural legitimacy, and the possibility of deliberation leading to reasoned consensus, little attention seems to have been given to the potential for deliberation to improve the reliability of democratic decisions. In part, this may be because of well-known failures in group deliberation, including group-think and group-polarisation.[5] Moreover, recent real-world examples of public democratic debates do not seem to include the features that we would expect might increase the likelihood of good political decisions. Nevertheless, given the importance of public deliberation to democracy, we cannot ignore the deliberative failures. Instead, we must find ways of improving public deliberation, and encouraging wider participation and acceptance of this democratic process. This is the task of the proposed research.

3. Research questions

The precise framing of the research is to be determined by the postdoc, in consultation with supervisors. Likely research questions include:

·  How does democratic deliberation improve the quality of political decisions?

·  How can the institutions of democratic deliberation be organised so as to avoid problems such as group think, and group polarisation?

·  What types of civic training are required to prepare individuals for participation in democratic deliberation?

·  How can we encourage wider participation by underrepresented groups in democratic deliberation?

·  What should be the role of experts in deliberation?

·  How do we limit the impacts of biases in deliberation?

[1] Estlund, D. (2008) Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework, Princeton University Press.

[2] Elster, J. (1997) ‘The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory’, in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds), Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, Blackwell, pp. 128–42.

[3] See, for example, Dietrich, F. (2008) ‘The Premises of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem are not Simultaneously Justified’, Episteme, 5(1): 56-73.

[4] Dryzek, J. S. (1990) Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science, Cambridge University Press.

[5] For a survey of some of the types of failure of group deliberation, see Sunstein, C. R. (2006) ‘Deliberating Groups versus Prediction Markets (or Hayek’s Challenge to Habermas)’, Episteme, 3(3):192–213.