Deliberative Democracy And Its Representative--a Critical Perspective

Deliberative democracy will define politics as the free and unrestrained common deliberation of the matters of public concern. Within this process of common deliberation, the free and equal citizens will listen respectfully to the opinions of others, even if they do not agree with them, and– aspiring the common good - by way of a final deliberation they will make decision which possesses collective obligatory force.The theory of deliberative democracy implies the rule that the preferences of the people are not static but should be the object of dialogue and debate, they are not yet fixed, they need to be transformed, and only the reasonable discussion among the citizens and communicative deliberation process can provide more comprehensive information, thus creating a more"true"preference. Although deliberate democracy points to the one-sided hypothesis of personal preferences of aggregative democracy, it cannot prove that the deliberation process which it advocates can avoid the influences of factors from outside. In the common deliberation process of practical life, the general voting population lacks sufficient information about the policy making process. Therefore the voters and the elite form the pattern of"information providers– information receivers". The common deliberation on this basis can only support the interests of the information providers and not the interests of the information receivers. The political elite will distort the preferences of the voters and so form a kind of"false preference". This opens a way for the manipulation of the voters, and the deliberation results will only be useful for the interests of the establishment.Deliberative democracy separates politics and market, it is not the blending of special interests but the effort to make use of public reason as to search for a policy that can meet the expectations of all citizens to the highest degree. It believes that public reason can enable people to transform selfish preferences and direct them towards a preference of the common good. The public use of reason means that the citizens who take part in a process of public discussion can only be convinced by a reasoning which emphasizes the common good. In this common deliberation the people will only use expressions like"this policy is useful for'us'"and not"useful for me", and this will enhance the common spirit of the people. However, in real life it is often a"dishonest deliberation", which means that the people use a language of public values to express private interests, and the"public support"is nothing else than a fig-leaf. Deliberative democracy cannot avoid this problem. Besides that, deliberative democracy emphasizes the"best force of debate", and this stresses the intelligence factor within politics too much, which reflects the preference of the elite for intelligence. Because the intellectual powers are unevenly distributed among the people, the only possible result will be that the factual power of political influence will shift to those people who are educated and convincing debaters. Obviously this is a trend to undemocratic elitism.As everyone knows, within today's big democratic societies the only choice is the system of representative democracy. Since deliberative democracy emphasizes the common interest, it must demand that the representatives who take part in the deliberation will negotiate as to ensure the interests of the nation and not the interests of a special area. The representatives must not sacrifice the common good for the interests of local voters. The representatives should be independent in the face of the voters, and this is in agreement with the commissioning representation theory of Edmund Burke, but the commissioning representation theory of Boke has a strong elitist inclination, which is irreconcilable with deliberative democracy. Current deliberative democracy experts provided this method of conciliation: they demand that the representatives must communicate with the voters and must justify their actions to the voters. This process of mutual justification and interaction shortened the distance between voters and representatives. However, in real life there will be a moment when the reasons of the representatives are unacceptable to the voters, and what should happen then? Their answer is this: In this situation"deliberative democracy acknowledges that the constitutional freedom and opportunity is an restraint of the will of the majority, and when there is the danger that the will of the majority will encroach upon this freedom and opportunity, then the commissioned representative can reject it."But what helps us to know whether the reasons of the representatives are superior to the reasons of the majority of the voters? According to deliberative democracy, exactly this"constitutional moment"needs public deliberation, and this will show the sovereignty of the people. Thus one can see that it is not a satisfactory method to overcome a deadlock between representatives and voters. It cannot solve the problem of a tension between voters and representatives, which it criticizes as a shortcoming of the traditional representative democracy.From this one can see that deliberative democracy itself faces several irreconcilable contradictions; to a high degree it remains on the level of ideal justice and lacks effective practicality. Therefore we have good reasons to adopt a cautious attitude of doubt when we are faced with the political idealism of deliberative democracy.In order to solve this tension, namely the dilemma of equal participation and careful discernment, James Fishkin proposes the theory of Deliberative Poll. It's basic method is to collect random samples from among the voters and ask some citizens to take part in the discussion. Some experts offer these citizens information concerning the point of debate and they answer the any questions which the debaters have. On this basis the citizens form groups, interact and deliberate and finally arrive at a decision. The advantage of this is that the small groups of people can talk and deliberate face to face, and they avoid the"ignorance of reason"which might happen within the wider society. In addition, this kind of selecting people at random is again a way of choosing representatives, and the randomness can even better ensure political equality, and as these representatives have no power advantages at all it also avoids the misuse of power by the representatives. However, we discovered that the Deliberative Poll has the following problems which are hard to solve: the citizens selected are only a tiny minority, and the rest of the citizens are not"present"but only passive onlookers, and this is in conflict with the theory of the participation of the citizens within deliberative democracy. Since the representatives are selected randomly they do not have the pressure of real voters, and it is hard to ensure that these random representatives will make a responsible deliberation. Deliberative polls have a strong emphasis on the influence of experts who control the proposal of debated questions and the deliberation process, thus the influence of the experts is far-reaching. From the fact that experts are so crucial within the deliberative poll one can also ascertain the tendency towards the view that experts should rule the country, and this is hardly reconcilable to the concept of political equality.