What we mean today when referring to 'democracy' is, according to some scholars, 'a way of organising the state that has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices' . The problem with this system is that it has distanced itself from the central ideas of democratic politics. These central ideas comprise
the ideas of encouraging active political involvement of citizens, reaching consensus through dialogue and being able to implement the decision that has been reached through consensus . In recent years, a new theory of democracy has tried to go back to democratic traditions. This new strand, deliberative democracy is much contested at the theoretical level as well as at the practicable level. To understand if deliberative democracy is, as some scholars claim, 'theoretically plausible but institutionally impracticable' one first has to understand what the concept of deliberative democracy is.
[...] Finally, the last institutional negative consequence of practicable deliberative democracy is the change in the relation between the people and the institutions. Deliberative democracy inherently encourages dialogue, discussion and debate, not violent or unilateral action. Therefore, deliberative democracy would put a ban on the most natural way challenging power: radicalism and militancy . There have been other problems with those experiments or proofs that deliberative democracy is not institutionally practicable the way it is established in theory, especially when it comes to citizen participation (which turned out to be very low, not more than 10 percent of the adult population There are obviously problems when trying to put into practice deliberative democracy theory. [...]
[...] As Joshua Cohen explains in his essay ( 'Deliberation and democratic Legitimacy'), the objective of deliberative democracy is to advance the aims of each party. Each party has his/her own good and they try to come to a decision that is acceptable to all . In that sense, deliberative democracy aims at advancing the common good. The real ideal of deliberative democracy is more radical than Cohen's view since it considers that democratic citizens have the duty, when voting, to 'express their impartial judgement of what conduces to the common good of all citizens, and not their personal preferences' . [...]
[...] Elstub, in 'Democarcy' gives an exhaustive list of the attempts to and the limits of those attempts to comply with the demands of deliberative democracy . He says that deliberative democracy would only be used when forming a constitution because otherwise the process is too heavy just for specific decision. As for the political parties, he deplores the lack of deliberation within them. Then taking the example of the citizen juries and polls, he claims that they are not representative enough. [...]
[...] Secondly, the situation depicts a deliberative situation in which all the actors are 'free and equal', where communication is not distorted and where communication aims at a rational consensus . Deliberative democracy therefore tends to include every one in the deliberation to which all actors take part, give their argument, criticise that of others and sometimes change their argument in favour of a more convincing argument. In the end, the 'force of the better argument' prevails . The main debate about this Ideal Situation of Speech is that in such a dialogue, people are not likely to be convinced by an argument because of its reasonableness but rather because of the provider of the information or the way in which it is provided . [...]
[...] As deliberative democracy seems to be deficient in some points, it has to be said that it is also a 2 political theory which is very attractive in theory because some aspects of it are quite plausible. One could think for instance about the plausibility to inform every individual of a society about every thing he/she needs to know to deliberate properly . However, one cannot affirm, in many respects, that deliberative democracy is theoretically plausible. Now, it is yet to be shown if, as some scholars say, it is institutionally impracticable. [...]
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