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D
EEPENING
D
EMOCRACY
:
I
NNOVATIONS IN
EMPOWERED PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE
Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright
Appearing in
Politics and Society
, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 2001)
Archon Fung
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
John F. Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617.495.9846
Email: archon_fung@harvard.edu
Short Bio:
Archon Fung is an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government. His research and teaching focuses on public and private sector reform strategies that
aim to increase equity and organizational effectiveness through participation, deliberation, and
transparency. His books include
Beyond Backyard Environmentalism (with Charles
Sabel and
Bradley
Karkkainen, Beacon Press, 2000) and
Institutions of Justice: Constitutionalism,
Democracy, and State Power
(edited, with Joshua Cohen, Edward
Elgar Publishers, 1996).
Erik Olin Wright
Villas Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Tel: (608) 262-2921
Email: wright@ssc.wisc.edu (Work)
Short Bio:
Erik Olin Wright is professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work
has revolved around two principle themes: the reconstruction of the Marxist tradition of social
science, and the empirical study of class structure. His most recent books include
Reconstructing
Marxism
(with Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober, Verso, 1992),
Interrogating Inequality
(Verso,
1994), and Class Counts (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2000). He is the director and
general editor of the
Real Utopias Project
.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all of the participants of the
Real Utopias V: Experiments In Empowered
Deliberative Democracy
conference, held in Madison, WI (January 2000) for valuable comments
on a previous version of this Chapter. We would also like to thank our many friends and
collaborators in this on-going endeavor to discover more democratic governance forms, especially
Joshua Cohen, Bradley Karkkainen,
Dara O’Rourke, and Charles
Sabel.
As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and
more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth
century — representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration — seem
increasingly ill-suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. “Democracy” as
a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially-based
competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices. Yet, increasingly,
this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of
democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political
consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive
economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal,
assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation’s wealth.
The Right of the political spectrum has taken advantage of this apparent decline in the
effectiveness of democratic institutions to escalate its attack on the very idea of the affirmative
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 3
state. The only way the state can play a competent and constructive role, the Right typically
argues, is to dramatically reduce the scope and depth of its activities. In addition to the traditional
moral opposition of libertarians to the activist state on the grounds that it infringes on property
rights and individual autonomy, it is now widely argued that the affirmative state has simply
become too costly and inefficient. The benefits supposedly provided by the state are myths; the
costs—both in terms of the resources directly absorbed by the state and of indirect negative
effects on economic growth and efficiency—are real and increasing. Rather than seeking to deepen
the democratic character of politics in response to these concerns, the thrust of much political
energy in the developed industrial democracies in recent years has been to reduce the role of
politics altogether. Deregulation, privatization, reduction of social services, and curtailments of
state spending have been the watchwords, rather that participation, greater responsiveness, more
creative and effective forms of democratic state intervention. As the slogan goes: “The state is the
problem, not the solution.”
In the past, the political Left in capitalist democracies vigorously defended the affirmative
state against these kinds of arguments. In its most radical form, revolutionary socialists argued
that public ownership of the principle means of production combined with centralized state
planning offered the best hope for a just, humane and egalitarian society. But even those on the
Left who rejected revolutionary visions of ruptures with capitalism insisted that an activist state
was essential to counteract a host of negative effects generated by the dynamics of capitalist
economies -- poverty, unemployment, increasing inequality, under-provision of public goods like
training and public health. In the absence of such state interventions, the capitalist market
becomes a “Satanic Mill,” in Karl
Polanyi’s metaphor, that erodes the social foundations of its
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 4
own existence.
1
These defenses of the affirmative state have become noticeably weaker in recent
years, both in their rhetorical force and in their practical political capacity to mobilize. Although
the Left has not come to accept unregulated markets and a minimal state as morally desirable or
economically efficient, it is much less certain that the institutions it defended in the past can
achieve social justice and economic well being in the present.
Perhaps this erosion of democratic vitality is an inevitable result of complexity and size.
Perhaps the most we can hope for is to have some kind of limited popular constraint on the
activities of government through regular, weakly competitive elections. Perhaps the era of the
“affirmative democratic state” — the state which plays a creative and active role in solving
problems in response to popular demands — is over, and a retreat to
privatism and political
passivity is the unavoidable price of “progress.” But perhaps the problem has more to do with
the specific design of our institutions than with the tasks they face as such. If so, then a
fundamental challenge for the Left is to develop
transformative democratic strategies that can
advance our traditional values—egalitarian social justice, individual liberty combined with
popular control over collective decisions, community and solidarity, and the flourishing of
individuals in ways which enable them to realize their potentials.
This paper explores a range of empirical responses to this challenge. They constitute real-
world experiments in the redesign of democratic institutions, innovations that elicit the
enerergy
and influence of ordinary people, often drawn from the lowest strata of society in the solution of
problems that plague them. In this paper we will examine briefly five such experiments:
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 5
•
Neighborhood governance councils
in Chicago address the fears and hopes of inner city
Chicago residents by turning an urban bureaucracy on its head and devolving substantial
power over policing and public schools.
•
The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership
(WRTP) brings together organized labor,
large firm management, and government to provide training and increase the transparency
in employment transitions in order to help workers assemble jobs into meaningful careers
in volatile economic times,
•
Habitat Conservation Planning
under the Endangered Species Act convenes stakeholders
and empowers them to develop ecosystem governance arrangements that will satisfy the
double imperatives of human development and the protection of jeopardized species.
•
The participatory budget
of Porto Alegre, Brazil enables residents of that city to
participate directly in forging the city budget and thus use public monies previously
diverted to patronage payoffs to pave their roads and electrify their neighborhoods.
• Panchayat reforms
in West Bengal and Kerala, India have created both direct and
representative democratic channels that devolve substantial administrative and fiscal
development power to individual villages.
Though these five reforms differ dramatically in the details
of their design, issue areas, and
scope, they all aspire to deepen the ways in which ordinary people can effectively participate in
and influence policies which directly affect their lives. From their common features, we call this
reform family
empowered deliberative democracy
(EDD). They have the potential to be radically
democratic in their reliance upon the participation and capacities of ordinary people; deliberative
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 6
because they institute reason-based decision-making; and empowered since they attempt to tie
action to discussion.
The exploration of empowered deliberation as a progressive institutional reform strategy
advances the conceptual and empirical understanding of democratic practice. Conceptually, EDD
presses the values of participation, deliberation, and empowerment to the apparent limits of
prudence and feasibility. Taking participatory democracy seriously in this way throws both its
vulnerabilities and advantages into sharp relief. We also hope that injecting empirically centered
examination into current debates about deliberative democracy will paradoxically expand the
imaginative horizons of that discussion at the same time that it injects a bit of realism. Much of
that work has been quite conceptually focussed, and so has failed to detail or evaluate
institutional designs to advance these values. By contrast, large and medium scale reforms like
those mentioned above offer an array of real alternative political and administrative designs for
deepening democracy. As we shall see, many of these ambitious designs are not just workable,
but may surpass conventional democratic institutional forms on the quite practical aims of
enhancing the responsiveness and effectiveness of the state while at the same time making it more
fair, participatory, deliberative, and accountable. These benefits, however, may be offset by costs
such as their alleged dependence on fragile political and cultural conditions, tendencies to
compound background social and economic inequalities, and weak protection of minority
interests.
We begin by briefly sketching five reform experiments.
2
Three of these—policing and
educational governance in Chicago, habitat conservation planning, and participatory budgeting in
Brazil—will be considered in more detail by other authors in this issues. We then lay out an
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 7
abstract model of Empowered Deliberative Democracy that distills the distinctive features of
these experiments into three central principles and three institutional design features. The next
section explains why, in principle, such arrangements will generate a range of desirable social
effects. We conclude this introduction with an agenda of questions to interrogate cases of
actually-existing EDD.
I. Five Experiments In Participatory Deliberative Governance
These institutional reforms vary widely on many dimensions, and none perfectly realizes
the democratic values of citizen participation, deliberation, and empowerment. In its own way
and quite imperfectly, however, each strives to advance these values and to an extent succeeds.
These cases can be usefully grouped into two general categories: first, reforms that
primarily address failures of specific administrative and regulatory agencies, and second, reforms
that attempt a more general restructuring democratic
decisionmaking. Three of the cases we will
examine fall under the first rubric. They attempt to remedy failures of state agencies by
deploying participation and deliberation as tools to enhance effectiveness. One consists of two
functionally specific administrative reforms geared to improve the performance of the police and
public education systems in the city of Chicago. Another connects workers and employers in an
attempt to develop internationally competitive human capital in the rust belt city of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. The third case attempts to balance human development and the protection of
endangered species through stakeholder governance under reforms to the U.S. Endangered Species
Act. The other two cases concern more broadly scoped reforms in which left-wing political
parties have captured state power and employed EDD forms to advance their social justice
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 8
agenda. These aim explicitly at the problems of inequality and lack of democratic accountability.
Participation and devolution are instruments toward those ends. One of these cases is an urban
budgeting experiment in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. In the other, left wing parties in two
Indian states – West Bengal and Kerala — have created popular, participatory village governance
bodies.
1. Functionally Specific Neighborhood Councils in Chicago, USA.
Our first experiment concerns public education and policing in a city characterized by
great poverty and inequality: Chicago, Illinois, whose 2.5 million residents make it the third
largest city in the United States. In the late 1980s, the Chicago Public School system suffered
attacks from all sides — parents, community members, and area businessmen, charged that the
centralized school bureaucracy was failing to educate the city’s children on a massive scale. These
individuals and groups formed a small but vocal social movement that managed to turn the top-
heavy, hierarchical school system on its head. In 1988, the Illinois legislature passed a law that
decentralized and opened the governance of Chicago schools to direct forms of neighborhood
participation.
3 The reform law shifted power and control from a centralized city-wide
headquarters to the individual schools themselves. For each of some 560 elementary (grades K-8)
and high schools (grade 9-12), the law establish a Local School Council. Each Council is
composed of six parents, two community members, two teachers, and the principal of the school,
and its members (other than the principal) are elected every two years. The Councils of high
schools add to these eleven members one non-voting student representative. These councils are
empowered, and required by law, to select principals, write principal performance contracts that
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 9
they monitor and review every three years, develop annual School Improvement Plans that
address staff, program, infrastructure issues, monitor the implementation of those plans, and
approve school budgets. These bodies typically meet monthly during the school year, and less
frequently in the summer. This reform created the most formally directly democratic system of
school governance by far in the United States. Every year, more than 5,000 parents,
neighborhood residents, and school teachers are elected to run their schools. By a wide margin,
the majority of elected Illinois public officials who are minorities serve on these councils.
The weaknesses of their decentralization soon became apparent. While many schools
used their new powers to flourish, other foundered due to lack of capacity, knowledge, internal
conflict, or bad luck. New regulations and departments within the Chicago Public Schools were
refashioned to address these problems. For example, 1995 legislation requires each Local School
Council member to undergo some 20 hours of training, provided by the central school
administration, on topics such as budgeting, school improvement planning, principal selection,
group process, and council responsibilities. The same law also created accountability provisions
to identify the worst performing schools in the city. These schools receive additional
management supervision, resources, and in some cases disciplinary punishment.
The Chicago Police Department restructured itself in the mid-1990s along deeply
decentralized and democratic lines that resemble (but were conceived and implemented quite
independently from) that city’s school reform. In response to the perception that conventional
policing practices had proved largely ineffective in stemming the rise of crime or in maintaining
safety in many Chicago neighborhoods, the Mayor’s office, several community organizations,
and officials inside the police department began to explore “community policing” ideas in 1993.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 10
By 1995, reformers from these groups had implemented a wide ranging program, called the
Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, that shifted the burden of maintaining public safety from
police professionals to hundreds of joint-partnerships between police and neighborhood
residents.
This program divides the city into some 280 neighborhood “beats,” the administrative atom
of policing. The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy’s first major plank opens up beat-level
public safety operations to the observation, participation, and direction of neighborhood
residents. Interested residents and the police officers serving the area attend “community beat
meetings” held monthly in each of the city’s beats. The Strategy’s second major reform redefines
the “how” of policing. In these meetings, neighborhood residents and police discuss the
neighborhood’s public safety problems in order to establish, through deliberation, which
problems should be counted as priorities that merit the concentrated attention of police and
residents. They then develop strategies to address these problems; responsibility for
implementing some of these strategies is assigned to police (e.g. obtaining and executing search
warrants) while other strategies are assigned to groups of residents (e.g. meeting with landlords to
discuss building dilapidation). At successive meetings, participants assess the quality of
implementation and effectiveness of their strategies, revise strategies if necessary, and raise new
priorities.
As with the school reform experiment, the police department has joined with other public
agencies and non-profit organizations to support and manage these decentralized problem solving
efforts on a city-wide basis. In the areas of citizen capacity and community mobilization, the city
has hired community organizers and trainers to rove throughout the neighborhoods to teach group
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 11
problem solving skills. The strategies and plans developed in community beat meetings have been
incorporated into ordinary reporting, evaluation, and management routines.
2. Labor Market Transparency and Skill Formation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The next experiment moves away from the rec
onstruction of municipal government to
new economic institutions that bring together workers and managers for the common cause of
managing industrial labor markets. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP) is a
consortium of some 40 firms employing over 60,000 workers in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area.
WRTP, jointly governed by representatives from organized labor, managers of member firms, and
public sector institutions such as area Technical Colleges and the Wisconsin State Department of
Labor, aims to improve the health of area industry by joining labor and management to provide
services that isolated firms would be unlikely to provide for themselves.4 Though the WRTP is
also active in firm modernization and school-to-industrial work transitions, its most distinctive
and developed efforts lie in the provision of incumbent and entry level worker training.
5
Against a competitive background that has demanded continuous modernization of fixed
and human capital since the late 1970s and 1980s, many Milwaukee area industrial firms
responded to the failure of public and private training systems to keep pace with technological
change by attempting to impose compensatory wage reductions or by moving productive
facilities to areas of higher skill or lower labor cost. Beginning with an early prototype in 1988,
the WRTP answered this de-industrialization by creating Worker Education Centers that
attempted to improve area skill training. These centers are miniature schools located within firms
that train workers in the most urgently needed basic or advanced skills. By early 1998, the
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 12
WRTP had established more than 40 education centers in the facilities of its member firms and
others who requested technical assistance. Each center is jointly designed and operated by a
labor-management committee that selects skill priorities, designs classes, markets those classes to
the incumbent workforce, re-negotiates labor contract terms that may be incompatible with such
skill training (such as seniority rules, job classifications, and work rules), and administers the
center. These centers sometimes receive their funding through public sources, but most often
through firm-side contributions. They frequently employ instructors from area technical colleges
to teach classes on-site.
The direct participation of workers in the design and management of these centers may
enable them to succeed where previous attempts have failed. The Centers take advantage of
worker cooperation first by developing classes and training priorities based shop-floor
experiences and perceptions of need. Neither technical college nor management-led training efforts
can access this level of high-quality, front-line information about which skill areas deserve
immediate investment and whether training routines are effectively imparting skills and
knowledge to workers. The centers also use “peer-networks” to market this training to other
workers and thus build a degree of worker acceptance that management acting alone could not.
Furthermore, the mutual confidence that comes from this cooperative effort gains management
support in the form of resource-investment in training and labor support that is manifest in less
adversarial bargaining positions. These education centers embody the deliberative-democratic
principles by shifting the power of design and implementation of incumbent-worker training from
a state-centered technical college system to decentralized, firm-based learning centers.
Finally,
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 13
many of these centers
brought together managers and workers accustomed to operating on
opposite sides of a bargaining table in a deliberative effort to solve training problems.
3. Stakeholder Ecosystem Governance Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act
For most the time since its establishment in 1973, the U.S. Endangered S
pecies Act has
been the antithesis of deliberative action. Section 9 of that Act prohibits the “taking”—killing or
injuring—of any wildlife listed as an endangered species through either direct means or indirect
action such as modification of its habitat. In practice, this often imposed a strict bar on any
development or resource extraction activities in or near the habitats of endangered species. This
law had two main defects.6
First, it stopped productive development projects that may have had
marginal impact on the ultimate viability of endangered species. Less obviously, the law
protected only the those species that are listed and receive administrative priority,
7 and so
created a listing process that frequently amounted to a high stakes political battle between
developers and conservationists. As a result, too few species receive protection and some are
nearly decimated by the time they do qualify.
In 1982, Congress created an option to escape these deep deadlocks called an “incidental
take permit.” Under this provision, an applicant can obtain a waiver from strict enforcement by
producing a “Habitat Conservation Plan” (HCP) that allows human activity in the habitat of an
endangered species so long as “take” occurs only incidentally, the plan includes measures to
mitigate take, and the human activity does not impair the chances of the species’ survival and
recovery. Until recently, this relief option was little used because permitting procedures were
unclear and plan production costs high. Only 14 HCPs were produced between 1982 and 1992.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 14
Since 1993, however, these plans and their associated permits have proliferated. By April 1999,
254 plans covering more than 11 million acres had been approved and 200 more were in various
stages of development. This explosion in Habitat Conservation Plan activity grew out of an effort
by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and several associates to use incidental take permit provision
to avoid the lose-lose outcomes generated by strict application of the Endangered Species Act’s
section 9. Under the process, developers, environmentalists, and other stakeholders could
potentially work together to construct large-scale, eco-system conservation plans.
The most advanced Habitat Conservation Plans have served this ambition by
incorporating significant elements of the design of empowered deliberative democracy. For
example, large acreage, multi-species Conservation Plans in Southern California were developed
by stakeholder committees that include officials from local and national environmental agencies,
developers, environmental activists, and community organizations. Through deliberative
processes, these stakeholders have developed sophisticated management plans that set out
explicit numerical goals, measures to achieve those goals, monitoring regimes that assess plan
effectiveness through time, and adaptive management provisions to incorporate new scientific
information and respond to unforeseen events.
Beyond devolving responsibility and power for endangered species protection to
local
stakeholders, recent improvements to the national Habitat Conservation Plan regime proposed by
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service attempt to create centralized learning and accountability
devices to mitigate the defects of excessive localism.
8
It has been widely recognized that high
quality
HCPs possess common features such as quantitative biological goals, adaptive
management plans, and careful monitoring regimes. Yet a study
9
of more than 200 plans revealed
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 15
that less than half of all plans incorporate these basic features. In a proposed guidance, the Fish
and Wildlife Service would instruct field agents to require these plan features in the development
of
HCPs and a condition of permit approval. To make Habitat Conservation Plan provisions and
performance a matter of transparent public accountability and enable stakeholders of different
HCPs to assess and learn from each other, this same Fish and Wildlife Service guidance will
establish an HCP information infrastructure that tracks the details of HCP permits as well as
plan performance.
4. Participatory City Budgeting in Porto
Alegre, Brazil
Porto Alegre is the capital of the state of Rio Grande do
Sul in Brazil and home to some
1.3 million inhabitants. Like many other local and national states in Latin America, a
clientelistic
government has ruled the city in recent decades through the time-tested machinery of political
patronage. This system allocated public funds not according to public needs, but rather to
mobilize support for political personages. As a result, “the budget becomes a fiction, shocking
evidence of the discrepancy between the formal institutional framework and the actual state
practices.”10
Under similar arrangements elsewhere in Brazil, investigators revealed that these
patronage-based “irregular allocation of social expenditures amounted to 64 percent of the total
[budget].”11
In 1988, a coalition of left parties led by the Workers’ Party, or
Partido dos
Trabalhadores (PT), gained control of the municipal government of Porto
Alegre and went on to
win successive elections in 1992 and 1996. Their most substantial reform measure, called
“Participatory Budgeting” (PB), attempts to transform the
clientelistic, vote-for-money
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 16
budgeting reality into a fully accountable, bottom-up, deliberative system driven by the needs of
city residents. This multi-tiered interest articulation and administrative arrangement begins with
the sixteen administrative regions that compose the city. Within each region, a Regional Plenary
Assembly meets twice per year to settle budgetary issues. City executives, administrators,
representatives of community entities such as neighborhood associations, youth and health clubs,
and any interested inhabitant of the city attends these assemblies, but only residents of the region
can vote in them. They are jointly coordinated by members of municipal government and by
community delegates.
At the first of these annual plenary meetings, held in March, a report reviewing and
discussing the implementation of the prior year’s budget is presented by representatives of the
city government and delegates are elected from those present at the assembly to participate in
more or less weekly meetings over the following three months to work out the region’s spending
priorities for the following year. These delegate meetings are held in neighborhoods throughout
the region and discuss a wide range of possible projects which the city might fund in the region,
including issues such as transportation, sewage, land regulation, day care centers and health care.
At the end of three months, these delegates report back to the second regional plenary assembly
with a set of regional budget proposals. At this second plenary, this proposal is voted on and
two delegates and substitutes are elected to represent the region at in a city-wide body called the
Participatory Budgeting Council which meets over the following five months to formulate a city-
wide budget out of these regional agendas.
The city-level budget council is composed of two elected delegates
from each of the
regional assemblies, two elected delegates each from each of five “thematic
plenaries”
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 17
representing the city as a whole, a delegate from the municipal workers’ union, one from the
union of neighborhood associations, and two delegates from central municipal agencies. The
group meets intensively, at least once per week from July to September, to discuss and establish
a municipal budget that conforms to priorities established at the regional level while still
coordinating spending for the city as a whole. Since citizen representatives are in most cases non-
professionals, city agencies offer courses and seminars on budgeting for Council delegates as well
as for interested participants from the regional assemblies. On September 30 of each year, the
Council submits a proposed budget to the Mayor, who can either accept the budget or through
veto remand it back to the Council for revision. The budget council responds by either amending
the budget, or by over-riding the veto through a super-
majoritian vote of 2/3. City officials
estimate that some 100,000 people, or eight percent of the adult population, participated in the
1996 round of Regional Assemblies and intermediate meetings.
5. Village Governance in India: West
Benga and Kerala
Like the participatory budgeting reforms in Porto Alegre Brazil, a left wing party, the
Communist Party of India, revitalized substantive local governance in West Bengal
12
and Kerala,
India, as a central part of its political program. Though Indian states have enjoyed many formal
arrangements for local self government since independence, these institutions have been doubly
constrained. Externally, larger state bureaucracies enjoyed the lion’s share of financing and formal
authority over most areas of administration and development over this period. Internally,
traditional elites used social and economic power to dominate formally democratic local
structures. Until 1957, the franchise was restricted on status grounds.
13 But even after universal
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 18
suffrage, traditional leaders managed to control these bodies and their resources. Corruption was
rampant, many locally administered services were simply not performed, and development
resources squandered.
In a number of Indian states, significant reforms have attempted to solve these problems
of local governance by deepening their democratic character. The earliest of these began in the late
1970s in the state of West Bengal.14
The Left Front Government, which took power in there in
1977 and has enjoyed a growing base of support ever since, saw the
Panchayat village governance
system as a opportunity for popular mobilization and empowerment.
15 In addition to instituting
one of the most radical programs of land reform in India in order to break the hold of traditional
power at the village level, the Left Front Government has, in several distinct stages from 1977 to
the present, transformed the West
Begali
Panchayats in order to increase opportunities for
members of disadvantaged classes to wield public power.
The first important ste
p in Panchayat empowerment came in 1988, when the state
government shifted responsibility for implementing many development programs from state
ministries directly to Panchayats. Simultaneous with this expansion in function, their budgets
more than doubled to approximately 2 million rupees per Panchayat. Then, in 1993, a series of
Constitutional and state statutory amendments dramatically enhanced the potential for further
expansion of
Panchayat democracy. Three changes were particularly important. First, these
reforms increased the financing capacity of the lowest level
Panchayat authorities – the Gram
Panchayats — by imposing a revenue sharing scheme with the Districts and gave the Gram
Panchayats their own taxing power. Second, these measures stipulated that one third of the seats
in
panchayat assemblies and leadership positions would be occupied by women and that lower
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 19
caste—Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST)—persons would occupy leadership
positions in all of these bodies in proportion to their population in the District. Finally, and most
importantly for our purposes, the 1993 reforms established two kinds of directly deliberative
bodies, called Gram
Sabhas, to increase the popular accountability of Gram Panchayat
representatives. The Gram
Sabha consists of all of the persons within a Gram Panchayat area
(typically around 10,000) and meets once per year in the month of December. At this meeting,
elected Gram
Panchayat representative review the proposed budget for the following year and
review the accomplishment (or lack thereof) of the previous year’s budget and action items.
Similar meetings occur twice a year at an even more disaggregated level of
panchayat governance.
Officials in the southwestern state of Kerala watched these democratic developments
closely and then embarked on a bold initiative to adopt and extend them in 1996. There, the ruling
Communist Party of India (CPI) pursued a devolutionary program of village-level participatory
planning as a strategy to both shore-up its waning electoral base and enhance administrative
effectiveness. Under the program, some 40 percent of the state’s public budget would be taken
from traditionally powerful line departments in the bureaucracy and devolved to some 900
individual
Panchayat village planning councils.
16 In order to spend these monies, however, each
village would have produce detailed development plans that detailed assessments of need,
development reports, specific projects, supplemental financing, arrangements for deciding and
documenting plan beneficiaries, and monitoring arrangements. These plans, in principle, are then
approved or rejected by direct vote in popular village assembles. In addition to these procedural
requirements, there are some categorical limitations: some 40-50 percent of each
Panchayat’s
funds were to be invested in economic development, while 40 percent was earmarked for social
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 20
spending including slum improvement, a maximum of 30 percent could be spent on roads, and 10
percent of funds were to be targeted to programs for women.17
Outside of these general
requirements, village planning bodies were left to their own devices.
A large scale political and administrative mobilization effort has been organized to
support this basic reform of devolution-for-accountability.
18
One component of this effort has
been to build village capacity to conduct rural assessment and formulate development plans. In
1997-8, some 300,000 participants attended these training “development seminars” where they
learned basic self-governance skills. Actual planning processes involves more than 100,000
volunteers to develop village projects and more than 25,000 to combine these projects into village
level plans. This sheer increase in village planning and project formulation far outstripped the
central state government’s ability to assess the quality of the plans or reject poor ones, much less
provide feedback to improve them. To remedy this dearth, some 5,000 volunteers, many of them
retired professionals, were enlisted into “Volunteer Technical Committees” to perform this
review and feedback.
Given the newness of the reform, its scale, and the paucity of resources available to
evaluate it, it is unsurprising that we have only limited knowledge of its outcomes. In terms of
both participatory process and technical effectiveness, the results so far are promising but
indicate that much work remains. While some villages produced what appear to be thoughtful
plans with high levels of direct popular participation, many others failed to produce any plans at
all. For those plans that were submitted, many were poorly integrated, had poor credit and
financing schemes, and the projects within them were sometimes ill-conceived or simply
mimicked bureaucratic boilerplate. On dimensions of democratic process, participation in existing
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 21
village governance structures increased dramatically after the 1996 reform, but still only amounts
to some 10% of the population. More optimistically, village-level empowerment has spawned
the creation of grassroots neighborhood-level groups in hundreds of villages. Similar to the
dynamic in Porto
Alegre’s participatory budgeting program, these groups articulate very local
needs and interests to village bodies and in turn hold those units accountable from below.
II. The Principles and Institutional Design of Empowered Deliberative Democracy
Though each of these experiments differs from the others in its ambition, scope, and
concrete aims, they all share surprising similarities in their motivating principles and institutional
design features. They may have enough in common to warrant describing them as instances of a
novel, but broadly applicable, model of deliberative democratic practice that can be expanded
both horizontally—into other policy areas and other regions—and vertically—into higher and
lower levels of institutional and social life. We assert that they do, and name that model
Empowered Deliberative Democracy (EDD).
Empowered Deliberative Democracy attempts to advance three currents in social science
and democratic theory. First, EDD takes many of its normative commitments from analyses of
practices and values of communication, public justification, and deliberation.
19 It extends the
application of deliberation from abstract questions over value conflicts and principles of justice
to very concrete matters such as street paving, school improvement, and habitat management. It
also locates deliberation empirically, in specific organizations and practices, in order to marshal
social experience to deepen understandings of practical deliberation and directions for its
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 22
improvement. Second, the recent body of work on civic engagement and secondary associations
offers another point of departure for EDD.
20
This family of scholarship attempts to understand,
and by doing so demonstrate, the importance of civic life and non-governmental organization to
vigorous and effective democracy. EDD builds upon this insight by exploring whether the
reorganization of formal state institutions can stimulate democratic engagement in civil society,
and so form a virtuous circle of reciprocal reinforcement. Finally, EDD is part of a broader
collaboration to discover and imagine democratic institutions that are at once more participatory
and effective than the familiar configuration of political representation and bureaucratic
administration.21 EDD adds considerable understanding of the institutions, practices, and effects
of citizen participation to that investigation.
We thus begin, tentatively and abstractly, to sketch EDD by laying out three general
principles that are fundamental to all these experiments: (1) a focus on specific, tangible
problems, (2) involvement of ordinary people affected by these problems and officials close to
them, and (3) the deliberative development of solutions to these problems. In the reform contexts
examined here, three institutional design features seem to stabilize and deepen the practice of
these basic principles: (1) the devolution of public decision authority to empowered local units,
(2) the creation of formal linkages of responsibility, resource distribution, and communication
that connect these units to each other and to
superordinate, more centralized authorities, (3) the
use and generation of new state institutions to support and guide these
decentered problem-
solving efforts rather than leaving them as informal or voluntary affairs. Finally, we discuss some
crucial background conditions necessary for these institutional designs to contribute to the
realization of democratic values.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 23
1.
Three Principles of Empowered Deliberative Democracy
First Principle: Practical Orientation
The first distinctive characteristic of our experiments is that they all develop governance
structures geared to quite concrete concerns. These experiments, though often linked to social
movements and political parties, differ from both in that they focus on practical problems such
as providing public safety, training workers, caring for ecosystems, or constructing sensible
municipal budgets. If these experiments make headway on these issues, then they offer a
potential retort to widespread doubts about the efficacy of state action. More importantly, they
would deliver goods to sectors of society that are often most grievously denied them. This
practical focus also creates situations in which actors accustomed competing with one another for
power or resources might begin to cooperate and build more congenial relations. This practical
focus, however, may distract agents from more important, broader conflicts (e.g.
redistributive
taxation or property rights) by concentrating their attention on a constrained set of relatively
narrow issues.
Second Principle: Bottom-Up Participation
All of the reforms mentioned establish new channels for those most directly affected by
targeted problems—typically ordinary citizens and officials in the field—to apply their
knowledge, intelligence, and interest to the formulation of solutions. We offer two general
justifications for this turn away from the commitment that complex technical problems are best
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 24
solved by experts trained to the task. First, effective solutions to certain kinds of novel and fluid
public problems may require the variety of experience and knowledge offered more by diverse,
relatively more open-minded, citizens and field operatives, than by distant and narrowly trained
experts. In Chicago school governance and policing, for example, we will see that bottom-up
neighborhood councils invented effective solutions that police officials acting autonomously
would never have developed. Second, direct participation of grassroots operators increases
accountability and reduces the length of the chain of agency that accompanies political parties
and their bureaucratic apparatus. In developing areas like Porto
Alegre, Brazil and Kerala, India,
one of the main accomplishments of enlarged participation has been to plug fiscal leaks from
patronage payoffs and loosen the grip of traditional political elites.
This is not to say that technical experts are irrelevant to empowered deliberative
democracy. Experts do play important roles in
decisionmaking, but do not enjoy exclusive power
to make important decisions. Their task, in different ways in the various cases, is to facilitate
popular deliberative
decisionmaking and to leverage synergies between professional and citizen
insights rather than to pre-empt citizen input. Whether these gains from popular participation
outweigh the potential costs of reduced expert power is an empirical matter that other
contributions in this issue treat extensively.
Third Principle: Deliberative Solution Generation
Deliberation is the third distinctive value of empowered deliberative democracy. In
deliberative decision-making, participants listen to each other’s positions and generate group
choices after due consideration.
22
In contemplating and arguing for what the group should do,
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 25
participants ought to persuade one another by offering reasons that others can accept. Such
reasons might have forms like: we should do X because it is the “right thing to do,” “it is the fair
way to go forward,” “we did Y last time and it didn’t work,” or “it is the best thing for the group
as a whole.” This ideal does not require participants to be altruistic or to converge upon a
consensus of value, strategy, or perspective. Real world deliberations are often characterized by
heated conflict, winners, and losers. The important feature of genuine deliberation is that
participants find reasons that they can accept in collective actions, not necessarily that they
completely endorse the action or find it maximally advantageous.
A deliberative decision process such as the formulation of school improvement plans in
Chicago or village plans in Kerala might proceed first with the construction of an agenda; parties
offer proposals about what the group’s priorities should be. They might then justify these
proposals in terms of their capacity to advance common interests (e.g. building an effective
school) or deliver social justice under severe resource constraints (e.g. beneficiary selection in
rural development projects). After a full vetting of various proposals and the considerations
backing them, participants might then, if remaining disputes made it necessary, vote to select a
group choice. In casting an authentic deliberative ballot, however, each participant does not vote
for the option that best advances his own self-interest, but rather for the choice that seems most
reasonable. Choices will be fair if groups adopt reasonable proposals rather than those that garner
the greatest self-interested support or political influence. Similarly, participants then reason
about the strategies that will best advance that group agenda and should adopt that set which
seems prospectively most promising. These results, of course, depend upon participants
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 26
following the procedures and norms of deliberation. The extent to which they do so depends
upon both individual motives and institutional designs.
One danger of ostensibly deliberative processes is that some participants will use their
power to manipulate and enhance the legitimacy positions motivated by particularistic interests.
In deliberative decision-making processes, by contrast, earnest arguments constitute the central
kind of reasoning through which problem-solving actually takes place. While it may sometimes be
difficult for a casual outside observer to distinguish between genuine deliberation and
disingenuous posturing, the difference is nevertheless fundamental and generally apparent to
participants
While empowered deliberative democracy shares this focus on persuasion and reaso
n-
giving with nearly all accounts of deliberation, its practical focus departs from many treatments
that depict discourse as the proffering of reasons to advance pre-given principles, proposals,
values, or policies. In these experiments, deliberation almost always involves continuous joint
planning, problem-solving, and strategizing. Participants in EDD usually enter these discursive
arenas to formulate together such means and even ends. They participate not exclusively to press
pre-formed agendas or visions, but rather they expect that strategies and solutions will be
articulated and forged through
deliberation
and planning
with the other participants. Though they
often have little in common, indeed often have histories of animosity, participants in these
settings are united in their ignorance of how best to improve the general situation that brings them
together. In the village planning efforts of Kerala or the Habitat Conservation Planning, for
example, the initial steps of decision often involve assaying existing circumstances. It is no
surprise that participants often form or transform their preferences and opinions in light of that
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 27
undertaking. If they entered such processes confident in a particular course of action, some other
strategy (such as management decree or partisan attempts to ascend to the commanding heights)
might be more attractive than deliberative engagement.
23
Empowered deliberative decision-making can be contrasted with three more familiar
methods of social choice:
command and control
by experts,
aggregative voting, and strategic
negotiation
. In the first familiar mode, power is vested in managers, bureaucrats, or other
specialists who are charged to act in the common weal and are capable of acting effectively by
dint of their training, knowledge and normative commitments. While such experts may engage in
deliberative practices among themselves, their discussions are insulated from popular
participation. By contrast, in empowered deliberative democracy, experts and bureaucrats are
engaged in deliberation directly with citizens.
Aggregation is a second familiar method social
decisionmaking in which a group’s choice
results from combining the preferences of the individual participants that make it up.
Voting—over issues, proposals, or candidates—is perhaps the most common procedure of
aggregative social choice. In voting, participants begin by ranking alternatives according to their
desires. Then an algorithm such as majority rule selects a single option for the whole group.
Again, a main difference between aggregative and deliberative voting is that in the former
individuals simply vote according to their own self-interest, without needing to consider the
reasonableness, fairness, or acceptability of that option to others. Without delving into the
familiar merits or problems
24
with aggregative voting, the shift to deliberative decision in some of
the empowered deliberative democracy experiments responded to failings in aggregative
mechanisms that preceded them. Sometimes, as in Porto
Alegre, these shortcomings lay in the
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 28
failure of electoral mechanisms to effectively respect electors’ desires due to problems like
patronage and corruption. In other instances, for example the formulation of school improvement
or habitat conservation plans, complexity and uncertainty often prevents participants from
forming clear preferences that can be easily aggregated.
Strategic bargaining and negotiation
25
is a third contrasting method of social choice. As
with aggregation but distinct from deliberation or most varieties of command, parties in strategic
bargaining use
decisionmaking procedures to advance their own unfettered self-interest backed by
resources and power they bring to the table. By comparison, voting procedures typically attempt
to equalize such power differentials through provisions like “one person one vote.” Collective
bargaining between large unions and employers captures this difference; each brings different
sources of authority and force to the encounter, and each uses them to secure the best (not
necessarily the fairest) deal that it can for its side. Unlike purely deliberative interactions, parties
typically do so through the use of threats, differential power, misrepresentation and “strategic
talk.”26
These four modes of decision—delibera
tion, command, aggregation, and strategic
negotiation—are ideal types. Actual processes, not least those involving principles of
empowered deliberative democracy, often contain elements of each. We privilege deliberation in
EDD, however, as a value and norm that motivates parties and informs institutional design
because of its distinctive benefits for these political and policy contexts. The case study papers
in the rest of this issue of
Politics & Society
explore the extent to which the reality of decision
practices vindicates this commitment.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 29
2.
Three Design Properties
Since these principles are in themselves quite attractive, the pressing question is whether
feasible institutional configurations or realistic social conditions would measurably advance them
in practice. The cases explored in this issue suggest that reforms advancing these principles in
deep and sustainable ways often exhibit three institutional design properties. Since the empirical
study of alternative institutional designs is too immature to reveal whether these features are
necessary (they are certainly not sufficient) to deliberative democratic arrangements, we offer
them as observations and hypotheses about institutional features that contribute to advancing,
stabilizing and deepening democratic values.
First Design Property: Devolution
Since empowered deliberative democracy targets problems and solicits participation
localized in both issue and geographic space, its institutional reality requires the commensurate
reorganization of the state apparatus. It entails the administrative and political devolution of
power to local action units—such as neighborhood councils, personnel in individual workplaces,
and delineated eco-system habitats—charged with devising and implementing solutions and held
accountable to performance criteria. The bodies in the reforms below are not merely advisory, but
rather creatures of a transformed state endowed with substantial public authority.
This devolution departs profoundly from centralizing progressive s
trategies, and for that
reason many on the Left may find it problematic. Just as the participatory dimensions of these
reforms constitute a turn away from authorized expertise, delegating to local units the power of
task-conception as well as execution stems from skepticism about the possibility that democratic
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 30
centralism can consistently generate effective solutions in these targeted issue areas. So, for
example, the Chicago cases offer neighborhood governance of policing and public education as an
supple alternatives to conventional centralized solutions such as more stringent penalties and
more police on the street for public safety issues, and national testing, school finance reform,
implementing the one best curriculum, racial desegregation, vouchers, and privatization for
educational problems. Habitat Conservation Planning gives up the centralized and uniform
standard of development prohibition under the Endangered Species Act in favor of a regime in
which local stakeholders produce highly tailored eco-system management plans that advance both
development and species protection. Rather than allocating funds and staff to pave, electrify, and
build sewers according to uniform standards or centralized judgement, Porto
Alegre’s
participatory budgeting system invites neighborhood residents and associations into the direct,
repeated process of establishing, implementing, and monitoring these priorities.
Second Design Property: Centralized Supervision and Coordination
Though they enjoy substantial power and di
scretion, local units do not operate as
autonomous, atomised sites of
decisionmaking in empowered deliberative democracy. Instead,
each of the cases features linkages of accountability and communication that connect local units
to
superordinate bodies. These central offices can reinforce the quality of local democratic
deliberation and problem-solving in variety of ways: coordinating and distributing resources,
solving problems that local units cannot address by themselves, rectifying pathological or
incompetent decision-making in failing groups, and diffusing innovations and learning across
boundaries. The Indian
Panchayat systems and participatory budgeting in Porto
Alegre feed
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 31
relevant village and neighborhood decisions to higher levels of government. Both of the Chicago
neighborhood governance reforms establish centralized capacities for benchmarking the
performance of comparable units (schools, police beats) against one another and for holding them
accountable to minimum procedural and substantive requirements. And, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service coordinates the activities of some 250 Habitat Conservation Plans though
centralized monitoring, information pooling, and permit and performance tracking.
Unlike New Left political models in which concerns f
or liberation lead to demands for
autonomous
decentralization, empowered deliberative democracy suggests new forms of
coordinated
decentralization. Driven by the pragmatic imperative to find solutions that work,
these new models reject both democratic centralism and strict decentralization as unworkable.
The rigidity of the former leads it too often to disrespect local circumstance and intelligence and
as a result it has a hard time learning from experience. Uncoordinated decentralization, on the
other hand, isolates citizens into small units, surely a foolhardy measure for those who don’t
know how to solve a problem but suspect that others, somewhere else, do. Thus these reforms
attempt to construct connections that spread information between local units and hold them
accountable.
Third Design Property: State Centered, Not
Voluntaristic
A third design characteristic of these experiments is that they colonize state power and
transform formal governance institutions. Many spontaneous activist efforts in areas like
neighborhood revitalization,
27
environmental activism,
28
local economic development, and worker
health and safety seek to influence state outcomes through outside pressure. In doing so, the
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 32
most successful of these efforts do advance empowered deliberative democracy’s principles of
practicality, participation, and perhaps even deliberation in civic or political organizations. But
they leave intact the basic institutions of state governance. By contrast, EDD reforms attempt to
remake official institutions along these principles. This formal route potentially harnesses the
power and resources of the state to deliberation and popular participation and thus to make these
practices more durable and widely accessible.
These experiments generally seek to tran
sform the mechanisms of state power into
permanently mobilized deliberative-democratic, grassroots forms. Such transformations happen
as often as not in close cooperation with state agents. These experiments are thus
less
“radical”
than most varieties of activist self-help in that their central activity is not “fighting the power.”
But they are
more radical in that they have larger reform scopes, are authorized by state or
corporate bodies to make substantial decisions, and, most crucially, try to change the central
procedures of power rather than merely attempting occasionally to shift the vector of its exercise.
Whereas parties, social movement organizations, and interest groups often set their goals though
internal deliberative processes and then fight for corporate or political power to implement those
goals, these experiments re-constitute decision processes within the state and firm. When this
reorganization is successful, participants have the luxury of taking some exercise of power for
granted, they need not spend the bulk of their energy fighting for power (or against it).
By implication, these transformations attempt to institutionalize the on-going
participation of ordinary citizens, most often in their role as consumers of public goods, in the
direct determination of what those goods are and how they should be best provided. This
perpetual participation stands in contrast, for example, to the relatively brief democratic
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 33
moments in both outcome-oriented, campaign-based social movements and electoral competitions
in ordinary politics in which leaders/elites mobilize popular participation for a specific outcome
or series of outcomes. If popular pressure becomes sufficient to implement some favored policy
or elected candidate, the moment of broad participation usually ends and the implementation of a
policy or legislative activity of an official takes place in the largely isolated state sphere.
3.
Enabling Conditions
A host of background conditions can facilitate or impede the progress of empowered
deliberative democracy. Literacy is an obvious example.
Kerala’s high literacy rates compared to
other Indian states, and in particular female literacy, certainly facilitate the participatory
democratic experiment there. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the likelihood that these institutional
designs will generate desired effects depends significantly upon the balance of power between
actors engaged in empowered deliberative democracy, and in particular the configurations of non-
deliberative power, that constitute the terrain upon which structured deliberation inside EDD
occurs. Participants will be much more likely to engage in earnest deliberation when alternatives
to it—such as strategic domination or exit from the process altogether—are made less attractive
by roughly balanced power. When individuals lack the power to easily dominate others and
secure their first-best preference, they are often more willing to deliberate. It is important to note
that this background condition does not require absolute equality. The participants in the
experiments below enjoy vastly different resources, levels of expertise, education, status, and
numerical support. Sometimes, however, they are on a par sufficient for deliberative cooperation
to be attractive.29
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 34
At least three paths
lead to power balances sufficient for deliberation. The first comes
from self-conscious institutional design efforts. When administrators or legislators endow parents
with the power to fire school principals or popular councils with authority for reviewing village
budgets, they put citizens and local experts on a more equal footing. Historical accidents, not
intended to establish deliberation or participation at all, sometimes also perform this equalization
function. The Endangered Species Act in the United States, for example, imposes costs on
private property owners that are sometimes so severe that they would rather cooperate with
environmentalists rather than bear them. Finally, groups such as community organizations, labor
unions, and advocacy groups often check the tendencies of both officials and groups of citizens
to commandeer ostensibly deliberative processes to advance their own narrow ends.
To recap, our experiments seem to share three political principles, three design characteristics,
and one primary background condition:
•
First, each experiment addresses a specific area of public problems.
•
Second, this deliberation relies upon the empowered involvement of ordinary citizens and
officials in the field.
•
Third, each experiment attempts to solve those problems through processes of reasoned
deliberation.
In terms of their institutional properties,
•
These experiments devolve decision and implementation power to local action units.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 35
•
Local action units are not autonomous, but rather recombinant and linked to each other
and to supervening levels of the state in order to allocate resources, solve common and
cross-border problems, and diffuses innovations and learning.
• The experiments colonize and transform existing state and corporate institutions in such a
way that the administrative bureaucracies charged with solving these problems are
restructured into these deliberative groups. The power of these groups to implement the
outcomes of their deliberations, therefore, comes from the authorization of these state
and corporate bodies.
And finally, in terms of background enabling conditions,
• There is a rough equality of power, for the purposes of deliberative decision, between
participants.
III. Institutional Objectives: Consequences for Effectiveness, Equity, and Participation
The procedural features of institutions designed according to the principles specified
above may be desirable in themselves; we often consider deliberation and participation as
important independent values. However, scholars, practitioners, and casual observers will judge
these experiments by their consequences as much as by the quality of their processes. In this
section, we describe how institutions following the design principles above might advance three
especially important democratic values: state action that is (1) effective, (2) equitable, and (3)
invites broad, deep, and sustained participation. Whether properly designed institutions can
advance these values or will instead yield a host of negative and unintended consequences must
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 36
be settled primarily through empirical examinations, and we offer here a set of optimistic
expectations that might guide those investigations.
1. Effective Problem Solving.
The first, perhaps most important, institutional objective of these deliberative
democratic
experiments is to advance public ends — such as worker skill upgrading, good schools, safe
neighborhoods, protecting endangered species, and sensible urban budget allocations — more
effectively than alternative institutional arrangements. If they cannot produce such outcomes,
then they are not very attractive reform projects. If they perform well, on the other hand, then
this flavor of radical democracy has the potential to gain widespread popular and even elite
support. Why, then, might we expect these deliberative democratic institutions to produce
effective outcomes?
Several features of decentralized deliberation may enhance the effectiveness of this
organizational form. First, these experiments convene and empower individuals close to the
points of action who possess intimate knowledge about relevant situations. Second, in many
problem contexts, these individuals, whether they are citizens or officials at the street level, may
also know how best to improve the situation. Third, the deliberative process that regulates these
groups’ decision making is likely to generate superior solutions than hierarchical or less reflective
aggregation procedures (such as voting) because all participants have opportunities to offer useful
information and to consider alternative solutions more deeply. Beyond this, deliberation
heightens participants’ commitment to implement decisions because they are not imposed from
above. Fourth, these experiments shorten the feedback loop—the distance and time between
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 37
decisions, action, effect, observation, and reconsideration—in public action and so create a nimble
style of collective action that can quickly recognize and respond to erroneous or ineffective
strategies. Finally, each of these experiments creates hundreds of such component groups, each
operating with substantial autonomy but not in isolation. This proliferation of command points
allows multiple strategies, techniques, and priorities to be pursued simultaneously in order to
more rapidly discover and diffuse those that prove themselves to be most effective. The learning
capacity of the system as a whole, therefore, may be enhanced by the combination of
decentralized empowered deliberation and centralized coordination and feedback.
2. Equity
In addition to making p
ublic action more effective, three features may enhance the
capacity of these experiments to generate fair and equitable outcomes. First, these goals are well
served by these experiments if they deliver effective public action to those who do not generally
enjoy this good. Since most of the experiments concentrate on problems of disadvantaged people
— ghetto residents in Chicago and Milwaukee, those from poor neighborhoods in Porto
Alegre,
Brazil, low status villagers in India, and industrial workers in Wisconsin facing technological
displacement — sheer effectiveness is an important component of social justice.
A second source of equity and fairness stems from the inclusion of disadvantaged
individuals — residents and workers — who are often excluded from public decisions. A classic
justification for democratic rule over paternalist or otherwise exclusive modes is that a decision is
more likely to treat those affected by it fairly when they exercise input. These experiments push
this notion quite far by attempting to devise procedures whereby those most affected by these
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 38
decisions exercise unmediated input while avoiding the paralysis or foolishness that so often
results from such efforts.
These experiments’ deliberative procedures offer a third way to advance equity and
fairness. Unlike strategic bargaining (in which outcomes are determined by the powers that
parties bring to negotiations), hierarchical command (in which outcomes are determined by
according to the judgement of the highly placed), markets (in which money mediates outcomes),
or aggregative voting (in which outcomes are determined according to the quantity of mobilized
supporters), they establish groups that ostensibly make decisions according to the rules of
deliberation. Parties make proposals and then justify them with reasons that the other parties in
the group can support. A procedural norm of these groups is that they generate and adopt
proposals that enjoy broad consensus support, though strict consensus is never a requirement.
Groups select measures that upon reflection win the deepest and widest appeal. In the ideal, such
procedures are regulated according to the lights of reason rather than money, power, numbers, or
status. Since the idea of fairness is infused in the practice of reasonable discussion, truly
deliberative decision-making should tend toward more equitable outcomes than those regulated by
power, status, money, or numbers. There will no doubt be some distance between this lofty
deliberative ideal and the actual practices of these experiments. The other articles in this issue will
explore the character and extent of that distance.
3. Broad and Deep Participation
Beyond achieving effective and fair public outcomes, these experiments also attempt to
advance the venerable democratic value of engaging ordinary citizens in sustained and meaningful
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 39
participation. They rely upon popular engagement as a central productive resource. Such
engagement can provide local information on the prospective wisdom of various policies,
retrospective data on their effects that in turn drives feedback learning, and additional energy for
strategy execution. The experiments invite and attempt to sustain high levels of lay engagement in
two main ways. First, they establish additional channels of voice over issues about which
potential participants care deeply, such as the quality of their schools and of their lived spaces,
their ability to acquire skills on which their employment security rests, and the disposition of
public resources devoted to local public goods. The experiments increase participation, then, by
adding important channels for participation to the conventional avenues of political voice such as
voting, joining pressure groups, and contacting officials. They also offer a distinct inducement to
participation: the real prospect of exercising state power.
30 With most other forms of political
participation, the relationship between, say, one’s vote or letter to a representative and a public
decision is tenuous at best. In these experiments, however, participants exercise influence over
state strategies. This input often yields quite palpable responses. Often, the priorities and
proposals of lay participants are adopted immediately or in some modified form. Even in cases
where one’s proposals are rejected through deliberative processes, one at least knows why.
The quality of participation—as gauged by the degree to which participants’ opinions
and proposals are informed and the quality of their interactions with one another—might also be
higher under these experiments in deliberative public action than under more conventional
political forms such as voting, interest group competition, or social movements. Following John
Stuart Mill’s comment that the success of democratic arrangements can be measured in two
ways: by the quality of its decisions and the quality of citizens it produces,
31
we say that the
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 40
character of participation, quite apart from its level (as measured by voting turnout, for example)
is an independent desiderata of democratic politics. Modern critics from both the left and the
right seem to be unified in their low opinion of the political capacities of mass publics.
Explanations from the left include the rise of the “culture industry” and the concomitant decline
of autonomous “public spheres” in civil societies where a competent public opinion might be
formed. The political right agrees with this diagnosis, but recommends elite democracy and
techno-bureaucratic administration as a solution that does not require healing the public body.
Against the background of this alarming diagnosis and even more alarming cure, concern for the
public wisdom of private individuals is even more urgent than in Mill’s time.
Individuals’ capacities to deliberate and make public decisions atrophy when lef
t unused,
and participation in these experiments exercises those capacities more intensely than
conventional democratic channels. In national or local elections, for example, the massive amounts
of information sold to them from many vantage points tempts even engaged, well- educated
citizens to throw their hands up in frustrated confusion or to focus on more easily understood
dimensions of character, personality, or party identity. These experiments reduce these
expertise-based barriers to engaged participation and thus encourage participants to develop and
deploy their pragmatic political capabilities. First, they allow casual, non-professional,
participants to master specific areas of knowledge necessary to make good decisions by shrinking
— through decentralization — decision scopes to narrow functional and geographic areas. Some
of our experiments doubly focus decisions — training at a single firm, safety in a neighborhood,
the effectiveness of a particular firm — and so participants may master materials necessary to
make high quality decisions. Other cases, such as deliberative planning bodies in
Kerlea and Porto
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 41
Alegre’s participatory budget have broader scope, but nevertheless retain the pragmatic,
problem-centered concerns that enables ordinary citizens to engage the
decisionmaking process.
Furthermore, citizens have incentives to develop the capacities and master the information
necessary to make good decisions because they must live with the consequences of poor ones —
these experiments institute “direct democracy” in the sense that these groups’ decisions are often
directly implemented by relevant state agencies. Again, this contrasts with most forms of
political voice such as voting or letter writing, where the consequences of one’s decisions are
statistically negligible.
Beyond the proximate scope and effect of participation, these experiments also encourage
the development of political wisdom in ordinary citizens by grounding competency upon
everyday, situated, experiences rather than simply data mediated through popular press,
television, or “book-learning.” Following Dewey and contemporary theorists of education and
cognition, we expect that many, perhaps most, individuals develop skills and competencies more
easily when those skills are integrated with actual experiences and observable effects. Since these
experiments rely upon practical knowledge of, say, skill training or school operation, and provide
opportunities for its repeated application and correction, individuals develop political capacities
in intimate relation to other regions of their professional and private lives. Many participants will
find it easier (not to mention more useful) to acquire this kind of “situated” political wisdom and
capacity compared to the more free-standing varieties of political knowledge required for, say,
voting. Finally, each of these experiments contributes to the political development of individuals
by providing specialized,
para-professional training. Leading reformers in each of our experiments
realized, or learned through disappointment, that most non-professionals lack the capacities to
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 42
participate effectively in functionally-specific and empowered groups. Rather than retrenching
into technocratic
professionalization, however, some have established procedures to impart the
necessary foundational capacities to participants who lack them. For example, the Chicago local
school governance reform requires parents and community participants to receive training in
democratic process, school budgeting and finance, strategic planning, principal hiring, and other
specific skills. Each of these experiments not only consists of
fora for honing and practicing
deliberative-democratic skills, but most also literally establishes schools of democracy to develop
participants’ political capacities.
IV. An Agenda for Exploring Empowered Participation
Thus far, we have sketched the outlines of a model of radical democracy that aims to
solve anticipated practical public problems through deliberative action, laid out the practical and
ethical advantages of institutions built along that model, and offered brief sketches of real-world
examples that embody these principles. Other articles in this issue explore several actually-
existing cases in some detail, inquiring whether these abstract principles accurately characterize
them, whether the experiments in fact yield the benefits that we have attributed to deliberative
democracy, and whether these advantages must be purchased at some as yet unspecified price.
Before we move to that very concrete discussion, however, we conclude this introduction by
laying out three sets of critical questions that might guide these investigations. First, to what
extent do these experiments conform to the theoretical model we have elaborated for the
institutional design and effects of empowered deliberative democracy? Second, what are the most
damning flaws in our model of empowered deliberative democracy? Finally, what is the scope of
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 43
empowered deliberative democracy—is it limited to the few idiosyncratic cases that we have laid
out, or are the principles and design features more broadly applicable?
1. The relationship of the cases to the model
Even if the normative principles of this proposed model offer an attractive guide for
feasible institutional innovation, the specific experiments we have described may not in fact
conform to it. Six critical dimensions of fit are:
(i) How genuinely
deliberative
are the actual decision-making processes?
(ii)
How effectively are the decisions made through this
process translated into real
action?
(iii)
To what extent are the deliberative bodies able to effectively monitor the
implementation of their decisions?
(iv) To what extent do these reforms incorporate recombinant measures that coordinate
the actions of local units and diffuse innovations among them?
(v)
To what extent do the deliberative processes constitute real “schools for
democracy”?
(vi) Are the actual outcomes of the entire process more desirable than those of prior
institutional arrangements?
(
i) Deliberation
Because many supposed benefits of our model rest on the notion of deliberation, the first
question goes to the degree to which decision-making processes within these experiments are
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 44
genuinely deliberative. Equitable decisions depend upon parties agreeing to that which is fair
rather than pushing for as much as they can get. Effectiveness relies upon individuals remaining
open to new information and proposals rather than doggedly advancing pre-formulated ones. And
learning at individual and group levels depends on people being able to alter their opinions and
even their preferences. Though deliberation is seldom deployed as a descriptive characteristic of
organizations in social science, its practice is completely familiar in public and private life —
where we often discuss issues and resolve conflict not by pushing for as much as we can get, but
rather by doing what seems reasonable and fair. Does this generous characterization of individual
and group behavior accurately describe how participants make decisions in real world cases, or is
their interaction better characterized by the more familiar mechanisms of rational interest
aggregation — command, bargaining, log-rolling, and threatening? In situations characterized by
substantial differences of interest or opinion, particularly from ideological sources, deliberation
may break down into either gridlock or power-based conflict resolution. Is the model’s scope
therefore limited to environments of low conflict or minimal inequality? In more contentious
situations, do deliberative efforts generally lead to co-optation as one side softens its demands to
get along or adapts to unjust conditions? If so, then the symbiotic relationship between
deliberation and empowerment suggested in section II above can become a trade off.
(ii) Action
The fact that collective decisions are made in a deliberative, egalitarian and democratic
manner is no guarantee that those decisions will be effectively translated into action. In some
cases, the implementation depends upon the capacities and will of the members themselves. For
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 45
example, Chicago community policing groups often ask patrol officers to perform various tasks.
In such cases, weak accountability mechanisms of publicity and deliberation may be insufficient
for the group to compel the action of its own members. In other cases, implementation may
depend upon the obedience of others over whom the group has formal authority — such as the
staff under a Local School Council. Such situations encounter familiar principal-agent dilemmas.
In still other instances, implementation may rely upon bodies whose relations with primary
deliberative groups are even less structured. In Porto
Alegre’s participatory budgeting system,
for example, the deliberations of regional assemblies are passed onto a city-wide body whose
budget must then be approved by the mayor. These budgetary decisions must then filter back
down the municipal apparatus before, say, a sewer main gets built or a street paved. It is
therefore important to know the extent to which decisions from deliberative processes are
effectively translated into real social action.
(iii) Monitoring
Implementation requires more than turning an initial decision into action; it also demands
mechanisms of ongoing monitoring and accountability. To what extent are these deliberative
groups capable of monitoring the implementation of their decisions and holding responsible
parties accountable? Most democratic processes are front-loaded in the sense that popular
participation focuses on deciding a policy question (as in a referendum) or selecting a candidate
(as in an election) rather than on monitoring implementation of the decision or the platform.
These democratic experiments, by contrast, aim for more sustained levels of participation over
time. Democracy here means participation beyond the point of decision, to popular
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 46
implementation, monitoring of that implementation, and disciplined review of its effects. Popular
participation throughout the entire cycle of public action, it is hoped, will increase the
accountability of public power and the public’s capacity to learn from past successes and
failures. It remains to be seen, however, whether participants in these experiments can sustain
involvement over time with sufficient intensity to become effective monitors of the decisions
they make; as in conventional democratic processes, moments leading up to decision are no doubt
more exciting and visible than the long periods of execution that follow.
(iv) Alleged Benefits of Centralized Coordination and Power
While it is fairly clear that all of the experimental reforms decentralize power, the
coordinating centralized mechanisms of accountability and learning theorized as the second design
principle of empowered deliberative democracy are less obvious. Under the pragmatic devolution
of empowered deliberative democracy, local units are by themselves unable to solve coordination
and cross-border problems and would thus benefit from information-sharing connections to other
units in the system. The fashion and degree to which the experiments reviewed above construct
institutions to execute these functions varies widely. The empirical studies will, in more
exploratory fashion, examine the extent to which these reforms construct recombinant linkages
and establish how well those mechanisms work in practice.
(v) Schools of Democracy
For deliberative democracy to succeed in real-world settings, it must engage individuals
with little experience and few skills of participation. The fifth question asks whether these
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 47
experiments actually function as schools of democracy by increasing the deliberative capacities
and dispositions of those who participate in them. While many standard treatments of political
institutions take the preferences and capacities of individuals who act with them as fixed, these
democratic experiments treat both of these dimensions of their participation as objects of
transformation. By exercising capacities of argument, planning, and evaluation, through practice
individuals might become better deliberators. By seeing that cooperation mediated through
reasonable deliberation yields benefits not accessible through adversarial methods, participants
might increase their disposition to be reasonable, and to transform narrowly self-interested
preferences accordingly. Both of these hypotheses about the development of individuals as
citizens in these democratic experiments are, of course, highly speculative pending much closer
examination of actors’ actual behavior.
(vi) Outcomes
For
many potential critics and supporters, the most important question will be one of
outcomes. Do these deliberative institutions produce strategies or effects more desirable than
those of the institutions they supplant? One prime justification for re-allocating public power to
these decentralized and deliberative groups is that they devise public action strategies and
solutions that are superior to those of, say, command-and-control bureaucracies, by virtue of
superior knowledge of local conditions, greater learning capacities, and improved accountability.
A central topic of empirical investigation, then, is whether these experiments have in practice
managed to generate more innovative solutions.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 48
2. Criticisms of the Model
Beyond these questions that address
whether the principles of our model of deliberative
democracy accurately describe the experiments we examine, a second set of questions focuses
pointedly upon criticisms that have been raised against ostensibly similar proposals for
associative, deliberative governance. The empirical materials can illuminate six critical concerns
about empowered deliberative democracy:
(i)
The democratic character of processes and outcomes may be vulnerable to serious
problems of power and domination inside deliberative arenas by powerful factions or
elites.
(ii)
External actors and institutional contexts
may impose severe limitations on the scope
of deliberative decision and action. In particular, powerful participants may engage in
“forum shopping” strategies in which they use deliberative institutions only when it
suits them.
(iii)
These special-purpose political institutions may fall prey to rent-seeking and capture
by especially-well informed or interested parties.
(iv)
The devolutionary elements of empowered deliberative democracy may balkanize the
polity and political decision-making.
(v)
Empowered deliberation may demand unrealistically high levels of popular
participation, especially in contemporary climates of civic and political
disengagement.
(vi) Finally, these experiments may enjoy initial successes but may be difficult to sustain
over the long term.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 49
(
i) Deliberation into Domination
Perhaps the most serious potential weakness of these experiments is that they may pay
insufficient attention to the fact that participants in these processes usually face each other from
unequal positions of power. These inequalities can stem from material differences and the class
backgrounds of participants, from the knowledge and information gulfs that separate experts
from laypersons, or from personal capacities for deliberation and persuasion associated with
educational and occupational advantages.
When deliberation aims to generate positive sum solutions in which nearly all participants
reap benefits from cooperation (outcome points that lie closer to
pareto frontiers), such power
differentials may not result in unfair decisions. However, serious projects that seek to enhance
social justice and equity cannot limit themselves to just these “win-win” situations. Therefore,
our model would not be a very interesting one, it might be argued, if it did not apply to contested
areas of public action or if its application to those areas systematically disadvantaged weaker
participants. Perhaps too optimistically, deliberation requires the strong as well as the weak to
submit to its norms; they ought to refrain from opportunistically pressing their interests even
when power allows them to do so.
32
One set of questions that must be answered, then, concerns
whether deliberative arenas enable the powerful dominate the weak. Consider four mechanisms
that might transform fair deliberation into domination.
One lamentable fact of all contemporary democracies is that citizens who are advantaged
in terms of their wealth, education, income, or membership in dominant racial and ethnic groups
participate more frequently and effectively than those who are less well off. These experiments
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 50
demand intensive forms of political engagement that may further aggravate these status and
wealth participation biases. If those who participate are generally better-off citizens, then
resulting public action is unlikely to be fair. As in other channels of popular voice, the question
of “who participates” remains a vital one in deliberative democracy.
Second, even if both strong and weak are well rep
resented, the strong may nevertheless
use tools at their disposal—material resources, information asymmetries, rhetorical
capacities—to advance collective decisions that unreasonably favor their interests. While many
other models of public
decisionmaking such as electoral and interest group politics expect such
behavior, empowered deliberation is more normatively demanding, and so perhaps more
empirically suspect.
Third, beyond unfair representation and direct force, powerful participants may seek to
improperly and unreasonably exclude issues that threaten their interests from the scope of
deliberative action. By limiting discussion to narrow areas of either mutual gain or inconsequence,
the powerful may protect their
status quo
advantages without resorting to blatantly non-
deliberative maneuvers. Nevertheless, thus constraining the agenda obviously violates the norms
of open deliberation and, if found to be a common phenomena in the cases, would indicate a
failure of the model.
33
Finally, and ultimately perhaps most seriously, deliberative democracy may disarm
secondary associations by obliging them to “behave responsibly” and discouraging radicalism and
militancy.34
After all, deliberation requires reasonableness, and so commitment to deliberative
processes might be thought to require abstinence from vigorous methods of challenging power.
That is, not only will the practices internal to the association bracket challenges to privilege, but
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 51
in order to maintain their credibility to “the powers that be” the associations will strive to
marginalize such challenges from the political arena altogether. If the popular associations engaged
in these experiments fail to enforce these political parameters — if the deliberative apparatuses
become sites of genuine challenge to the power and privileges of dominant classes and elites —
then this criticism predicts that the deliberative bodies would be dismantled.
(ii) Forum Shopping and External Power
Even if deliberative norms prevail and diverse participants cooperate to develop and
implement fair collective actions, the powerful (or the weak) may turn to measures outside of
these new democratic institutions to defend and advance their interests. The institutions of
empowered deliberative democracy operate in a complex web of more conventional arrangements
that includes interests groups and politicians contesting one another in agencies, legislatures, and
courts. When participants cannot get what they want in deliberative settings—perhaps because
what they want is unreasonable—they may press their interests in more hospitable venues. In
the context of public education, for example, a parent who cannot secure special privileges for his
child in the local school council may try to use the central school system office to over-rule local
deliberations. Real estate development interests in the city of Porto
Alegre have bypassed the
participatory budgeting system in favor of more friendly planning agencies when they anticipated
neighborhood opposition. Engaging in such forum shopping to overturn or avoid unfavorable
deliberative decisions clearly violates deliberative norms that ground the experiments discussed
above and, if widespread, will certainly poison the mutual confidence necessary for open
discussion and cooperative collective action among diverse parties.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 52
Aside from the possibility of the defection, parties constituted outside of these
deliberative bodies may not recognize their authority and resist their decisions. Driven by
understandable jealousies, we might expect officials firmly ensconced in pre-existing power
structures — elected politicians, senior bureaucrats, those controlling traditional interest groups
— to use their substantial authority and resources to over-rule unfavorable deliberative decisions.
At the extreme, they might try to cut the lives of these experiments short or at least contain them
to some seedling form. So, for example, environmental groups have sometimes viewed
cooperative ecosystem management efforts as ceding too much ground to development or
agricultural interests and fought locally deliberative decisions through litigious and legislative
methods.35
The Chicago school reforms empowered local governance councils by authorizing
them to hire and fire their principals, and thereby removed the job tenure privileges that had been
enjoyed by these school leaders. The association of principals fought back litigiously by arguing
that the school reform’s functional electoral structure violated the Constitutional mandate of one
vote per adult citizen. Locally dominant left-wing political parties sustain both the Indian village
governance reforms and Porto
Alegre’s participatory budget. Officials there have claimed credit
for the success of these experiments and subsequently based their political fortunes upon the
continuation of these experiments. Conventional politicians and bureaucrats thus became the
handmaiden of deliberative-democratic transformation by mobilizing elite and popular support
for the expansion and reproduction of these experiments. Without such political foundations, it is
easy to imagine that these systems of popular deliberative action would be quickly overturned by
social and political elites that they often act against.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 53
(iii) Rent-seeking
vs public goods
We have hypothesized that t
hese experiments produce public goods that benefit even
those who choose not to participate directly. Sound urban budgeting would benefit all of Porto
Alegre’s residents, not just those who take part in the formal institutions of participatory
budgeting. Similarly, most neighborhood residents enjoy the good of public safety, all students
and their parents benefit from effective schools, and many workers at a firm gain from the
establishment of a skill-upgrading center. Potentially, however, rent-seeking participants might
reverse this flow of benefits by capturing these deliberative apparatuses to advance private or
factional agendas. Members of the training consortium, for example, might attempt to make it
exclusive and use public training monies as a weapon against local competitors. Similarly, the
system of participatory budgeting could be re-absorbed into old-school clientelist politics in
which party bosses control discussion and resulting budget recommendations. Small factions of
neighborhood residents or parents might use public powers created by the community policing
and school governance reforms to benefit themselves by, for example, protecting just a few
blocks or establishing special school programs for the sake of just their own children.
Some of
these new institutions attempt to stem rent seeking through centralized
transparency and accountability measures. They link decentralized local bodies to one another
and to centralized authorities in order to make the varied performance of deliberative action
widely known and therefore more accountable. All Habitat Conservation Plans, for example,
must be reviewed by U.S. Department of Interior authorities in Washington, D.C. and the actual
performance of those plans will soon be made publicly available in a centralized data warehouse.
Similarly, the decentralized plans of police beats and schools in Chicago are reviewed and
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 54
aggregated by higher bodies, as are the neighborhood budget priorities of Porto
Alegre and
Panchayat decisions in India. In most of these cases, the capacity of accountability and
transparency mechanisms to check self-interested behavior is simply not known. Accordingly,
one critical question is the extent to which its institutions can be perverted into rent-seeking
vehicles and the efficacy efforts to check this tendency.
(iv) Balkanization of Politics
In a further pitfall, these experiments may exacerbate the balkanization of a polity that
should be unified. Prominent democratic theorists such as Rousseau and Madison worried that
the division of the body politic into contending groups would weaken the body as a whole
because individuals would advance their factional interests rather than common good. In the
extreme, such factionalism might create conditions in which one faction dominates the rest. Or,
fragmented political institutions and social factions might each be quite capable of solving its own
particular problems, yet the system as a whole would be incapable of addressing large scale
concerns or formulating greater agendas. From this critical perspective, these experiments might
aggravate the problem of faction by constituting and empowering hundreds of groups, each
focused on a narrow issue within cramped geographic boundaries. A proponent might respond
that these channels of participation add some public component to lives that would otherwise be
fully dominated by private, or even more particular concerns, and that therefore the net effect of
these institutions is to broaden the horizons of citizens, not to narrow them. Both of these
contending perspectives remain hypothetical, however, absent accounts of particular individuals
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 55
and the relationship of these experiments to the political institutions that supposedly foster
greater political commonality.
(v) Apathy
While these fou
r pathologies result from energetic but ill-constrained political engagement,
a fifth criticism begins with the common observation that the mass of citizens are politically
disengaged and ignorant, not fervid. From this perspective, empowered deliberation demands far
too much in terms to the depth and level of participation from ordinary citizens, and the
knowledge, patience, and wisdom that they are expected to possess or in short order acquire. It
may be that the citizens in late capitalist societies are generally too consumed with private life to
put forth the time, energy, and commitment that these deliberative experiments require. Or,
symptoms of apathy may result from institutional design rather than individual preference.
These deliberative channels ask citizens to generate public goods which are broadly shared, and
so many will be tempted to free-ride on the efforts of others. The cases below will offer some
evidence that begins to adjudicate these questions about citizen apathy by examining the quantity
and character of participation.
(vi) Stability and sustainability
Another concern focuses upon the stability of these experiments through time. They may
begin in a burst of popular enthusiasm and good will but then succumb to forces that prevent
these auspicious beginnings from taking root and growing into stable forms of sustained
participation. For example, one might expect that practical demands on these institutions might
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 56
press participants eventually to abandon time-consuming deliberative decision making in favor of
oligarchic or technocratic forms. Even if one concedes that empowered deliberation generates
innovations not available to hierarchical organizations, the returns from these gains may diminish
over time. After participants have plucked the “low-hanging fruit,” these forms might again
ossify into the very bureaucracies that they sought to replace. Or, ordinary citizens may find the
reality of participation increasingly burdensome and less rewarding than they had imagined, and
engagement may consequently dim from exhaustion and disillusionment. Though most of the
reforms considered here are young institutions, some of them have a history sufficient to begin to
ask whether their initial successes have given way to anti-deliberative tendencies. In his article,
Patrick Heller compares experiences of decentralized democracy in Kerala, Brazil, and South
Africa and argues that two keys to the durability of these reforms are the support of popular
political parties on one hand and integrated social movements on the other.
3. Is EDD Generalizable?
A final and crucial question about this endeavor goes to its scope. Are the democratic
principles and design features of empowered deliberative democracy of quite general
applicability? Or, is it limited to just a few settings such as those already mentioned? Since
answering that question requires much more empirical research than is presently available, we can
only offer a few speculative remarks.
The diversity of cases—across policy areas, levels of ec
onomic development, and
political cultures—discussed in this issue suggests that empowered deliberative democracy would
usefully contribute to a large class of problem-solving situations. In the most general terms, those
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 57
contexts are ones in which current arrangements—whether organized according to expert
command, market exchange, or perhaps informally—are failing and in which popular engagement
would improve matters by increasing accountability, capacity, or by bringing more information to
bear. Arguably, this is a large class indeed, and recent work has documented the emergence and
operation of similar reforms in areas such as the treatment of addiction
36
and environmental
regulation.
37
In a variety of institutional settings, however, empowered deliberative democracy may
not be helpful. It is not a universal reform strategy. In many areas of public life, conventional
systems of guardianship, delegation, and political representation work well, or could be improved
so as to be optimal. To take one small example, injecting more parental power and participation
in already well-functioning wealthy suburban school systems, might lead to conflict and wasted
energy that serves neither parents, students, nor educators in the long term. EDD would also be
inappropriate where current institutions perform unsatisfactorily, but where direct participation
would add little to problem-solving efforts. Sometimes, public policy might be naturally
centralized, and so not admit of broad participation. At other times, policy areas may be so
technically complex that they preclude constructive lay engagement. But perhaps the burden of
proof lies on those who would oppose more participatory measures. After all, many of the areas
of public life already subject to empowered deliberative democracy reforms might have seemed,
quite recently, too daunting for ordinary citizens to contemplate: the formulation of municipal
budgets, management of schools, habitat conservation, and rural development.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 58
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 59
Notes
1 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1944). The phrase
appears originally in William Blake’s
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
(1804).
2
These five cases were presented at a conference in the
Real Utopias Project
held at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, in January 2000. Preliminary reports on the two case studies
which are not included as papers in this volume of
Politics and Society
– the case study on the
WRTP and the one of village governance in Kerala, India – can be found at: give the www address
for the Real Utopias Project.
3
The Chicago School Reform Act, P.A. 85-1418, affects only schools in the city of Chicago,
which is its own school district.
4
Either because they are public goods or because existing arrangements within firms do not meet
these challenges for lack of know-how, inventiveness, or simple resources.
5
See Laura Dresser, Joel Rogers, and Scott
Zdrazil, “The Wisconsin Regional Training
Partnership” (Manuscript, January 2000).
6 Charles
Sabel, Archon Fung, and Brad
Karkkainen,. Beyond Backyard Environmentalism,
forward by Hunter
Lovins and Amory Lovins (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
7 In 1999, almost 1,200 species were on the federal endangered species list, but only 120 of those
had a designated “critical area” of habitat necessary to trigger strict protection. See
Thomas F.
Darin, “Designating Critical Habitat Under the Endangered Species Act: Habitat Protection
Versus Agency Discretion,”
The Harvard Environmental Law Review
. Vol. 24, no. 1 (2000),
209-235.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 60
8
Federal Register, Vol. 64, No. 45 (March 9, 1999), 11485-11490.
9 Peter
Kareiva et. al.
Using Science in Habitat Conservation Plans
(University of California,
Santa Barbara: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, 1998).
10
See
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Participatory Budgeting in Porto
Allegre: Toward a
Redistributive Democracy,”
Politics and Society
26, no. 4 (Dec. 1998), 461-510..
11 Ibid.
12 Much in the account that follows has been drawn from G.K. Lieten, Development, Devolution,
and Democracy: Village Discourse in West Bengal
(New
Dehli: Sage Publications, 1996).
13 Ibid., 50.
14
Maitreesh
Ghatak and
Maitreya
Ghatak, “Grassroots Democracy: a Case Study of the
Operation of the
Panchayat System in West Bengal, India,” (Manuscript, 2000).
15 The Panchayat system consists of three aggregated layers. The lowest level is an elected body
called the Gram
Panchayat, which typically covers some 10-12 villages totaling 10,000 residents.
The responsibilities of GPs have changed through time, but typically now include the
administration of public
health, drainage and sanitation; supply of safe drinking water;
maintenance of public utilities, primary education, agricultural development, irrigation, land
reform, poverty alleviation, rural industrialisation, electrification, and housing provision. The
second tier is called the
Panchayat Samity, governs a unit of area that usually consists of ten
GPs. Above this still is a district governance body called the Zilla
Parishad, which aggregates and
coordinates the Panchayat Samity level plans.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 61
16 See T.M. Thomas Isaac with Richard Franke,
Local Democracy and Development: People’s
Campaign for Decentralized Planning in Kerala
(New Delhi: Left World Press, 2000).
17
Figures here from Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19
Two especially relevant theorists of deliberation for the purposes here are
Jurgen Habermas
and Joshua Cohen.
20
See, for example,
Robert Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000);
Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina eds,
Civic Engagement in American Democracy
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,
1999), 1-23; Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers,
Associations and Democracy
, ed. Erik Olin Wright
(London: Verso, 1995).
21
See
Joshua and Charles
Sabel Cohen, “Directly-Deliberative
Polyarchy,”
European Law
Journal
3, no. 4 (December 1997), 313-342;
Michael C. Dorf and Charles
Sabel. "Drug Treatment
Courts and Emergent Experimentalist Government,"
Vanderbilt Law Review
, Vol. 53, no. 3, April
2000 (forthcoming); Archon Fung,
Street Level Democracy: A Theory of Popular Pragmatic
Deliberation and Its Practice in Chicago School Reform and Community Policing, 1988-1997
(Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT Department of Political Science, 1999).
22
This account of deliberation as reason-giving draws recent treatments in democratic theory,
especially various works of Joshua Cohen. See, for example, his “Procedure and Substance in
Deliberative Democracy” in
Selya
Benhabib ed.
Democracy and Difference: Contesting the
Boundaries of the Political
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996): 95-109.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 62
23
Deliberative processes can affect the understanding individuals have both of their interests and
of the optimal strategies for satisfying those interests. In general it would be expected that when
people enter such deliberative processes they have a better sense of their basic goals than they do
of the best means for accomplishing their goals, and thus much of the deliberative process
concerns problem-solving discussions over alternative courses of action. Still, because interests
are complex and often quite vague, and because individuals often define their interests over
variable sets of other actors, deliberative practices can also affect how people understand the
interests themselves. For a discussion of modes of interest transformation through deliberation,
see Jane
Mansbridge, “A Deliberative Theory of Interest Transformation,” in
The Politics of
Interests: Interest Groups Transformed
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992): 32-57.
24
The most famous of these is of course the problem of incoherence. See William Riker,
Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory
of Social Choice
(Prospect, IL: Waveland Press, 1982).
25
For the limited purposes of this discussion, we use negotiation and strategic bargaining
interchangeably.
Negociations and strategic bargaining can, of course, also involve deliberation
among the parties involved. The issue here, then, is the difference between such
deliberative
bargaining and
strategic
bargaining that is intended to give maximum advantage to one’s own
interests.
26
See, for example,
David
Austen-Smith, “Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision
Making,”
International Political Science Review
13, no. 1 (1992): 45-58.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 63
27 See , for instance, Harry
Boyte’s
Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen’s
Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)
and Peter
Medoff and Holly
Sklar’s
Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood
(Boston, MA: South End Press,
1994). For one prominent concrete example discussed from the perspective of its leader, see
Ernesto Jr.
Cortes, “Reweaving the Social Fabric,”
The Boston Review 19, no. 3&4 (Jun-Sep
1994): 12-14, on the activities of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) group Communities
Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas.
28 Andrew Szasz,
Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
29 The range of equality here is perhaps akin to Rousseau’s, when he claims that laws of
democracy should create circumstances such that “no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy
another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.” JJ Rousseau,
Social Contract
(trans.
Donald A. Cress, (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987), Book II, Chapter 11.
30
One classic problem of political science is explaining why people vote at all, given the
complete absence of effect associated with a single vote. For an attempt to explain this
apparently irrational behavior from the rational choice perspective, see William Riker and Peter
Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,”
American Political Science Review
, Vol. 62
(March 1968): 25-42.
31 John Stuart Mill. Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1991), Chap. 2.
Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, Final Draft Page 64
32 For a variation on this critique, see Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,”
Political Theory
25, no. 3 (June 1997): 347-76.
33 For a classic statement of this dynamic, see Peter Bachrach and Morton
Baratz, “Two Faces
of Power,”
American Political Science Review
56 (Dec 1962): 947-52.
34
See
Szasz.
35 See Mark
Sagoff, “The View from Quincy Library: Civic Engagement in Environmental
Problem Solving,” (Manuscript, 1998) and Louis Jacobson
,
“Local timber collaboration stalls in
national arena,”
Planning
, Vol. 61, No. 11. (Nov 1998):22-23.
36
See
Dorf and
Sabel.
37
See
Sabel, Fung, and
Karkkainen (1999).
