Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Chantal Mouffe

As testified by the increasing success of the extreme right in several countries, western societies are witnessing a growing disaffection with democratic institutions. Such a disaffection may have serious consequences for the future of democracy. Unfortunately, liberal democratic societies are ill-prepared to confront the present challenge, since they are unable to grasp its nature. One of the main reasons for this inability lies in the type of political theory currently in vogue, dominated as it is by an individualistic, universalistic, and rationalistic framework. Such a framework erases the dimension of the political and impedes envisaging in an adequate manner the nature of a pluralistic democratic public sphere.

This paper examines the most recent paradigm of liberal democratic theory: "deliberative democracy," in order to bring to the fore its shortcomings. Then, I put forward some elements for the elaboration of an alternative model that I propose to call "agonistic pluralism."

To be sure, the aim of the theorists who advocate the different versions of "deliberative democracy" is commendable. Against the interest-based conception of democracy, inspired by economics and skeptical about the virtues of political participation, they want to introduce questions of morality and justice into politics, They are looking for new meanings of traditional democratic notions like autonomy, popular sovereignty, and equality. Their aim is to reformulate the classical idea of the public sphere, giving it a central place in the democratic project. However, by proposing to view reason and rational argumentation, instead of interest and aggregation of preferences as the central issue of politics, they simply move from an economic model to a moral one. Their move consists in replacing the market-inspired view of the public sphere by another conception that conceives political questions as being of a moral nature and therefore susceptible of being decided rationally. This means that they identify the democratic public sphere with the discursive redemption of normative validity claims. It is clear that what is missing, albeit in different ways, in both approaches is the dimension of the political. This is why I consider that the deliberative model is unable to offer a better understanding of the nature of democratic politics and that it cannot provide a real alternative to the aggregative view.

Deliberative Democracy

There are many different versions of "deliberative democracy," but the most theoretically sophisticated one is the Habermasian and it is that model that I will examine here. Moreover it is also the model where the concept of "public sphere" is more fully elaborated and it is therefore particularly relevant for our concerns.

In the approach elaborated by Habermas and his followers, the main purpose of deliberative democracy is to propose a reformulation in communicative terms of the classical notions of democratic theory, especially the concept of popular sovereignty. According to Seyla Benhabib for instance, one of the central issues to be addressed is how the articulation of the common good can be made compatible with the sovereignty of the people. In her view, the main challenge confronting democracy today lies in reconciling rationality with legitimacy. She puts it in the following way:

   According to the deliberative model of democracy, it is a necessary
   condition for attaining legitimacy and rationality with regard to
   collective decisions making processes in a polity, that the institutions of
   this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the common interest
   of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted
   rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals (1996, p. 69).

The basis of legitimacy in democratic institutions derives in this view from the fact that the instances that claim obligatory power do so on the presumption that their decisions represent an impartial standpoint that is equally in the interest of all. In order for this presumption to be fulfilled, those decisions must be the result of appropriate public processes of deliberation that follow the procedures of the Habermasian discourse model. The fundamental idea behind this model is that for the norms and institutional arrangements to be valid they should have been agreed by all affected by their consequences according to as process of deliberation whose features are defined by Benhabib in the following way:

1. Participation in such deliberation is governed by the norms of equality and symmetry; all have the same chance to initiate speech acts, to question, interrogate, and to open debate;

2. All have the right to question the assigned topics of conversation;

3. All have the right to initiate reflexive arguments about the very rules of the discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied or carried out. There are no prima facie rules limiting the agenda or the conversation, nor the identity of the participants, as long as each excluded person or group can justifiably show that they are relevantly affected by the proposed norm under question (1996, p.70).