Deliberative Democracy and the Systemic Turn: Reply to Kuyper

ABSTRACT

According to Jonathan Kuyper, deliberative democratic theory, having taken a “systemic turn,” is now better able to deal with the complexity of the real world. Central to this development is the democratic “division of epistemic labor,” under which experts, public servants, and the politically engaged may compensate for the relative ignorance of democratic citizens at large. However, the systemic turn raises the question of whether deliberation has been reconstituted as a means to the end of citizens’ interests, or whether it remains an end in itself. To the extent that deliberation has been accepted as a means to the realization of common interests, the systemic turn begs the question of why we should expect the epistemic division of labor to be effective in identifying public policies that serve those interests. To the extent that deliberative democrats seek to avoid this problem by retaining an a priori commitment to deliberative inclusion, it is more than conceivable that the systemic turn will descend into a simplistic and unedifying form of functionalism.

Keywords:

• deliberative democracy
• division of epistemic labor
• epistemic democracy
• political complexity
• systemic turn
• James Bohman
• Thomas Christiano
• John Dryzek
• Jonathan Kuyper
• Jane Mansbridge

Notes

1 In fact, Kuyper (2015, 54) defines the “core goal” of recent deliberative thinking as that of “cultivat[ing] and promot[ing] deliberative values within and across a specific system.” I have avoided this definition of the aim of the systemic turn because theoretical agreement on the values guiding deliberation is an insufficient basis for evaluating deliberative decisions; otherwise deliberative theory would begin and end with Joshua Cohen's (1989) seminal argument. Since systemic deliberative theory (however obliquely) shifts attention towards real-world problems, Kuyper's comment concerning means and ends provides a better statement of the goal of deliberative thinking after the systemic turn.

2 Of course, Rawls does not use the term “interests” to directly ground his account of the importance of the basic structure; instead, he says that the state bears the same contractual relationship to its members as does a non-political association (Rawls [1993] 1996, 264), and that this relationship requires the core political institutions to uphold fairness (ibid., 265-66) and give form to citizens' capacities and interests in a fashion consistent with their core moral attributes (that is, a capacity for justice and a capacity for the pursuit of the good; see ibid., 202-3 and 299-70). At most, he concedes that the state has an interest in properly reproducing citizens (Rawls 1997, 779), but it is neither clear how the state can have an interest apart from that of its citizens, nor why the significance of basic state institutions for individuals’ autonomy and life chances should not be understood as bearing on their interests.

3 To support this claim further, consider here Rawls's conception of political autonomy, according to which citizens “reasonably and rationally” strive to correct the imperfections in social institutions and constitutional rules over time (Rawls [1995] 1996, 401-2; see also 399, 405, and 415). Against the Habermasian suspicion that Political Liberalism is simply an apology for the U.S. Constitution, Rawls illustrates this point by suggesting that properly autonomous Americans would address widening economic inequalities, the failure to provide adequate health care, and the problem of campaign finance (ibid., 407). On one reading, these are simply questions of values; these problems could be resolved by simply holding government officials to the standards of public reason (Rawls 1997, 769). But this reading suffers from both an internal and external problem. Internally, political debate is often concerned primarily with questions of policy, rather than values, because citizens disagree about what government officials should be doing. Moreover, to be consistent with his external account of public reason, Rawls's autonomous voters would need to reason through the consequences of their voting decisions in a way that balances the solutions to these problems with the needs of future generations, the demands of international politics, and our duties towards nature (Rawls [1993] 1996, 244-45). Since public reason successfully resolves public political disagreements only when it admits “a balance giving a reasonable answer to all or nearly all fundamental questions,” it is not enough to try to resolve a problem (say, by equating the enactment of campaign-finance rules with a straightforward reduction of the influence of money in politics; see ibid., 244). Citizens must also in their voting decisions balance the effects of the actions taken in pursuit of their aims across all the different requirements of justice, which extend, as Rawls recognizes in his discussion of “problems of extension” (ibid., 20-21), across the various human and non-human systems in which we find meaning and sustenance.

4 This point suggests that Kuyper, as a systemic theorist, should have been far more sympathetic to the critiques of deliberative democracy presented in The Modern World, each of which seeks to demonstrate how facts about the real world (“social facts,” in Bohman's terms) challenge or undermine idealistic deliberative accounts. For instance, Pennington's (2013, 68-69) critique of the centralization necessary for the implementation of Gutmann and Thompson’s (1996) moral conception of deliberation can be read as a systemic account of the need for heterogeneous and decentralized institutions that are plainly incompatible with the foundational principles in Gutmann and Thompson's account. Certainly, Kuyper is not committed to agreeing with Pennington's analysis or that of any of the other contributors to The Modern World. But at the very least, his systemic defense of deliberation should be concerned with confronting alternative systemic views.

5 E.g., Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes 1960; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Somin 2013.

6 Christiano (2012, 39) obliquely notes that “none of this assumes differences in native talent.” There are two possible meanings of this claim. First, experts are not experts because they are intellectually superior (i.e., citizens are not stupid). This seems to be a more reasonable interpretation, because it protects Christiano from accusations of elitism. Second, however, Christiano might mean that everyone fully understands everything there is to know about solving social problems. If so, then he has already accepted my analysis, and the argument presented here is redundant. But so, of course, is Christiano's: if everyone shared the same complete knowledge concerning how to solve social problems, then there would be little point in a division of epistemic labor or even a deliberation; citizens would already know, and agree about, what needed to be done.

7 This is an elaborated version of Christiano's (2012, 38-39) example of the shared understanding between economists and policy analysts.