William J. Long in The Immanent Frame:
Democracies today face turbulent times. Populism, polarization, and entrenched inequality threaten their foundations, while authoritarianism continues to rise—democracy has declined for 18 consecutive years. In this climate of division, democratic governments increasingly struggle to make decisions that are both legitimate and widely accepted.
In academic circles, many theorists promote deliberation as a remedy. The concept is straightforward: Democratic decisions are made more legitimate, intelligent, and socially stabilizing through the exchange of reasons among those affected. Its proponents argue that public deliberation among citizens is the essence of democratic legitimacy. Ideally, this process aims for consensus oriented toward the shared good.
This model contrasts with the prevailing aggregative model, which sees democracy as a competition among self-interested actors resolved by counting votes. The aggregative model arose in response to twentieth-century mass democracy in an increasingly pluralistic society. It holds that in an age of value pluralism and given the average citizen’s political disinterest, policy ignorance, and susceptibility to elite manipulation or coercion, participation should be limited to occasional voting for one leader or another cast by a subset of the electorate as part of a competitive struggle for power. As Joseph Schumpeter explains, democracy “does not and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of ‘people’ and ‘rule.’ Rather, it means only that people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men [sic] who are to rule them.”
Modernity rendered the classical republican model of democracy—with its focus on a search for a common good or general will of the people—less applicable. Instead, theorists shifted emphasis to aggregating individual preferences via interest groups and political parties, with periodic elections determining leadership. Most modern democracies reflect this aggregative or “realist” (power politics) model as their zeitgeist, while deliberative approaches remain largely theoretical or experimental.
Deliberation, by contrast, emphasizes shaping preferences through reasoned dialogue, offering a means to challenge power imbalances and elite control.
More here.
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