Deliberative Democracy as a Conceptual Landscape

Born as an attempt to move beyond the models of democracy which dominated public and academic discourses during the second postwar period, the deliberative turn has over the years promoted several other turnings, yielding a highly complex and disorienting theoretical landscape—a conceptual spaghetti junction. Following the main deliberative turn we can also count: an ‘epistemic’ turn (Jörke. Critical Policy Studies, 3(3–4), 440–446, 2010), and an ‘empirical’ turn (Thompson. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 497–520, 2008), a ‘systemic’ turn (Parkinson & Mansbridge. Deliberative systems. Cambridge University Press, 2012) and even a ‘democratic’ turn (Barker et al. Democratizing deliberation: a political theory anthology. Kettering Foundation Press, 2012). The end result of these twists and turns is a plurality of deliberative democratic models reproposing many analytical features which used to characterise those employed in the past (i.e. procedural, aggregative and participatory models of democracy), and which deliberative theorists wanted to transcend. The revitalisation of democracy theory promoted by the deliberative turn has thus made the theoretical landscape extremely intricate and impervious, making even those acquainted with it likely to lose their way. The present work aims to be a rough analytical guide to deliberative democracy (DD) for those who are keen to explore this uneven terrain on their own. As a guide, its goal is twofold: to single out some landmarks to follow along the way, and to indicate which dwelling stations to use in order to make the journey worthwhile. However, its main substantive goal is to understand what practical solutions this speculative activity is envisaging as possible remedies for the legitimacy crisis affecting existing liberal democracies. In keeping with the first goal, this introduction follows a topographical approach, intending to arrive at a conceptual map of DD models. A general assessment of DD’s contribution to the revitalisation of democratic politics will be carried out in Chap. 6 .