Recasting Democracy as a Metagame

Past attempts to underscore the limitations of democratic practices and institutions were characterised by two main shortcomings. First, there was an attempt to reduce complexity by identifying democratic politics with only one of its features or manifestations. The more egregious example was the attempt to arrive at a minimalist definition of democracy, and the relevance such an effort attributed to elections and ballot-counting against the more idealistic and dialogical aspects of democratic politics (Mayo. An introduction to democratic theory. Oxford University Press, 1960, ch. 4). Secondly, this type of reductionism was often accompanied by controversial assessments of the discrete ‘democratic games’ thus identified, the aim of which was to show that they yielded logical paradoxes, empirical dilemmas and suboptimal results. The ‘new political economy’ is the postwar disciplinary field where assessments of this sort became commonplace (Coleman. Markets, morals, and the law. Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 12); soon to be joined by other so-called empirical approaches to democracy (Green & Shapiro. Pathologies of rational choice theory. Yale University Press, 1994). It was to redress these evaluative enterprises—disguising themselves as scientific assessments—that the deliberative turn issued its call to arms among progressive political theorists in the 1990s. Thus, in this book I have tried to show that at the root of the deliberative turn in democratic theory there were initially (1) methodological concerns about the way in which democracy was parcelled out into a series of disjointed ‘games’ to be analysed in isolation from each other, and (2) normative concerns about the ideological biases supporting the negative evaluation of democratic values, norms and practices. Several decades later, and after many other internal twists and turns, it is time to ask whether the various models spawned by the deliberative turn have been able to overcome these shortcomings. Have these models supplied a better picture of democracy, as both an ideal to engender and a set of governance practices to endorse critically? The book is the result of my personal inquiry in the field, and arrives at, by and large, a negative answer to those questions.