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This chapter summarizes the criteria for a legitimate deliberative democracy and assesses the different deliberative democratic models against those criteria. It points out that no single process can meet them all, thus criticizing the ‘minipublic’ approach. It suggests that a deliberative system approach is necessary, using different processes at different points of the decision making process. The outlines of such a scheme are described, linking activists in civil society and parliamentary processes with a variety of agenda-setting and decision-making tools.

This chapter discusses the concept of legitimacy, distinguishing between procedural and substantive legitimacy. Theoretical solutions to the scale and motivations problems are surveyed, drawing out three key ideas to explore further: representation, publicity, and rationality. It shows how some of the solutions to the motivations problem undermine solutions to the scale problem, and suggests that thinking in terms of a ‘deliberative system’ might help resolve the tensions before sketching the principles of what a legitimate deliberative democracy might look like.

This chapter offers a model of a ‘deliberative system’ in which different deliberative responsibilities are distributed among different agents playing different deliberative roles. There, component deliberative virtues would be on display sequentially, over the course of various stages of deliberation involving different agents in different roles. That constitutes a more realistic alternative to the ‘unitary’ model of deliberation, in which all the deliberative virtues have to be continuously and simultaneously present in all parties to the deliberation.

In any large and complex community, deliberation cannot realistically take place in the agora (or its electronic equivalent), with everyone potentially affected by the decision taking an active part in all the deliberations. Deliberative democracy, in such a world, simply has to work on and through our inherited institutions of representative democracy. Revisioning those institutions through a deliberative lens, we can think of them as constituting a ‘deliberative system’, with different parts of the deliberative task being allocated to each. Political parties play a key (but non-exclusive role) in all that. The public sphere can best be connected to that process through networked accountability mechanisms.

Since the deliberative turn taken by democratic theory around 1990, deliberative democracy has gone from strength to strength. That turn put communication and reflection at the center of democracy. Further turns have come thick and fast: an institutional turn emphasizing designed forums, a systemic turn stressing whole systems, a practical turn toward implementing deliberation, and an empirical turn linking social science and political theory. Ideas about deliberative systems are especially promising. A system can be said to possess deliberative capacity to the degree it has structures to accommodate deliberation that is authentic, inclusive, and consequential. Renewed consideration can be made of some of the foundations of deliberative democracy when it comes to legitimacy, representation, communication, pluralism, and consensus. The reach of deliberative democracy into ever-growing arenas of theory, study, and practice can be both investigated and furthered.

How exactly do we distinguish between deliberative and non-deliberative form and content in political communication? Particularly when it comes to large-scale processes in the broader public sphere, many deliberative democrats now recognize that rhetoric has an important place. This is especially true when it comes to communication linking the components of a deliberative system. Yet, rhetoric also has its well-known hazards, especially in the hands of demagogues and deceivers. There is a need for systemic as well as categorical tests for the sort of rhetoric that is defensible and desirable. Categorical tests focus on the content of the rhetoric itself. Systemic tests look too at the degree to which the rhetoric in question contributes to the construction of an effective deliberative system – or undermines any such system.

The long frontier of deliberative governance does, then, extend from mini-publics to the global system. With this examination of points on the long frontier complete, the concluding chapter returns to the more foundational concepts set out in earlier chapters. The discussions of foundations and frontiers are synthesized to demonstrate how they can be joined in a coherent systemic view of deliberative democracy and its many applications. There may be limits to the reach of deliberative systems and the deliberative democratization of politics – but they have not yet been encountered.

Consensus was once thought of as the gold standard of political legitimacy in deliberative democracy. The idea of consensus has also been a soft target for critics of deliberative democracy in a plural society, because it seems unrealistic when faced with deep political conflicts. Apparently, competing ideals of consensus and pluralism can be reconciled by the idea that the purpose of deliberation is not to secure consensus. Instead, the key goal of deliberation is to produce meta-consensus that structures continued dispute. Meta-consensus can refer to agreement on the legitimacy of contested values, on the validity of disputed judgments, on the acceptability and structure of competing preferences, and on the applicability of contested discourses. Meta-consensus can be applied as a standard for the evaluation of deliberative systems, as well as to particular forums. We need to pay careful attention to the deliberative qualities of the processes that produce meta-consensus.

Traditionally, democratic theorists have located democracy in the accountable institutions of the sovereign state. The rise of networked governance undercuts notions of sovereignty and accountability, for networks often do not correspond to traditional political units. They are informal, sometimes transnational, and engaged by public and private actors from many different locations. Traditional aggregative and electoral ideas about democracy are helpless in the face of these developments. Governance networks can be interpreted fruitfully as deliberative systems, enabling democratic standards to be applied in the evaluation of such governance.

Consider four main arguments against applications of deliberative democracy—domination by the more advantaged, polarization, lack of citizen competence, and the gap between mini-publics and the broader society. We consider why these problems seem intractable according to the political theory literature. Drawing on the case studies in Part III, we show that these challenges can be overcome. Thought experiments for deliberation are considered, drawing on work from John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. The argument for applied deliberative democracy, as in Deliberative Polling, is developed. “Deliberative systems,” where deliberation enters a democratic decision process at one point or another, are discussed. Topics include reform of the US presidential selection process, commissions within specific issue domains such as the Texas utility experience, the Japanese use of Deliberative Polling, and the use of Deliberation Day. The issue of constitutional change is also discussed, drawing on the recent Deliberative Poll in Mongolia.

Critics of the deliberative approach argue that deliberative theory works with an overly restrictive understanding of argumentation that leads to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. Successive generations of deliberativists have developed two approaches in response. The first, supplementing approach, supplements rational argumentation with ‘other’ forms of communication to better accommodate difference. Drawing on the work of Iris Young, this strategy is shown to fail. The second, systemic approach, replaces the categorical criteria of the supplementing approach with systemic criteria. While this response significantly opens up deliberation, it sacrifices core deliberative ideals for perceived net benefits to the deliberative system. This can result in the violation citizens’ deliberative freedom and the political impoverishment of vulnerable actors. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of rhetoric, a third, constitutive approach, is suggested, an approach that opens up deliberation in a way that overcomes the problems with the supplementing approach, whilst avoiding some of the unwelcome consequences of the systemic approach. The chapter ends with an unexpected crossing of paths between Bohman and Derrida that points the way to a deconstructive entry into the debate.

Chapter six takes the systems account from chapter five and develops its empirical implications. It begins by setting out again the definition of the deliberative quality before returning to the additive and summative distinction set out in the introduction, testing how far one can push the summative idea before it, settling on a weak rather than strong account that insists on a role for citizen deliberation. It then develops the empirical cues of the resulting account through a series of linked questions about the nature of agency and inclusion; venues; memes and storylines; transmission and coupling; transformation and deliberative education; and decision-making and implementation. It argues that faithful transmission is often an unreasonable goal, depending on the context of power relations; but that the tensions can be managed by representation relationships and, thinking laterally, education that trains people to operate in multiple contexts.

Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticized as inherently elitist and technocratic, and it is blamed not only for the rise of depoliticized institutions, but also for the rise of anti-political and even populist attitudes in citizens. The chapter analyses the discussion about the depoliticizing implications and effects of deliberation and argues that, contrary to these critics, deliberation must be viewed as a genuinely political mode of interaction. A systemic perspective on deliberation allows us to critically assess the deliberative and democratic qualities of political systems and to see when and where they fail to deliver on their promises. Applied with critical intentions, the deliberative system perspective can be used to identify depoliticized policy areas and undemocratic decision-making processes. Moreover, it can feed into processes of meta-deliberation that allow for a democratization of institutional design.

Deliberative democracy has experienced several ‘turns’. This chapter reflects critically on them, situating the book’s main arguments within the academic landscape. By its focus on mechanisms at work in a real existing deliberative democracy, and its support for informal networked deliberation as its main platform, Deliberation Naturalized aims to tackle some important shortcomings associated with the last ‘turns’ of deliberative theory.

This chapter investigates ‘everyday talk’ within the deliberative system. The democratic potential of everyday talk is assessed against the normative criteria of deliberation and then with reference to the politicizing and depoliticizing effects of this practice. Against scholars who argue that government-focused forums and mini-publics are internally more democratic than broader processes of everyday discussion in the public sphere, this chapter contends that there is no space that is intrinsically more deliberative than any other, especially when seen from a network of governance. This chapter argues that connections across governmental networks and social spaces are more intricate in an increasingly hybrid media environment. Everyday talk is becoming ever more important for helping citizens to discover problems that may otherwise remain hidden or consigned to the realm of fate or necessity, converting topics of conversation into issues of broader public concern, and criticizing and demanding review of certain political decisions.

This chapter introduces the key themes by noting that many empirical studies of deliberative democracy appear to study neither deliberation, nor democracy. The authors set out two ways of thinking about the deliberative quality of democracies. The first is additive: there are procedures and institutions that insert deliberation into a democratic forum or system. The second is summative: the deliberative quality may emerge from the complex interactions of many practices and institutions rather than an input generated by one or two of them. Drawing mainly on additive ideas, it sets out a fairly standard account of what the deliberative quality adds to democratic goods like inclusion, representation, and will-formation; but that quality can also conflict with democratic goals and functions. One of the book’s goals is to redemocratize deliberation by placing democratic agents at the centre of its study.

This chapter picks up where chapter four left off, fleshing out three major accounts of deliberative systems: discursive, spatial, and sequential, each of which has useful foci and important blind spots in both descriptive and normative terms. Along the way it raises a number of challenges for each of the models, including questions about how each treats democratic norms of inclusion and legitimate decision-making, as well as specifying a ‘memetic’ account of democratic communication rather than a preference-based one. The chapter then focuses on four key steps in an ideal sequence: listening to the narratives and claims of the informal public sphere; structuring those claims and connecting them with reasons; making collective decisions; and doing so in a context of representation as relationship building.

Chapter 2 offers a critical review of three systemic accounts of deliberative democracy, focusing on their assumptions about democratic connectivity. It draws attention to the ‘communicative miracles’ that lie at the heart of each deliberative system account—‘miracles’ that are out of step with contemporary disconnects experienced in the representative process, in the public sphere itself, and along the policy process. The chapter shows that these ‘communicative miracles’ are not only theoretical blind spots, but also practical obstacles hindering deliberative democracy from speaking more directly to, and serving as a richer resource for, democratic renewal. The chapter calls for a more empirically informed account of connectivity in contemporary public deliberation, one that is grounded in the work and agency of those involved in making or strengthening connectivity. It argues that an abductive research approach that employs interpretive methods is particularly well suited for developing such empirically informed accounts of connectivity. The chapter concludes by making the case for the close study of contemporary political practices, especially focused on how diverse actors are experiencing democratic disconnects, and what actions they are taking to mend them.