Preventing the Atrophy of the Deliberative Stance: Considering Non-Decisional Participation as a Prerequisite to Political Freedom

• Authors: Michał Zabdyr-Jamróz

Abstracts

EN

In order to be exercised meaningfully, political freedom requires the capacity to actually identify available policy options. To ensure this, society ought to engage in deliberation as a discussion oriented towards mutual learning. In order to highlight this issue, I define deliberation in terms of the participants’ openness to preference change, i.e. the deliberative stance. In the context of the systemic approach to deliberative theory, I find several factors causing the atrophy of such a deliberative stance. I note that this state can occur not only when debaters are representatives or are in the presence of an audience, but also when they face the prospect of a binding decision. It is the latter effect that is a serious challenge to the micro-deliberative strategy, one that strives towards decisional powers being granted to deliberative minipublics. Presenting my findings, I propose-as an alternative to the power-oriented ‘ladder of participation’-a distinction between traditional co-decision and deliberative consultation, the latter one being (in certain systemic contexts) an environment that is more conducive to deliberative stance. This new typology highlights factors that lead to preference petrification and allows for the appreciation of the non-decisional character of micro-deliberation. All of it leads to the conclusion that, in order to preserve their deliberative character in the systemic context, deliberative minipublics should not always be required to have decision-making powers

Keywords

EN

deliberative democracy; deliberative stance; preference change; deliberative systems

• Publisher: Ośrodek Badań Filozoficznych - Centre for Philosophical Research
• Journal: Avant
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 89-117

Dates

published

2019

Contributors

author

Michał Zabdyr-Jamróz

• Jagiellonian University Medical College, Cracow, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.26913/avant.2019.01.07

Biblioteka Nauki

2200446