Transitions seminar | Deliberative procedures and ideological/policy orientations

Among the attempts to address the so-called crisis of democracy, the development of deliberative processes (DPs) has gained success and visibility over the last twenty years. Broad slogans such as ‘bringing citizens back in’, ‘empowering the people’ or ‘innovating democracy’ have inspired practices where lay citizens – not only recognized stakeholders and experts – are invited to exchange about political concerns and provide input to decision-making processes. Such practices have attracted the attention of numerous scholars. Anchored in the deliberative paradigm (Asenbaum 2021), a vast body of empirical studies address their capacity to foster inclusive, respectful, open, coherent, well-informed and legitimate debates (Curato et al. 2021; van der Does and Jacquet 2023; Niemeyer et al. 2023). Many resources are devoted to these elements, considering they are key conditions to a successful event. These criteria relate to the intrinsic procedural merits of DPs as well as their capacity to be transferred into the broader political system. However, the focus on DPs’ procedural aspects neglects an essential element to grasp their relationship and potential contribution to political systems, namely their substantive orientation. These substantive orientations refer to mean the ideological directions of their outputs. Activists as well democratic theorists that promote DPs often consider that their outputs should question and challenge dominant policy orientations and favor alternative ones (Böker and Elstub 2015), including attention to minority rights (Chambers 2003), policies that ensure economic and social redistribution (Fung 2015) or solutions to address the global threats of climate change and biodiversity loss (Smith 2021). Conversely, some fear that DPs remain nothing else but easily manageable tools that ratify the dominant political order, which would lead to their disqualification as vehicles of political change (Pateman 2012). Beyond these projections, the directionality of DPs’ substantive outputs remains largely open for empirical analysis. We do not know in which context DPs outputs differ from those produced by ‘traditional’ decision-making process (provided that they sometimes differ, which should also be scrutinized). 

Through this letter, we therefore argue that to understand DPs’ current spread, influence and potential development, the directionality of their outputs deserves more scrutiny. In the first part of the letter, we defend that these issues can be best addressed by considering DPs as institutional arrangements that produce substantive outputs shaped by both internal dynamics and external political context. Based on this perspective, we identify in the second part of the letter a research agenda that tackles current and future DPs contributions to democratic systems.