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Key Text Radical Democracy

Author: J Cohen and A Fung
Date: 2004
Size: 12 pages (145kB)

Summary

Concerns about the regulatory capacities of national governments and the capacity of conventional democracies to engage the energies of ordinary citizens have recently given rise to radical-democratic ideas. Radical democracy advocates two strands of political engagement: participation and deliberation. What is the relationship between these two strands? Can radical democracy address the limitations of competitive representation? This article from Swiss Political Science Review addresses these questions, concluding that there are some tensions and difficulties within these concepts that must be resolved in order to advance a radical-democratic project.

Radical democracy joins two strands of democratic thought – a commitment to broader participation in public decision-making, and an emphasis on deliberation, where citizens address public problems by reasoning together. Radical-democratic criticisms of competitive representation focus on three political values: (1) Responsibility: because competitive representation is a limited tool for ensuring accountability, citizens may be put off and in turn lack democratic skills to properly judge. (2) Equality: despite formal political equality such as suffrage rights, it is social and economic inequalities that shape opportunities for political influence. (3) Autonomy: competitive representation fails to give people the autonomy to make their own rules. Instead, political outcomes depend on the capacity to mobilize and fund constituencies and interest groups.

In contrast, the radical democratic model proposes:

Not relying excessively on representatives to make political choices.
Participation and deliberation, to increase equality and overcome social and political hierarchies. Deliberation replaces the power of greater resources with the power of better arguments, and expanding participation can challenge the inequalities that come from a concentration of interests.
Deliberative democracy, whereby citizens defend solutions on the basis of relevant reasons. Political argument should be framed by considerations such as fairness, equality and common advantage.

There are, however, tensions between participation and deliberation. Improving the quality of deliberation may come at the cost of participation. Expanding participation may diminish the quality of deliberation. Furthermore, social complexity and scale limit the extent to which modern polities can be both deliberative and participatory. These challenges could be addressed through reforms which incorporate both ideas:

Mediated society-wide deliberation: involving citizen deliberation on political matters in the informal public sphere. These deliberations are fully participatory because they take place through wide social movements. This kind of deliberation increases responsibility, equality and autonomy. For example, it increases political equality because it is less vulnerable to monetary power.
Direct participatory deliberation: drawing on the practical competence citizens have as public service users to deliberate over public issues. This approach increases the role of popular mobilization, and collective deliberation makes direct contributions to self-government by subjecting the policies and actions of agencies to a rule of common reason.

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Source: Cohen, J. and Fung, A., 2004, ‘Radical Democracy’, Swiss Political Science Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, Pp. 23-34