Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy:

Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy:
Introduction
Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright
JFK
School Sociology Department
Harvard
University University of Wisconsin
(June 1999)
As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities
larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy
developed in the nineteenth century -- representative democracy plus techno-
bureaucratic administration -- seem increasingly ill-suited to the novel
problems we face in the twenty-first century. "Democracy" as a way of
organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially-
based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and
executive offices. Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political
representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of
democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the
citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and
implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy
society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal,
assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation's wealth.
The Right of the political spectrum has taken advantage of this apparent
decline in the effectiveness of democratic institutions to escalate its
attack on the very idea of the affirmative state. The only way the state
can play a competent and constructive role, the Right typically argues, is
to dramatically reduce the scope and depth of its activities. In addition
to the traditional moral opposition of libertarians to the activist state
on the grounds that it infringes on property rights and individual
autonomy, it is now widely argued that the affirmative state has simply
become too costly and inefficient. The benefits supposedly provided by the
state are myths; the costs--both in terms of the resources directly
absorbed by the state and of indirect negative effects on economic growth
and efficiency--are real and increasing. Rather than seeking to deepen the
democratic character of politics in response to these concerns, the thrust
of much political energy in the developed industrial democracies in recent
years has been to reduce the role of politics altogether. Deregulation,
privatization, reduction of social services, and curtailments of state
spending have been the watchwords, rather that participation, greater
responsiveness, more creative and effective forms of democratic state
intervention. As the slogan goes: "The state is the problem, not the
solution."
In the past, the political Left in capitalist democracies vigorously
defended the affirmative state against these kinds of arguments. In its
most radical form, revolutionary socialists argued that public ownership of
the principle means of production combined with centralized state planning
offered the best hope for a just, humane and egalitarian society. But even
those on the Left who rejected revolutionary visions of ruptures with
capitalism insisted that an activist state was essential to counteract a
host of negative effects generated by the dynamics of capitalist economies
-- poverty, unemployment, increasing inequality, under-provision of public
goods like training and public health. In the absence of such state
interventions, the capitalist market becomes a "Satanic Mill," in Karl
Polanyi's metaphor, that erodes the social foundations of its own
existence. (1) These defenses of the affirmative state have become
noticeably weaker in recent years, both in their rhetorical force and in
their practical political capacity to mobilize people. Although the Left
has not come to accept unregulated markets and a minimal state as morally
desirable or economically efficient, it is much less certain that the
institutions it defended in the past can achieve social justice and
economic well being in the present.
Perhaps this erosion of democratic vitality is an inevitable result of
complexity and size. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to have some kind
of limited popular constraint on the activities of government through
regular, weakly competitive elections. Perhaps the era of the "affirmative
democratic state" -- the state which plays a creative and active role in
solving problems in response to popular demands -- is over, and a retreat
to privatism and political passivity is the unavoidable price of
"progress". But perhaps the problem has more to do with the specific design
of our institutions than with the tasks they face as such. If so, then a
fundamental challenge for the Left is to develop transformative democratic
strategies that can advance our traditional values--egalitarian social
justice, individual liberty combined with popular control over collective
decisions, community and solidarity, and the flourishing of individuals in
ways which enable them to realize their potentials.
This volume of the Real Utopias Project explores five innovative real-world
experiments in such institutional redesign, experiments that in different
ways enlist the energy and intelligence of ordinary people--often drawn
from the lowest strata of society--in the solution of problems that plague
them:
1. The participatory budget of Porto Alegre, Brazil enables residents
of that city to participate directly in forging the city budget and
thus use public monies previously diverted to patronage payoffs to
pave their roads and electrify their neighborhoods.
2. Neighborhood governance councils in Chicago address the fears and
hopes of inner city Chicago residents by turning an urban bureaucracy
on its head and devolving substantial power over policing and public
schools.
3. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP) brings together
organized labor, large firm management, and government to provide
training and increase the transparency in employment transitions in
order to help workers assemble jobs into meaningful careers in
volatile economic times,
4. The Panchayat reforms in West Bengal, India, has created both
direct and representative democratic channels that devolve substantial
administrative and fiscal development power to individual villages.
5. Habitat Conservation Planning under the Endangered Species Act
convenes stakeholders and empowers them to develop ecosystem
governance arrangements that will satisfy the double imperatives of
human development and the protection of jeopardized species.
Though these five reforms differ quite dramatically in the details of their
design, issue areas, scope, and participatory particulars, they all aspire
to deepen the ways in which ordinary people can effectively participate in
and influence policies which directly impact on their lives. From their
common features, we call this reform family empowered deliberative
democracy. The experiments are democratic in the radical sense that they
rely upon the participation and capacities of ordinary people. They are
deliberative since they institute reason-based decision-making. And they
are empowered because they tie action to deliberation; the varieties of
deliberation explored below directly deploy state and private power, and so
are not just exercises in criticism or justification.
We hope that injecting empirically centered examination into current
debates on deliberative democracy will paradoxically expand the imaginative
horizons of that research at the same time that it injects a bit of
realism. Much of the existing thinking on these issues drives deliberative
democracy in institutionally conservative directions, by leaving most of
the deliberation to authorized elites, (2) imagining deliberation as a
primarily a critical (3) or justificatory (4) activity divorced from the
exercise of real power, and by using the concepts of deliberation to re-
interpret the commonplace institutions of courts and parties rather than
using those ideas as a touchstone to generate more fair and effective
arrangements in the real world. The experiments which we explore in this
volume, and the more abstract model which we believe these experiments
embody, challenge the restrictive parameters of much of this recent debate. In what follows, we will begin by elaborating the central principles
underlying the idea of empowered deliberative democracy and then explain
why we think, in principle, these arrangements will generate a range of
desirable social effects. A brief sketch of the experiments follows this,
and we conclude this introduction with an agenda of questions to
interrogate these cases of actually-existing empowered deliberative
democracy.

I. The general principles underlying empowered deliberative democracy
Though each of these experiments differs from the others in its ambition,
scope, and concrete aims, they all share surprising similarities in certain
pivotal institutional design principles. These design principles, we
believe, constitute the basis for a novel, but generalizable model of
deliberative democratic practice that potentially can be expanded both
horizontally--into other policy areas and other regions--and vertically--
into higher and lower levels of institutional and social life. We begin,
tentatively and abstractly, to construct that model here by laying out the
distinctive general principles that seem fundamental to all these
experiments. Six design elements stand out in these experiments: (1) they
all focus on specific, tangible problems; (2) they develop solutions to
these problems through deliberation; (3) the deliberations involve both the
ordinary people affected by problems and officials close to them; (4)
public decision authority is significantly devolved to empowered