Can we design a perfect democratic decision
procedure?
(public lecture at the "Visions in Science"
conference, Berlin, September 2014)
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Lecture podcast
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Condorcet famously
observed that majority rule has some
desirable properties, but sometimes
produces inconsistent outcomes. The aim
of this lecture is to show that there is
a conflict between three initially
plausible requirements of democracy:
‘robustness to pluralism’, ‘basic
majoritarianism’, and ‘collective
rationality’. For all but the simplest
collective decision problems, no
decision procedure meets these three
requirements at once. At most two can be
met together. This ‘democratic trilemma’
raises the question of which requirement
to give up. Since different answers
correspond to different views about what
matters most in a democracy, the
trilemma suggests a map of the
‘logical
space’
in which different conceptions of
democracy are located. (Click
here for background paper.) |
Democracy and deliberation
The two most influential contemporary approaches
to theorizing about democracy - social choice
theory and the theory of deliberative democracy
- are often considered mutually disconnected or
even inconsistent.
The former sees the aggregation of conflicting
individual opinions as central to democracy, the
latter their transformation in deliberation.
In several papers, some jointly authored with
other colleagues, I have argued that the two
approaches are complementary, investigating, for
example, the role of deliberation before
aggregation.
One key hypothesis is that group deliberation
leads participants to develop a shared
understanding of a decision problem
('meta-agreement'), while leaving room for
disagreement about the best alternative. If
true, this opens up an escape from several
social-choice-theoretic impossibility results.
Together with James Fishkin, Robert Luskin and
others, I have been involved in empirical work testing
this and other related hypotheses about
deliberation-induced opinion change.
On the theoretical side, I am involved in the
development of formal models of group
deliberation, drawing on ideas from the theory
of judgment aggregation and the theory of belief
revision.
Highlights
Democratic Deliberation and Social Choice: A Review, Oxford
Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, in press
Independence and Interdependence: Lessons from
the Hive
(with A.
Vermeule), Rationality and Society
26: 170-207, 2014
Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the
Possibility of Meaningful Democracy: Evidence
from Deliberative Polls
(with R. C. Luskin, J. S. Fishkin
and I. McLean), Journal of Politics 75(1): 80-95,
2013
The Logical Space of Democracy, Philosophy
and Public Affairs 39(3): 262-297, 2011
Group
Communication and the Transformation of
Judgments: An Impossibility Result,
Journal of Political Philosophy 19(1): 1-27, 2011
Can there be a global demos? An agency-based approach
(with Mathias Koenig-Archibugi),
Philosophy and Public Affairs 38(1): 76-110, 2010
Social
Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation (with
John Dryzek),
British Journal of Political Science 33(1): 1-28
Two
Concepts of Agreement,
The Good Society 11(1): 72-79, 2002 (revised
version, 2008)
Other
papers
The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason,
Ethics 116(2): 362-402, 2006
When
to defer to supermajority testimony -- and when not, 2006
Disaggregating
Deliberation's Effects: An Experiment within a Deliberative Poll
(with
Cynthia Farrar, James Fishkin, Donald Green, Robert Luskin and
Elizabeth Levy Paluck),
British Journal of Political Science 40(2): 333-347
Social
Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Response to Aldred (with
John Dryzek),
British Journal of Political Science 34(4):
752-758, 2004
Deliberative
Polling als Methode zum Erlernen des demokratischen Sprechens (with
Anne Sliwka),
Zeitschrift fuer
Politik 51(1):
87-105, 2004 (English
translation)
Edited book
