Josh Cohen on Deliberation and Power

I liked this discussion of the relationship between deliberation and power from a forthcoming piece by Josh Cohen¹.

the importance of background differences in power is not a criticism of the deliberative ideal per se, but a concern about its application. Deliberative democracy is a normative model of collective decision-making, not a universal political strategy. And commitment to the normative ideal does not require commitment to the belief that collective decision-making through mutual reason-giving is always possible. So it may indeed be the case that some rough background balance of power is required before parties will listen to reason. But observing that does not importantly lessen the attraction of the deliberative ideal; it simply states a condition of its reasonable pursuit.

Thus, in Habermas’ account of the ideal speech situation, or my own account of an ideal deliberative procedure, inequalities in power are stipulated away for the sake of presenting an idealized model of deliberation. These idealizations are intended to characterize the nature of reasoned collective decision-making and in turn to provide models for actual arrangements of collective decision-making. But actual arrangements must provide some basis for confidence that joint reasoning will actually prevail in shaping the exercise of collective power, and gross inequalities of power surely undermine any such confidence. So discussion that expresses the deliberative ideal must, for example, operate against a background of free expression and association, thus providing minimal conditions for the availability of relevant information. Equally, if parties are not somehow constrained to accept the consequences of deliberation, if “exit options” are not foreclosed, it seems implausible that they will accept the discipline of joint reasoning, and in particular to reasoning informed by the democratic idea of persons as equals. Firms retaining a more or less costless ability to move investment elsewhere are not, for example, likely to accept the discipline of reasoned deliberation about labor standards, with workers as their deliberative equals.

Saying “if you don’t listen to reason, you will pay a high price” is not a joke: it is sometimes necessary to resort to destabilization, threats, and open conflict as answers to people who won’t reason in good faith. A sucker may be born every minute, but deliberative democracy is not a recommendation that we all join the club. But if the willingness to reason does depend on the background distribution of power, doesn’t that defeat the point of deliberative democracy by reducing deliberation to bargaining under a balance of power? Not at all. Once people do listen to reason, the results may not simply reflect the balance of power that defeated their previous imperviousness, but their attentiveness to reasons that can be shared. If I need to drink some espresso to concentrate hard enough to prove a theorem, it does not reduce theorem-proving to a caffeine high. So similarly, paying attention to power and threats to exercise it doesn’t reduce deliberation to bargaining. To suppose otherwise is like thinking that if you need to trust your math teacher in order to learn how to do a proof then there is nothing more to proof than trust. It confuses conditions that make an activity possible with that activity itself.

This does a very nice job, I think, in clearing away some conceptual brush, and emphasizing how deliberation shouldn’t be a substitute for radical transformation of power relations, but instead a way of building on it. Some of the existing literature on deliberation (e.g. the kinds of deliberative polling advocated by Ackerman and Fishkin) _do_ seem to me to be naive about power relations, in that they assume that the existence of a deliberative consensus on issues will, in and of itself, have potent political consequences (this _might_ sometimes be true, but only, I suspect, under relatively stringent political conditions). Cohen’s argument seems to me to be considerably more realistic (while I am probably more skeptical than he is about what deliberation can accomplish, even under these conditions, the case he advances is a much stronger one for its attention to the consequences of power asymmetries).

¹ Joshua Cohen, “Reflections on Deliberative Democracy,” in Thomas Christiano and John Christman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).