It is not so common that number-based studies are included in the conceptually upgraded discussions on the future of democracy. As a rule, theorists and empiricists keep their distance from one another. But the limit is falling, albeit slowly. The favorite in both camps is the immense material that the “Citizens’ Convention on Climate Protection”, initiated by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019, presented in a 460-page final report. Of course, like a lot of other data, the report was immediately made available to the general public on the Internet.
In the run-up to the meeting, a detailed public record of how many emails, contributions to discussions and much more was kept among the 150 French people selected by lot, 300,000 had originally been written to, two thirds showed no interest, and state institutions were changed. In the end, there were a total of 177 proposals for legal changes, which were justified and contextualized in detail. Since then, there has been a lively and controversial debate, not only in France, about questions of willingness to act within the political systems and classes when they are confronted with concrete demands from the sovereign, the citizen. A clever investigation by the Paris branch of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung has been available since April.
Neither the celebration of popular sovereignty nor the longing for expertocracies solve the democracy problems of the West
But they were far from the first. Hélène Landemore, who teaches at Yale, used parts of the material in 2020 for her book “Open Democracy” to advance her ideas about democracy. Since speed is becoming an increasingly important criterion in the interpretation market, Landemore linked the Paris survey with the idea of ”Mini Publics”, a form of small, grassroots “publics” that has been practiced for over 25 years and that plays through thematically on a small scale, which then turns out to be a pattern on a large scale for democratic processes.
People quickly became enthusiastic and sometimes still are: “Mini Publics” are the test tube in which it is possible to observe how citizens act, resolve conflicts and then deliver very specific solutions to urgent problems. Quite soon, the “island” and “lighthouse” rhetoric that had become commonplace spoke of a new chance for democracy. But in democracy, even in the supposedly so old and overburdened form of the representative, nothing is to be had without a price: The beautiful “Mini Publics” always hung on the drip of the state clients and they have so far refused to go to institutions in almost all cases secure way of being integrated into established legislative procedures and thus allowing other realities to emerge from the proposals. So are the “Mini Publics” just a “fig leaf”, as some think?
Cristina Lafont: Unabridged Democracy – A Theory of Deliberative Citizen Participation. Translated from the English by Bettina Engels and Michael Adrian. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 448 pages, 34 euros.
This history can be helpful when one approaches the new book by Cristina Lafont, who did her doctorate in Frankfurt on Heidegger’s linguistic thinking and who teaches in the USA. “Unabridged Democracy” is the title of her study, which should be read in peace. Because she tries to bring calm to a debate landscape that is characterized on the one hand by radical gestures and on the other hand by helplessness.
So what is it about? The first part of the book may still be off-putting, because the author first goes to a meta-level in order to get an overview of the discussion landscape. Dealing with Landemore and the “Mini Publics” plays a central role in this. For the advance on their own recipes for the patient democracy, Lafont primarily got rid of three unsatisfactory models: Neither the celebration of the “popular sovereignty gone wild” (Ingeborg Maus) nor the longing for expertocracies solved the democracy problems of Western societies. And even those who rely on the good old, because ancient lottery, do not find Lafont’s approval.
On the other hand, it relies on the model of “deliberative democracy”, that is, a model that has managed to get by without definitional limits for 40 years and which therefore appears to be attractive in terms of content with good reasons. “Advising” and “considering” may be translations of “deliberative”, but Lafont adds another systematic note: “deliberate”. The formulation of this seemingly fragile criterion applies to the second part of “Unabridged Democracy”.
In this one can understand the laborious handling of complex, plural societies, whose will to break boundaries seems to doom any conceptual containment to failure. Negotiation processes must be “well-considered” that offer space, but do not get out of hand at random. “Well-considered” must be transfers to already institutionalized or yet to be created procedures that want to perpetuate proposals based on consensus. And it has to be “well considered” when democracy has to be able to defend itself.
Lafont’s catalog works with strong normative specifications and, in view of the current situation, seems almost nostalgic. But in times of pointless and obviously only driven by the need for thought relief, the departure of the great political-philosophical traditions from Plato to Kant to John Rawls, a well-considered plea for a rational idea of democracy is very welcome.