The legitimation of deliberative democracy
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis explores issues of legitimacy in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. The starting point is two problems which arise in classical accounts of deliberation. First, if legitimacy depends on the give and take of reasons between free and equal citizens, how can the results of a deliberative moment be legitimate for those who did not take part, when in complex societies there will always be many more outsiders than insiders? Second, there are problems to do with motivations which mean that people may choose not to deliberate even if they can. The thesis begins by criticising the standard deliberative conception of legitimacy as being too narrow, then expands on it to include two different means of establishing links between participants and non-participants: representation and the publicity principle. The former helps by allowing a legitimate basis for including relatively few participants; the latter helps by greatly expanding the institutional possibilities of deliberative democracy, moving away from a reliance on small, self-contained forums and towards a "deliberative system". Having established a set of ideals, I then examine how three key features of the theoretical solution play out in real deliberations, using four deliberative experiments in the UK's National Health Service. One of the reasons why legitimacy is problematic in that context is a conflict between bureaucratic and deliberative imperatives, and so it should not be surprising that legitimacy problems plague some attempts to use deliberation in a liberal state. In chapter four I show how competing representation claims are used as strategic weapons in real policy conflicts, but argue that different claims have strengths and weaknesses depending on context. This has implications for the kind of process used at different points of a policy debate, particularly with regards to participant selection. In chapter five I argue that publicity lessens our reliance on problematic repres…
abstract: This thesis explores issues of legitimacy in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. The starting point is two problems which arise in classical accounts of deliberation. First, if legitimacy depends on the give and take of reasons between free and equal citizens, how can the results of a deliberative moment be legitimate for those who did not take part, when in complex societies there will always be many more outsiders than insiders? Second, there are problems to do with motivations which mean that people may choose not to deliberate even if they can. The thesis begins by criticising the standard deliberative conception of legitimacy as being too narrow, then expands on it to include two different means of establishing links between participants and non-participants: representation and the publicity principle. The former helps by allowing a legitimate basis for including relatively few participants; the latter helps by greatly expanding the institutional possibilities of deliberative democracy, moving away from a reliance on small, self-contained forums and towards a "deliberative system". Having established a set of ideals, I then examine how three key features of the theoretical solution play out in real deliberations, using four deliberative experiments in the UK's National Health Service. One of the reasons why legitimacy is problematic in that context is a conflict between bureaucratic and deliberative imperatives, and so it should not be surprising that legitimacy problems plague some attempts to use deliberation in a liberal state. In chapter four I show how competing representation claims are used as strategic weapons in real policy conflicts, but argue that different claims have strengths and weaknesses depending on context. This has implications for the kind of process used at different points of a policy debate, particularly with regards to participant selection. In chapter five I argue that publicity lessens our reliance on problematic repres…
author: Parkinson, John Richard
language: en_AU
keywords: legitimacy, deliberative democracy, health politics, citizenship, deliberation
date published: 2003
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:07:27Z
provider: Australian Catholic University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian Catholic University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/12470