Acceso usuarios
Fabrizio Cattaneo
Two Issues of Deliberative Democracy In this essay I focus on two specific themes of particular relevance within the debate on deliberative democracy: 1) the relationship between rights and (deliberative) democracy, 2) the problem of the democratic quality of debates. In developing the first of these two issues, we compare the standpoints of two scholars that uphold the model of deliberative democracy: José Luis Martí and Jürgen Habermas. The first claims there is a conflict between rights and democracy, while the latter claims these are "compatible" and mutually related (the thesis of the so-called cooriginality of the two). By comparing these two positions it becomes clear that the divide between them is not as wide as one might think prima facie. At any rate I advocate the position of Habermas while attempting to bridge his model of deliberative democracy with that of democratic constitutionalism as it has been developing with theories of social contract in modern legal rationalism. In the second part of this essay I focus on the democratic quality of debates, on the basis of a radical outlook: Can they be democratic? In other words, can there be something like "deliberative democracy"? On the basis of the theory of democratic representation elaborated by Norberto Bobbio and Michelangelo Bovero, I argue that debates taking place within parliaments can be democratic whereas debates taking place in deliberative areas where participants are chosen on the basis of polling techniques is not. Informal and non institutionalized deliberation in the public sphere is also undemocratic. There we should adopt Habermas' two track model. This model is grounded on a strengthened parliamentary debate among the elected representatives of the people as well as a public, yet informal and non-institutionalized debate that should be promoted even though undemocratic because it enables political self-education of citizens.
