Acta Politica, 2005, 40, (384392) r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 0001-6810/05 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.

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Concluding Comments on Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Politics

Ju rgen Habermas
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Senckenberganlage 31, Frankfurt am Main 60325, Germany.

Acta Politica (2005) 40, 384392. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500119

I am grateful for the privilege to add some thoughts on the contributions to this volume (although I was not able to participate in the actual conference). Far from being capable of writing a kind of review, my comments only resonate some reactions to the inspiring reading of papers from a field of research I am not familiar with. It will not come as a surprise that I am most satisfied with the operationalization of online Deliberation that D. Janssen and R. Kies extract from Lincoln Dahlbergs research (2002). One set of criteria for measuring the quality of discourse refers to structural features: the reciprocity of raising and responding to validity claims; the connection of this exchange with justifying reasons; the direct or indirect inclusion of all those affected; and the absence of interfering pressures with the exception of the forceless force of the better argument. The remaining three criteria concern required dispositions of participants: a reflexive attitude towards ones own claims and background assumptions; ideal role taking or willingness to take the demands and counterarguments of the others seriously; and sincerity or the absence of manipulation and self-deception. At first glance, it might appear puzzling that a list of criteria for evaluating internet discussions should fit best to my own description and presuppositional analysis of practical discourse (Habermas, 1983, 93119; 1991, 15266; 1996a, 5664). However, issue-oriented chat rooms provide the researcher with selfdefined, weakly institutionalized, spontaneous and rather isolated discourse units, which can be analysed apart from any larger political context. These abstract units invite an empirical analysis of how informal yet focused deliberations deviate from the model of rational discourse. Experimental groups, such as S. Fishkins focus groups for deliberative polling, provide another approach to discourse analysis. The conception of rational discourse serves as standard for an evaluation of the cognitive potential of actual communications, in the first case, and as design for the construction of cognitively enhanced communications in the second case.1

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These examples might suggest that rational discourse is a kind of philosophical ideal belonging to what Rawls calls ideal theory. This is not how I understand the term. The conception of rational discourse results from the reconstruction of an actual practice and captures just those pragmatic features of a communicative setting that anybody tacitly presupposes once he seriously enters an argumentation in order to check a problematic validity claim by either supporting or denying the truth or rightness of some statement with reasons pro and con. This rather demanding practice of giving and taking reasons (Brandom, 1994) is rooted in, and emerging from, the everyday contexts of communicative action. The idealizing presuppositions of inclusiveness, equal communicative rights, sincerity and freedom of repression and manipulation are part of the intuitive knowledge of how to argue. Far from being an imposition of philosophical ideas from the outside, they form an intrinsic dimension of this practice. With this description I do not imply, of course, that we can use arguments only in the context of a discourse that properly serves the purpose of proving and redeeming validity claims. Nor do I maintain that we ever actually meet those ideal conditions we cannot but presupposing when we engage in rational discourse. Yet, these presuppositions are constitutive of the game of argumentation: the very moment we discover that somebody cheats and manipulates or excludes relevant persons or contributions, we realize that the game is over. This is to remind us of the reconstructive character of any empirical research that is guided by discourse theory as I understand it. The intuitive knowledge that participants connect with their performance may not match the observable facts while yet being constitutive of that same practice. Take the practice of general voting as an example. It depends on a voluntary participation of a large part of the citizens. Any democratic regime is finished without that. However, would citizens participate at all unless they presupposed, contrasting evidence notwithstanding, that ones own vote does make a difference in the effective outcome?2 Would citizens bring to court any legal case unless they presupposed, contrary to the beliefs of many lawyers and law professors, that outcomes more often than not qualify for the kind of fair administration of justice they expect?3 Would members of a parliamentary committee or a caucus engage again and again in discussions on normatively loaded issues (such as stem cell research) unless they presupposed that they can win over people by better arguments? Research in constitutive presuppositions is part of conceptual analysis, a proper job for philosophers. However, such a philosophical analysis assumes more and more features of an empirical research, the more we depart from the level of generalized cognitive and linguistic practices and approach presuppositions of institutionalized and more or less conventional practices. In a few cases, philosophical reconstructions of basic competences have been used for
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the construction of empirical theories. Genetic epistemology is a case in point (although Piaget did almost all the philosophical work by himself). In a similar vein, Robert E. Goodin suggests to develop the conception of deliberation from the famous conversation postulates of Paul Grice (1975, 2001). I myself prefer a stronger conception of rational discourse for explaining an epistemic notion of deliberative politics. Even if that conception serves a proper role in a theory of truth or in moral theory4, it is not at all obvious that politics lends itself for discourse theory as a proper domain of application. We should keep in mind the reason why normative political theory has bought into an epistemic notion of deliberative politics: it is for solving the problem of legitimation that the secular state faces in view of the fact of pluralism. Once the acceptance of binding political decisions can no longer be based on justifications derived from a substantive world view that is, or can be expected to be, shared by all citizens, the burden of legitimation finally falls only on what we may expect from the democratic process. In the legitimation base of the constitutional state, there is certainly a circular relationship between democracy and human rights. However, as soon as metaphysical and religious arguments do no longer count in public, human rights cannot on behalf of natural law claim validity independently of any democratic authorization. The law of law giving is up for democratic legitimation, too. Democratically generated laws would, on the other hand, remain deficient as well, if they were following the doctrines of legal positivism or legal realism nothing but the expression of an arbitrary or unbound will of the people. A legitimating authority can only spring from a democratic process that grounds a reasonable presumption for the rational acceptability of outcomes. And this will be only the case if there is a cognitive dimension built into it the decisions of the democratic law giver must remain internally linked to preceding deliberations. And here is the entry for a discourse theory that claims to explain how the institutionalization of deliberative politics can generate a postmetaphysical and postreligious kind of legitimacy within a pluralist civil society.5 From this perspective, I am happy to see how many contributions to this volume actually highlight three important aspects of such a theory as follows: (1) In dealing with the transnational arena of politics, the papers of Part V explain in different ways the relevance of a legal institutionalization of political deliberation. At this level, deliberation, as a mechanism of problem solving and conflict resolution, is still underinstitutionalized. What in German international law has been called the constitutionalization of international relations is obviously a long-ranging, vulnerable and still open-ended process that did not start until the foundation of the United Nations. In view of such uncertain prospects, it is interesting to analyse the role of arguing and bargaining in
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multilateral negotiations. Focusing on several case studies on multilateral negotiations undertaken in a common project jointly led with Harald Mu ller, Thomas Risse and Cornelia Ulbert confirm the assumption that a stronger impact of deliberations on outcomes depends on a dense framework of previously agreed-upon principles, norms and rules. At the national level such as common background is granted by the frame of a democratic constitution. Compared with those more or less well-institutionalized legitimation processes within democratic nation states, there is a lack of coupling between, on one side, the decision-making processes in international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization or the World Bank and, on the other side, any organized opinion and will formation among citizens affected by those decisions beyond the nation state. This is the reason why Patricia Nanz and Jens Steffek choose these organizations for a critical assessment of the insufficient institutionalization of proper deliberations. The lack of Democratic Quality in international governance can so far hardly be compensated by weak forms of participation from the side of globally operating Civil Society Organizations. (2) Depending on the domains in need of political regulation, political deliberation and decision-making faces different types of problems. From a logical point of view, complex political issues can be analysed in terms of empirical, evaluative and normative components. Political deliberation shifts correspondingly over a broad range of aspects, from factual or pragmatic discourse to ethical, moral or legal argumentation, and again from arguing to bargaining, that is to the negotiation of power-based interests. If we understand by arguing any kind of rational discourse, the difference between bargaining and arguing points to problems that are no longer rooted in a disagreement on facts, values or norms, that is, in a conflict between opinions, but in a conflict between particular interests. Bargaining mediates between conflicting preferences, which allow for compromises, whereas conflicting value positions, forms of life or identities resist compromising, because existential meanings escape comparison in terms of basic goods (such as money, free time, health, social or personal security, etc.). Political deliberation, broadly understood, thus responds to different issues with a different logic and mode of communication. Katharina Holzinger characterizes arguing and bargaining accordingly in terms of speech-act theory by the choice of different kinds of illocutionary types. She establishes correlations between types of conflict and modes of communication. Her beautifully designed comparative study on a local clash between particular interests and a nationwide conflict between deeply rooted ethical beliefs confirms the hypothesis. We must not forget, however, that bargaining remains indirectly linked to argumentation. If the competing parties are to accept outcomes as fair, they must agree on the conditions of negotiations. And this
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procedural agreement cannot again result from another compromise. In order to reach a normative consensus on fair procedures participants must first engage in practical discourse. (3) If we conceptualize the democratic generation and legitimate use of power in terms of discourse theory, we arrive at a rather complex image of the political system as a whole.6 The normative infrastructure of the constitutional state is mirrored in terms of channels, filters and transformers of various communication flows. These flows circulate between the informal networks of the political public sphere on one side, legislatures, courts and administrative bodies on the other side. And each of these state powers operates again according to patterns of deliberation of its own. In this mode, the classical scheme for the interaction and separation of powers (that ideally make, apply and implement laws) is realized by an increasingly selective access to different sorts of reasons so that for different powers some spaces of reasons are closed and binding, whereas others are left open for further processing. And as soon as those communication flows (in the public, in parliaments, in courts or agencies) pass certain institutional sluices (such as general elections, or legislative, juridical and administrative decisions), there is a change in both, the mode of communication and the regulatory impact: public influence is transformed in communicative power, communicative power in juridical competence or administrative power, and both in the execution of court decisions or the implementation of programmes. Robert E. Goodin and Michael Neblo are right to stress the functional differentiation of discourses, depending on the place deliberation and decisionmaking in each case occupy within the larger context of the political system as a whole. With this systemic view in mind, we can develop more specific hypotheses on what kind of results discourse and negotiation are expected to yield in different settings and in view of different conflicts. Political deliberation can serve many purposes, for example, the formation of relevant, instructive and influential opinions in the public sphere, or the generation of informed votes on competing platforms among citizens (or, from the complementary perspective of campaigning parties, the mobilization of support from the electorate), or reasonable decisions on legal programs in parliament, or the rational choice and effective implementation of policies within the administration, or legitimate solutions for legal conflicts in court, etc. We must first specify the purpose of the type of deliberation under consideration, before we can choose the right mix of methods, the merits and disadvantages of which John S. Dryzek convincingly discusses. The main focus of the present volume is on political deliberations in the narrow sense of democratic opinion and will formation (a) among citizens within the informal public sphere and (b) among politicians or representatives within formal settings. Even though the authors are not so much concerned
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with mass communication, and how it generates the agenda setting pressure of relevant issues and the political influence of conflicting public opinions, they analyse the public sphere from two perspectives (c) as an arena of citizens who make up their own mind and (d) as an audience reacting to political elites. (a) In the light of the sobering results of research on voters ignorance, all approaches to deliberative politics seem to miss the point of really existing democracy from the beginning. All the more important is the evidence from studies that focus on actual political deliberation among citizens. They reach from induced reasoning in experimental groups to everyday talk in focus groups. Fishkins and Luskins research of deliberative polling is designed for mobilizing capacities of ordinary citizens that most people cannot makes use of under normal conditions. There is a largely neglected disposition for the rational appropriation of political information and an information-driven preference change on the basis of normative criteria. Large-scale democracies obviously do not take advantage of this potential. The study of everyday political talk by Pamela Johnston Conover and D. Searing suggests that the daily routines and interactions foster reasonable political attitudes and interests among potential voters even within existing institutions and cultural contexts. This kind of data fit to the image of how individual citizens cognitively process a more or less inattentively perceived flow of rather accidental and scattered information over a longer period in such a way that the constant input piles up to an intuitive knowledge as the tacit background for still rationally motivated pro and con attitudes towards political issues at elections. Ba (b) The splendid comparative study of Ju chtiger, rg Steiner, Andre Markus Spo rndli and Marco R. Steenbergen on the deliberative dimension of four national legislatures reaches just to the centre of the whole approach to deliberative politics. Deliberative politics inconspicuously derives its name from historical ideas of a pre-1848 liberalism that received its inspiration from what deliberierende Versammlungen the early modern parliaments were expected to achieve, namely the rationalization of an in-transparent use of governmental power. I admire the careful research design for testing ambitious hypotheses as much as I admire the inventive introduction of a Discourse Quality Index for capturing essential features of proper deliberation. Both achievements would deserve a detailed commentary, which I cannot provide in the present context. Nor can I take up the discussion on procedure vs substance at the principled level, where the controversy depends on the choice of epistemic vs non-epistemic concepts of truth and rightness.7 At the level of the actual democratic process, the procedural institutionalization of parliamentary deliberation feeds on the normative substance of the constitutional frame anyway.8
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Although I do have some reservations about the method for measuring substantive outcomes (the supposed egalitarian content of 20 decisions of the German Vermittlungsausschuss9), my main question concerns the general result, summarized in the first major proposition that power trumps discourse with regard to substantive outcomes. I have no idea, of course, whether a sharper distinction between matters of conflicting interests, admitting only bargaining and compromise, and matters of value conflict, yielding to principled arguments, would have led to any differentiation of the thesis. However, apart from that, I would like to ask about the meaning of a power, which is expressed in terms of parliamentary majority votes. This power derives from the result of general elections, which is in turn determined by deliberatively formed opinions opinions shaped by public controversies and disputes on competing platforms. From a systemic point of view, the communicative power, stored by majority parties, shares with the more fluid impact of parliamentary debates on shifting votes of MPs the same roots of political deliberation. This is why the finding that the institutionalized power of democratically elected majorities cannot be easily counteracted by deliberation within either parliament or parliamentary committees fits as well to the overall view of a discourse theory of the constitutional state as the other finding, and that egalitarian arguments did have a measurable impact on egalitarian outcomes in cases of a stalemate.10 (c) Steiner and his group present in their summary the second major proposition that the large majority of parliamentary debates are not really deliberative. This fits with some other observations on the interaction of parliaments with outside audiences and the ambivalent impact of a double reference of plenary debates to the internal audience and an external addressee. Katharina Holzinger reports on a prominent occasion where arguments in the German Bundestag were not exchanged for the purpose of deliberation, but just used for a nationwide public presentation and legitimation of polarized positions that had been previously developed and hardened over years of controversies at various levels. The out-of-window reference to a larger audience serves the function of mobilizing and securing legitimation for ones own party and is, normatively speaking, quite in order, even though it lowers the kind and quality of deliberation. On the other hand, Simone Chambers and Thomas Risse compare the contrasting effects of publicity in cases, when political elites either appeal to the supposed impartial authority of a diffuse and anonymous public at large or try to serve the presumably fixed preferences and prejudices of a familiar audience. What may promote the sensitivity for a style of principled reasoning and the common good type of arguments in one case and seduces at other times to shift towards rhetoric and demagoguery. On the basis of a review of the relevant literature on manipulative misinformation,
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pandering and image maintaining, Simone Chambers comes up with a clarifying analysis of private vs public reasoning. (d) The interaction between political elites and the general public is intensified during campaign periods. Hanspeter Kriesis exemplary study on political participation in referenda highlights the institutional conditions in which argument-based voting is reinforced. This Swiss experience confirms the normative expectations we connect with the form of direct democracy. It intensifies at the same time scepticism about the feasibility of effective arrangements in large-scale democracies and complex societies, which can hardly meet the two requirements for deliberative politics, identified by this research a genuine familiarity with the political project at stake and a high level of information about the pros and cons of the controversial aspects of it. How can we hope to meet the doubts of Swiss citizens, who reject to join a European Union that cannot, by its own operations, meet the conditions it requires for acceding member states? I must apologize for the selective perspective of my reading. My evaluation is guided by a theoretical frame afterwards brought to empirical studies, most of which have been designed from different points of view. However, the bridging conception of deliberative politics reminds us of the peculiar feature that all of these studies have in common. The approach towards one or the other kind of deliberative practices requires an instrument for the evaluative measurement of data (like the Discourse Quality Index) or an experimental design for the construction of value-impregnated data (like the focus groups for deliberative polling). The evaluation comes in via some notion of communicative or practical rationality, which extends beyond the familiar conceptions in rational choice- and game-theory and plays a different role in structuring designs. Compared with the well-defined standard notion of purposive rationality of actions and interactions, conceptions of what is rational in communication (D. Davidson, M. Dummett, R. Brandom, J. Habermas) or reasonable in practice (J. Rawls, Ch. Taylor, B. Williams) still vary with controversial theories. Thus, the empirical design to a large extent depends on who cooperates with whom, or on the choice between philosophical approaches in both fields, the philosophy of language and normative political theory. For the case of my own theory, the impact on design and method is easily illustrated by the following implication. Whereas the observed behaviour of an actor does or does not fit the paradigm of rational choice, the communicative behaviour of participants in deliberative practices always fits the paradigm to some degree, as long as the actor is participating in a practice of that kind. For the rational presuppositions are attributed to the type of practice, whether it is institutionalized or not. In this case, the intricate purpose of measurement is to find out the degree in which a given sample of participants live up to rational presuppositions that are constitutive of their practice.
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References
Brandom, R. (1994) Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dahlberg, L. (2002) Net-public sphere research: beyond the first phase, Euricom colloquium: electronic networks and democracy; 912 October, 2002, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Grice, H.P. (1975) Logic and Conversation, in D.D. and G. Harman (eds.) The Logic of Grammar, Encino, CA: Dickenson. Grice, H.P. (2001) Aspects of Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Habermas, J. (1983) Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1991) Erlauterungen zur Diskursethik, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1996a) Die Einbeziehung des Andern, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1996c) Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1999) Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, Teil III. Spo rndli, M. (2004) Diskurs und Entscheidung. Eine empirische Analyse kommunikativen Handelns im deutschen Vermittlungsausschuss, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu r Sozialwissenschaften. Tyler, T.R. (1990) Why People Obey the Law, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Notes
1 For this research strategy, the work of Michael A. Neblo is representative, too. 2 The so-called voters paradox is an artefact of a theory that reduces by definition all action orientations to those resulting from rational choice. 3 Tyler (1990). 4 Habermas (1999). 5 Habermas (1996c). 6 Habermas (1996c, Chapter 4). 7 Habermas (1999, Teil III; 1991, 164ff). 8 Habermas (1996c). 9 Spo rndli (2004, Kapitel 5, 6 and 9). 10 Spo rndli (2004, 161).

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