Deliberation Naturalized: Improving Real Existing Deliberative Democracy

Democratic theory's deliberative turn has hit a dead end. It is unable to find a good way to scale up its small-scale, formally-organized deliberative mini-publics to embrace the entire community. Some turn to deliberative systems for a way out, but none have found in that a credible way of deliberatively involving the citizenry at large. Deliberation Naturalized offers an alternative way out-one we have been using all along. The key sites of democratic deliberation are citizens' everyday political conversations networked across the community. Informal networked deliberation is how all citizens actually deliberate together, directly or indirectly. That is how public opinion emerges in civil society. Networked deliberation satisfies the classic deliberative desiderata of inclusion, equality, and reciprocity, albeit differently than standard mini-publics. Reconceptualizing democratic deliberation in those terms highlights some real threats to the networked mode of deliberative democracy, such as polarization, message repetition, and pluralistic ignorance. Deliberation Naturalized assesses the extent of each of those threats and proposes ways of protecting real-existing deliberative democracy against them. By focusing on the mechanisms underpinning everyday democratic deliberation among ordinary citizens, Deliberation Naturalized offers a truly novel approach to deliberative democracy.