Direct-democratic processes have won popular support but fall far short of the standards of deliberative democracy. Initiative and referendum processes furnish citizens with insufficient information about policy problems, inadequate choices among policy solutions, flawed criteria for choosing among such solutions, and few opportunities for reflection on those choices prior to decision making. We suggest a way to make direct democracy more deliberative by grafting randomly selected citizen assemblies onto existing institutions and practices. After reviewing the problems that beset modern direct-democratic (...) elections and the long history of randomly selected citizen assemblies, we propose five different varieties of randomly constituted citizen bodies—Priority Conferences, Design Panels, Citizens’ Assemblies, Citizens’ Initiative Reviews, and Policy Juries. After selecting members through stratified random sampling of citizens, each of these assemblies would operate at a different stage of the legislative process, from initial problem identification through approval of a finished ballot measure. Highly structured procedures guided by professional moderators and featuring expert testimony on policy and legal matters would help to ensure deliberative quality, and careful institutional designs would make each body politically powerful. In the end, these citizen bodies would be likely to address the deliberative deficit of direct democracy and better achieve the public’s desired policy objectives. (shrink)

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of minipublics that could (...) enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies. (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard view that Kant ignored the role of prudence in moral life by arguing that there are two notions of prudence at work in his moral and political thought. First, prudence is ordinarily understood as a technical imperative of skill that consists in reasoning about the means to achieve a particular conditional end. Second, prudence functions as a secondary form of practical thought that plays a significant role in the development of applied moral and political judgment. (...) The political judgment of citizens and politicians is prudence regulatively guided by right and virtue. As informed by regulative ideas, prudential judgment negotiates the demands of these ideas in relation to the cultural, political, and social realities of a particular form of life. This sense of prudence is empirically informed and involves a context-sensitive application of morality as well as conceptions of individual and general welfare. (shrink)

Should voting be compulsory? This question has recently gained the attention of political scientists, politicians and philosophers, many of whom believe that countries, like Britain, which have never had compulsion, ought to adopt it. The arguments are a mixture of principle and political calculation, reflecting the idea that compulsory voting is morally right and that it is will prove beneficial. This article casts a sceptical eye on the claims, by emphasizing how complex political morality and strategy can be. Hence, I (...) show, while there are good reasons to worry about voter turnout in established democracies, and to worry about inequalities of turnout as well, the case for compulsory voting is unpersuasive. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors argue for two main claims: first, that the epistemic results of group deliberation can be superior to those of individual inquiry; and, second, that successful deliberative groups depend on individuals exhibiting deliberative virtues. The development of these group-deliberative virtues, the authors argue, is important not only for epistemic purposes but political purposes, as democracies require the virtuous deliberation of their citizens. Deliberative virtues contribute to the deliberative synergy of the group, not only in terms of (...) improving the quality of the group's present decisions, but also improving the background conditions for continued group deliberation. The authors sketch a preliminary schedule of these group-deliberative virtues modelled on Aristotle's conception of virtue as the mean between two extreme vices. The virtues discussed in this article include deliberative wit, friendliness, empathy, charity, temperance, courage, sincerity, and humility. (shrink)

Against the background of historical antipartyism in practice and in democratic theory, and with a focus on American political thought, this paper takes issue with contemporary arguments that value the political identity ‘Independent’ and disparage partisanship. A typology of ‘Independent’ is offered and both empirical and moral claims about the superiority of Independent voters are rebutted, with particular focus on the ‘weightlessness’ of Independents. The reasons to appreciate the moral distinctiveness of partisanship for democracy are set out: commitment to political (...) pluralism, to regulated political rivalry, and to shifting responsibility for governing. Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and compromisingness set the contours for an ethic of partisanship. (shrink)

Coll clearly advocates the Aristotelian notion that "moral principles are ultimately realized only in specific acts which human beings choose to carry out." He cites Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill as examples of leaders whose moral wisdom in political reasoning led to a statecraft explicitly derived from prudence.