Deliberation and Voting Entwined

Abstract

Deliberative democracy arose in opposition to a reigning aggregative conception of democracy in political science, solely about voting. Not long ago, political scientists arduously believed, based on logical speculations, that democratic voting is arbitrary and meaningless and that democratic voting is irrational as well. Rather than challenge these mistaken views about voting, democratic theorists instead singled out and celebrated deliberation. We review how those views about voting failed and report democratic theory’s reconciliation with voting.. Deliberative theory often says that variation in quality of deliberation can shape voting for better or worse; we add the idea that choice of voting rule can shape the value of deliberation for better or worse, illustrated with three examples. Finally, we compare the ideal values of voting and discussion, which overlap but are not identical.