Deliberative mini-publics as a Confucian institution

Abstract

This article constructs a positive case for deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) from the perspective of contemporary Confucian political philosophy. Extant empirical and normative studies of DMPs have treated them primarily as a concrete way to instantiate the deliberative conception of legitimacy advocated by Western political philosophers such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas. Almost no attention has been paid to how certain non-Western philosophies like Confucianism could provide different understandings of such an institutional innovation. The article fills this gap by exploring why DMPs should be incorporated into the two ideal types of regimes considered by today’s Confucian political philosophers, Confucian democracy and Confucian political meritocracy. In this regard, it makes an original contribution to both the field of democratic theory and the emerging paradigm of Confucian public administration.