A Model of Deliberative and Aggregative Democracy

Abstract

We present a model of collective decision making in which voting and deliberation are treated simultaneously. Political theorists argue that public discussion can lead individuals to change their preferences.This aspect of democracy is typically ignored in models of social choice that focus exclusively on voting. In our model, individuals debate in a public forum and potentially revise their preferences in light of deliberation. Once this process is exhausted, a voting rule is applied to aggregate post-deliberation preferences into a social choice. Restricting attention to three alternatives, we identify conditions under which * Financial support from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through MICINN/FEDER grants ECO2010-21624 and ECO2010-14929, and the NUI Galway Millennium Fund is gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful for comments received at a Choice Group seminar at LSE. In particular, we would like to thank Nick Baigent, Richard Bradley, Franz Dietrich, Wulf Gaertner, Christian List, Marcus Pivato, Kai Spiekermann and Katie Steele for their helpful comments. We owe a large intellectual debt to the work of Christian List. Two of his papers, Dryzek and List (2003) and List (2011), inspired us to work on this problem.† Departamento de Análisis Económico, Universidad de Zaragoza, Gran Vía 2, 50005 Zaragoza, Spain. Email: jperote@unizar.es ‡ J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland. Email: ashley.piggins@nuigalway.ie 1 a democracy is truth-revealing in the sense that the deliberation path and the voting rule will always lead to the correct social choice being made, irrespective of the original profile of preferences and size of the electorate (provided the latter is finite). A critical parameter in the model is the persuasion cost. When this is low, a democracy is almost always truth-revealing. When it is high, we have the standard social choice model and truthful revelation is impossible. Moreover, we identify when and only when truthful revelation occurs in an interesting intermediate case.JEL classification: D71, D72.

Governments Should Play Games

“…There are different deliberation models that illustrate how online deliberations should take place (see Burkhalter et al, 2002 andPerote-Peña &Piggins, 2015 for a review of these models), and also frameworks and studies that operationalize these models (see Macintosh, 2004 andPhang &Kankanhalli, 2008 for applications). It is therefore difficult to adopt any single deliberation model as a general guideline for civic engagement platform design (Abdelghaffar & Sameer, 2013;Perote-Peña & Piggins, 2015).…”

“…There are different deliberation models that illustrate how online deliberations should take place (see Burkhalter et al, 2002 andPerote-Peña &Piggins, 2015 for a review of these models), and also frameworks and studies that operationalize these models (see Macintosh, 2004 andPhang &Kankanhalli, 2008 for applications). It is therefore difficult to adopt any single deliberation model as a general guideline for civic engagement platform design (Abdelghaffar & Sameer, 2013;Perote-Peña & Piggins, 2015). However, the core features of these models are that citizens should be given enough information about the civic matters presented on the platform (information provision), they should be encouraged to interact with each other and to express their opinions whenever possible (interactivity), and the participants should reflect on their experience, learn from it and provide their final opinions either through means of a vote or other appropriate mechanism (reflection) (Burkhalter et al, 2002;Eränpalo, 2014;Min, 2007;Perote-Peña & Piggins, 2015;Sameer & Abdelghaffar, 2015;Swezey et al, 2012).…”

“…One of the core theories of civic engagement is that of democratic deliberations, or deliberation theory in short. It posits that democratic, societal discussions of political matters are the preferred method to create informed individuals who actively participate in governance and political activism (Abdelghaffar & Sameer, 2013; Eränpalo, 2014; Fung & Wright, 2001; Min, 2007; Perote-Peña & Piggins, 2015; Sameer & Abdelghaffar, 2015; Schlosberg, Zavestoski, & Shulman, 2009). Deliberations are thus a crucial requirement for any civic engagement platform, without which it cannot be expected to achieve its core functional objectives or any of the positive outcomes for which civic engagement platforms are designed (Gordon et al, 2014; Sameer & Abdelghaffar, 2015; Sánchez-Nielsen & Lee, 2013; Swezey et al, 2012).…”

“…As a design practice, gamification should be done thoughtfully to ensure that it leads to sustainable long-term results (Bartle, 1996; Coronado & Urriago, 2014; Deterding, 2012; Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014; Landers, 2014; Nicholson, 2015; Rigby, 2015; Zuckerman & Gal-Oz, 2014). Additionally, civic engagement platforms are governed by the rules of democratic deliberation as vital requirements to be fulfilled, in order for effective civic engagement to take place (Burkhalter, Gastil, & Kelshaw, 2002; Macintosh, 2004; Perote-Peña & Piggins, 2015; Phang & Kankanhalli, 2008; Sameer & Abdelghaffar, 2015). This duality complicates gamification design for civic engagement.…”

A Formal Theory of Democratic Deliberation

“…As some have pointed out, unlike the “systematic analysis of the normative and analytical properties of voting procedures” of social choice theory, “[n]o comparable analysis exists for deliberative democracy” (Knight and Johnson 1997, 282). The literature is beginning to fill this gap in the theory of deliberative democracy, as there is an increasing number scholars who are offering formal theories of democratic deliberation (Dietrich and List 2013; Hafer and Landa 2007; Landa and Meirowitz 2009; Patty 2008; Patty and Penn 2011, 2014; Perote-Pena and Piggens 2015). This article presents a formal theory of democratic deliberation that contributes to this growing line of research in a way summarized in the next section.…”