On the elusive notion of meta-agreement

Abstract

Public deliberation has been defended as a rational and noncoercive way to overcome paradoxical results from democratic voting, by promoting consensus on the available alternatives on the political agenda. Some critics have argued that full consensus is too demanding and inimical to pluralism and have pointed out that single-peakedness, a much less stringent condition, is sufficient to overcome voting paradoxes. According to these accounts, deliberation can induce single-peakedness through the creation of a 'metaagreement', that is, agreement on the dimension according to which the issues at stake are 'conceptualized'. We argue here that once all the conditions needed for deliberation to bring about single-peakedness through meta-agreement are unpacked and made explicit, meta-agreement turns out to be a highly demanding condition, and one that is very inhospitable to pluralism. Downloaded from democratic public can align its otherwise scattered and conflicting views about how to rank available policy options. Furthermore, it does this through a fully rational and noncoercive process. 1 This not only may appear as good in itself, but is also a sure remedy against the dangers of Arrovian cycles and the inconsistencies associated with democratic decision-making procedures, which have been brought to light and analyzed by social choice theory (Arrow, 1963;Riker, 1982). If there is consensus on how to rank and assess different available political options, then cycles do not occur and democracy is safeguarded against irrationality and manipulation.However, some critics have argued that aiming at consensus as a solution to these problems might not be the right strategy. Consensus, they have pointed out, is very difficult to achieve, even in the best deliberative circumstances. Moreover, aiming at consensus as a condition for the correct functioning of democracy shows disregard for pluralism, which is a defining feature of modern democratic societies and one that (at least within certain limits) deserves respect.In the past few years, a new and different account has emerged of how deliberation produces cycle-free democratic decisions. Specifically, what deliberation does, and should do, is not to bring about a substantive agreement on how to rank and assess the different options on the political agenda. Rather, it should encourage a meta-agreement concerning how those options should be 'conceptualized'. 2 The basic idea behind this claim is that substantive agreement (that is, identical orderings of the available alternatives by individual voters) is not only difficult to achieve, but also unnecessary for freeing democracy from cycles and paradoxical results. As shown by Duncan Black more than 50 years ago, a sufficient condition for avoiding such results is that citizens' preference orderings be 'single-peaked'; this means that although individuals' preferences may be different, they can be represented spatially along the same left-right dimension.Deliberation, it is argued, tends to bring about single-peakedness beca...

Democratic Self-Determination and the Intentional Building of Consensus

“…As we mentioned, metaconsensus is compatible with different preference orderings of the alternatives on the political agenda and different ways in which people cast their vote; however, it requires that the members of a polity conceptualize the issues on the political agenda in exactly the same way. This substantially curbs pluralism by making everyone look at the world through the same conceptual lenses (Ottonelli & Porello, 2013). Again, it can be argued that pluralism does not concern so much how people rank policy alternatives but most importantly consists in people's having different worldviews-different ways to conceptualize their social world and represent different policies, their impact and their relations to underlying values and principles.…”

Agreement and Relational Justice: A Perspective from Philosophy and Sociology of Law

“…There is an ongoing interesting discussion on meta-agreements -the conceptualization of issues at stake, the context of sets of judgments over multiple interconnected propositions-and single-peakedness -individuals rationalize their preferences in terms of a common issue dimension-to overcome the well-known voting paradoxes. (List, 2007;Ottonelli and Porello, 2012). I still think that there is no valid argument against the capacity to produce new knowledge through the empowerment of individual participation in the web.…”

Towards an Ontological Modelling of Preference Relations

“…A recent approach to the foundation of preference relations has been developed by Dietrich and List [5,4] and discussed in [15,19]. Here, preference relations are dependent on the properties of the alternatives at issue, whose salience depends on the views of the agent.…”

“…This simplification amounts to assuming that in a preference statement only one dimension of choice is involved[15,19]. That is, the value of a for i does not depend on any further conditions.…”