I never thought I'd ask the question. Indeed, I never thought the question existed. But are citizen participation and deliberative democracy at odds?
The two, in my mind at least, seemed to go hand in hand; with greater citizen involvement in the democratic process, the more discussion and deliberation would be need to make decisions.
But a (fantastic) article I'm in the middle of reading (pdf), suggests the opposite: that the more you cushion decisions from the democratic process, the more potential there is to demand deliberative decisions. Huh.
I'm not sure, but I think the logic is thus: democratically made decisions risk happening at the whim of an impassioned electorate or wily politicians (not necessarily working in the best interest of the nation, but decisions made by institutions a step away from politics - courts, the Federal Reserve, etc - can have the space to dis-impassionedly think through the complexities of an issue.
The key here is who gets to be deliberative. In this view, citizens are out of the process - and the wonks in the institutions are in. I'm assuming that two caveats are implied. One, that the semi-independent agencies have to be public with their thinking process and that, by extension, if they're really unconvincing that that a public backlash could get them to backtrack.
