1 Deliberative Democracy and the Legitimacy of Basic Income

Pre-introductory remarks In order to gain legitimacy, a basic income scheme – like any other welfare-political measure – must be in accordance with basic political ideals and beliefs of the polity. Very often this has led to a focus on the principle of reciprocity and to discussions concentrating on whether or not a basic income would violate this principle (cf. Kildal, ….; Gutmann…; Rothstein). While not at all denying the importance of this problematic, this paper intends to relate the idea of a basic income to another deeply fundamental and also widely recognized idea, namely that of democracy. Now, of course, ‘democracy ’ is an extremely contested notion, and there are a lot of suggestions as to how its deeper meaning or its ‘regulative ideal ’ (Miller 1993) should be specified. One such suggestion is democracy understood as deliberative democracy, and in the paper it is argued not only that this regulative ideal of democracy is more valid and rewarding than – in broad terms – ‘economic ’ conceptions of democracy but also that it embodies a basic and highly recognised legitimacy. Against this background, the paper was originally meant to make a comparison between tw