Deliberative Elitism? Distributed Deliberation and the Organization of Epistemic Inequality

This is the author accepted manuscript.The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2016.1165126In the systemic turn, deliberative theory seems to have come full circle. After a phase of empirically engaged research on practices of deliberation in various ‘natural’ settings, and experiments in the production of considered public opinions in ‘minipublics’ and other citizen panels, deliberative theory is returning to problems of locating deliberation within democratic systems. This paper explores the question of how expert authority might be integrated into a deliberative democracy, thereby addressing an important tension between the principle of democratic equality and the inequalities implied by expert knowledge. The problem of locating expertise within deliberative politics, I argue, is just a special case of a general problem in deliberative systems: How to locate the different deliberative ‘moments’ with respect to each other and to observing publics. In answering this question I emphasize the importance of ‘metadeliberation’ on the value and functions of divisions of deliberative labor. I describe deliberation among experts, contestation in the critical public sphere and deliberation in minipublics from the point of view of their capacity to support a wider context of public judgment of expertise. And I conclude with a discussion of the problem of ‘deliberative elitism’.EU FP7/2007-2013, grant agreement no. 23723