Deliberating Like a State: Public Administration and the Deliberative System

• In Event: Critical Approaches to the Study of the Crisis in Politics and Policymaking

Abstract

Deliberative system approaches now dominate deliberative democratic theory. They have shifted the deliberative democratic project away from a deontological ideal of legitimate law-making to a consequentialist systems approach that expands this ideal to every domain of the democratic system. This article examines the challenges of this expansion by exploring the way public administration is represented within deliberative systems theory. It argues that these representations are characterised by a mixture of elision, synecdoche and Panglossianism that render public administration as a deliberative object by forcing it into theoretical categories predominantly developed in relation to the legislative process. This creates misunderstandings or omissions concerning the legitimacy functions of public administration, its mode of coordination, its key legitimacy relationships, the nature of the public administrator and its variety of actors and institutions. The article then points to directions for strengthening the conceptual foundations of deliberative systems approaches to address these issues.

Author

• Rikki Dean, Goethe University Frankfurt