Intra-party Deliberation and Reflexive Control within a Deliberative System

• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718806829
• Author: Valeria Ottonelli,Enrico Biale
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718806829

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(4) 500 –526

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718806829

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Article

Intra-party Deliberation

and Reflexive Control

within a Deliberative

System

Enrico Biale1 and Valeria Ottonelli2

Abstract

From within a “systemic approach” to deliberative democracy, political

parties can be seen as crucial actors in facilitating deliberation, by playing

epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that are central to

the deliberative ideal. However, we point out that if we assume a purely

outcome-oriented conception of the role of parties within a deliberative

system, we risk losing sight of a central tenet of deliberative democracy

and of its distinctive principle of legitimacy, namely, that citizens must be

able to exercise critical reflection on the grounds of democratic decisions.

We argue that parties have a special responsibility in making a deliberative

system meet this requirement, and that such special role can be fulfilled only

if parties’ programs, values, and strategies are shaped through intra-party

deliberation. On the grounds of this discussion, we define a model of intra-

party deliberation that is based on the principles of mutual acceptability,

pluralism, and publicity.

Keywords

intra-party deliberation, political parties, democratic legitimacy, deliberative

systems, partisanship

1Department of Humanities, University of Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy

2DAFIST-Philosophy, University of Genova, Genova, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Valeria Ottonelli, Associate Professor, DAFIST-Philosophy, University of Genova, Via Balbi 30,

Genova, 16126, Italy.

Email: vottonel@nous.unige.it

806829PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718806829Political TheoryBiale and Ottonelli

research-article2018

Biale and Ottonelli 501

The normative theory of deliberative democracy has recently been affected

by two important developments. The first concerns the re-evaluation of the

role of parties and partisanship. Traditionally seen as inimical to deliberation,

parties have been vindicated as crucial actors in the democratic public sphere

by playing important epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that

are also central to the deliberative ideal.1 The second development has been

to reassess the scope and implications of the dialogical setting on which the

deliberative ideal is modeled. Contrary to what traditional models of delib-

erative democracy assume, democratic deliberation does not need to take

place in a unitary, impartial, and reasoned discursive setting. It can also be

built through the interaction of different stages and actors, not all necessarily

deliberative, which taken as a whole constitute a “deliberative system.”2

Though these two developments have been growing independently of each

other, they can be seen as complementary. In fact, on the one hand, advocates

of the systemic turn explicitly claim that partisanship can play an important

role within a deliberative system.3 On the other hand, in virtue of its rejection

of a unitary and undifferentiated model of democratic deliberation, the sys-

temic approach has proven very congenial to rehabilitating parties and parti-

sanship within the normative theory of democracy.

Scholars rightly remark that if parties must exercise their important func-

tions, they must not act as gangs, factions, mere representatives of economic

powers and interests, or appendages of the state apparatus.4 However, these

caveats concern obvious pathologies of party politics. In this paper, we argue

that if we want to be true to the deliberative ideal, steering away from these

pathologies, which concern the outcomes of parties’ activity as facilitators of

public deliberation, is not enough. Parties must also fulfill a defining proce-

dural requirement of the deliberative ideal—namely, that citizens must be

able to exercise reflexive control over the process through which political

decisions are made. Reflexive control, as defined here, is the requirement that

political decisions be made through processes that enable people to exercise

critical reflection about their grounds. We argue that if parties must ensure

reflexive control in performing their functions within a deliberative system,

their programs, principles, and strategies must be shaped through intra-party

deliberation. An important literature is emerging on the benefits and require-

ments of intra-party deliberation5 as the best and most efficient way for par-

ties to fulfill their role of “linkage” between civil society and institutional

decision-making. Here we argue for a different, more specific, and stronger

claim: that intra-party deliberation is not just a welcome feature of a demo-

cratic regime but a necessary requirement of legitimacy for a deliberative

system.