Autoren:	Landwehr, Claudia Schäfer, Armin
Titel:	The promise of representative democracy : deliberative responsiveness
Online-Publikationsdatum:	16-Jan-2024
Erscheinungsdatum:	2023
Sprache des Dokuments:	Englisch
Zusammenfassung/Abstract:	In the eyes of its citizens, liberal democracy is connected to at least three promises—the promises of autonomy, equality and rationality. To what extent citizens can view these promises as being fulfilled will affect political trust and support for democracy. The rise of populism and trends towards technocratic government have rightly been interpreted as arising from a gap between normative aspirations and institutional and practical realities. Does this mean that we should adjust our ideals to reality, or that we should strive to bring realities closer to the ideal? Self-proclaimed ‘realists’ argue that democratic ideals are unattainable and that we should therefore settle for a second-best alternative, such as a competitive oligarchy. Against this position, we point out that deliberative democracy offers an attractive ideal for successful representation that can inform democratic innovation. However, deliberative democracy also remains institutionally underdetermined and needs to develop better criteria that enable us to determine if, how and under what conditions the attempt to fulfil democracy’s promises succeeds in practice. In this paper, we suggest a criterion of deliberative responsiveness as a measure for representative democracy’s success in fulfilling promises of autonomy, equality and rationality. We go on to show in what respects these promises tend to be broken in contemporary representative democracies and discuss strategies for institutional reform that have potential to counteract these problems.
DDC-Sachgruppe:	320 Politik 320 Political science
Veröffentlichende Institution:	Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Organisationseinheit:	FB 02 Sozialwiss., Medien u. Sport
Veröffentlichungsort:	Mainz
ROR:	https://ror.org/023b0x485
DOI:	http://doi.org/10.25358/openscience-9789
Version:	Published version
Publikationstyp:	Zeitschriftenaufsatz
Nutzungsrechte:	CC BY
Informationen zu den Nutzungsrechten:	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Zeitschrift:	Res publica Version of Record (VoR)
Verlag:	Springer Science + Business Media B.V
Verlagsort:	Dordrecht u.a.
Erscheinungsdatum:	2023
ISSN:	1572-8692
DOI der Originalveröffentlichung:	10.1007/s11158-023-09640-0
Enthalten in den Sammlungen:	DFG-491381577-H