Deliberative democracy (Dezide discussion and summary)
sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term used by some political theorists, to refer to any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry.
The term "deliberative democracy" was originally coined by Joseph M. Bessette, in "Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government," in 1980, and he subsequently elaborated and defended the notion in "The Mild Voice of Reason" (1994). Others contributing to the notion of deliberative democracy include Jon Elster, Jurgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen and John Rawls.
Joshua Cohen, a student of Rawls, most clearly outlined some conditions that he thinks constitutes the root principles of the theory of deliberative democracy in the article "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy" in the book The Good Polity. He outlines 5 main features of deliberative democracy, which include:
- An ongoing independent association with expected continuation
- The citizens in the democracy structure their institutions such that deliberation is the deciding factor in their creation and that they allow deliberation to continue.
- A commitment to the respect of a pluralism of values and aims within the polity.
- The participants in the democracy regard deliberative procedure as the source of legitimacy and as such they also prefer those causal histories of legitimation for each law be transparent, and easily traceable back to the deliberative process.
- Each member and all members recognize and respect each others' having deliberative capacity
- this can be construed as the fact that in a deliberative democracy, we "owe" one another, in the legislative process, reasons.
Representative democracy (Dezide proxy voting- and expert system)
is a form of government founded on the principles of popular sovereignty by the people's representatives. The representatives form an independent ruling body (for an election period) charged with the responsibility of acting in the people's interest, but not as their proxy representatives—i.e., not necessarily always according to their wishes, but with enough authority to exercise swift and resolute initiative in the face of changing circumstances. It is often contrasted with direct democracy, where representatives are absent or are limited in power as proxy representatives.
In many representative democracies (eg, Canada, the USA, Britain, Sweden etc), representatives are most commonly chosen in elections by a plurality of those who are both eligible to cast votes and actually do so. A plurality means that a winning candidate has to win more votes than any other candidate in the race, but does not necessarily require a majority of the votes cast. While existing representative democracies hold such elections to choose representatives, in theory other methods, such as sortition (more closely aligned with direct democracy), could be used instead. Also, representatives sometimes hold the power to select other representatives, presidents, or other officers of government (indirect representation).
Direct democracy (Plain use of Dezide)
classically termed pure democracy, comprises a form of democracy and theory of civics wherein sovereignty is lodged in the assembly of all citizens who choose to participate. Depending on the particular system, this assembly might pass executive motions (decrees), make law, elect and dismiss officials and conduct trials. Where the assembly elected officials, these were executive agents or direct representatives (bound to the will of the people).
Direct democracy stand in contrast to representative democracy (see above) , where sovereignty is exercised by a subset of the people, elected periodically, but otherwise free to advance their own agendas. These two forms of democracy can be combined into representative direct democracy, where elected representatives vote on the behalf of citizens, as long as they do not choose to vote themselves (Dezide proxy voting system!).
Direct democracy also deals with how citizens are "directly" involved with voting for various laws, instead of voting for representative to decide for them.
Modern direct democracy is characterized by three pillars: Initiative, Referendum including binding referendums, Recall.
The second pillar can include the ability to hold a binding referendum on whether a given law should be scrapped. This effectively grants the populace a veto on government legislation. The third pillar gives the people the right to recall elected officials by petition and referendum.
Other institutions exist which are regarded as being directly democratic in character. In particular, the use of sortition to fill posts in government or decision making bodies and the formation of Citizen Assemblies for collective decision making (British Columbia and Ontario have used such assemblies to come up with proposals for new voting systems