Democracy without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy

This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require citizens to blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics.

About the Author :
Cristina Lafont is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, where she is Chair of the philosophy department and Director of the Program in Critical Theory. She is the author of Global Governance and Human Rights (Amsterdam, 2012), Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure (Cambridge, 2000), The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (MIT, 1999), and co-editor of Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order (Columbia, 2017) and the Habermas Handbook (Columbia, 2017). She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Frankfurt. In 2011 she held the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam and in 2012/13 she was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She was recently awarded the 2022 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution by The American Philosophical Association and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Review :
A brilliant book. The author offers a powerful reconstruction of the systematic content of a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, which she justifies with metacritical arguments that exhibit an equal measure of analytical acumen. Trenchantly argued, ambitious, and full of surprising insights, Democracy without Shortcuts is a major contribution to contemporary democratic theory by one of the best political philosophers in the world. It is hard to exaggerate the importance today of Lafont's identification and exploration of the central goal of dispelling alienation – helping citizens to own their own laws, identify with those laws, and endorse them... Her willingness to directly address the need for the justification of state coercion is what makes this book so important... Lafont's analysis is extremely valuable for today and for the future. It puts the citizen at the center and takes seriously the citizens' capacities for reflectively endorsing the laws that coerce them. A searching and thought-provoking philosophical work on the nature of deliberation in modern democracy. Cristina Lafont's powerful critique of deliberative minipublics strikes at the central strategy that has energized efforts to actually apply deliberative democracy to real public problems. Every effort to make deliberative democracy practical needs to take account of her critiques. This book makes a significant contribution to the literature defending a broadly deliberative view of democracy ... In the course of her defense she shows that judicial review need not be opposed to participatory deliberative democracy.