Deliberative participation to democratize democracy

In an attempt to respond to the challenge of the crisis of democracy, a new actor is emerging, and it takes the form of an assembly of citizens, selected by lot on a representative basis, grounded in the deliberative theorists’ claim that democracy requires more than the mere aggregation of individual preferences. The quality of decisions is believed to derive from the quality of public debate that precedes the vote. In other words, decisional legitimacy is tied more to robust political argumentation than to the act of voting itself. Altogether, this leads to the paradoxical coupling of participation and indifference. Deliberative practices today represent a “participatory piece” striving to carve out space within these dynamics. In doing so, they confront the pressing question of whether we may once again be living in a moment when “our age is one of gestation and transition to a new era”. It is in this spirit that this work seeks to offer a reflection on the subject, not in a classificatory sense, but rather as a systemic inquiry. Firstly, because attempts to categorize these fragmented and unevenly distributed phenomena have already been widely provided by foreign scholarship. Secondly, because the guiding intent of this research is to use this opportunity to rethink democracy, and to observe representative democracy through the lens of deliberative democracies. This volume is thus a collection of reflections on the relationship between these two forms of democracy, aiming to explore their essence, particularly the beating heart that has sustained representative government. From a methodological standpoint, the approach is constitutional and comparative, enriched by interdisciplinary contributions, particularly from the fields of history and the history of political thought, which can offer significant insights for legal theorists of the state and institutions. The starting point is a dive into the past, necessary to establish key distinctions that help elucidate the rationale behind contemporary deliberative theories and practices. This historical grounding allows for identifying the differences between past and present and examining the philosophical reflections that gave rise to deliberative democracies and their practices. The endpoint – closing the circle – is a synthesis of the reflections offered throughout, assembled like pieces of a puzzle to provide interpretive keys not only to the deliberative phenomenon, but above all to representative democracy itself.