Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Imagination
Author: Kuo-Hsien Hsu
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
Majoritarianism plays a vital part in modern democracy. It is a simple method with clear-cut solution in case of disagreement. Building upon the quantitative comparison of preferences, this very simplicity ignores the justification of preferences, which proponents of deliberative democracy think we should provide and then reason together with others. As a new form of democratic imagination, deliberative democracy asks citizens and politicians to deliberate publicly their justifiable reasons for preferring specific policies with their fellow-citizens, in order that purely self-interested preferences will be seriously cross-examined. This article tries to evaluate the overall project of deliberative democracy and to delineate the difficulties it may encounter, and then concludes with a reflective look at democratic process today.