Direct deliberative democracy: A mixed model: (Deliberative for active citizens, just aggregative for lazy ones)

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce and discuss a new model of governance, in which epistemic qualities of intrinsically elitist open deliberation are combined with normative qualities of aggregative democracy based on universal suffrage. In our model, these two approaches, typically considered as opposite to each other, are combined in a quite natural way. Namely, the process of deliberative policy-making in a community is open to every its member who is willing to participate (the “active” ones); while all others (the “lazy” ones) are provided with the possibility of either to cast their informed vote, or, at the end, to delegate their voting right to the whole community, through an IT system enforcing appropriate procedures and performing appropriate algorithms. Practical implementation of our model will be made possible through a combined use of (1) a procedural framework for Mass common Online Deliberation (MOD), which had been described in detail in our past papers; (2) an appropriately designed Computer-Assisted Argumentation (CAA) system; and (3) a system for collecting and taking into account individual preferences of every “lazy” citizen, in a way similar to the so-called Voting Advice Application (VAA) systems.