Failures of Partisan Deliberation

AbstractAlthough the picture of intra-party deliberation that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5 is generally very positive, it is important to note that some of the party groups that were studied for this book proved to be less deliberative than others. Those groups provided good preconditions for deliberation, yet their actual deliberations displayed numerous shortcomings. This chapter examines these shortcomings, looking closely at three types of ‘deliberative failure’—(a) group splits and defection; (b) cases where deliberation does not arise, or only seldom arises; and (c) polarizing tendencies. The chapter also sketches a number of institutional devices for making deliberative failures tractable and concludes that even though deliberative failures will be difficult to avoid in an internally deliberative party, their most harmful effects can be limited through institutional design; so, the fact that deliberation sometimes fails does not speak against a deliberative model of intra-party democracy as a whole. This is important as the proposal of a more deliberative and thus democratic party the book advances is meant to be feasible and functional even under difficult conditions.