Deliberative democracy and incompatibities of choice norms

Abstract

<p>Deliberative democracy aims at reaching collective decisions through mechanisms that involve flexible opinions, variable alternative sets and information gathering in the process of decision making as opposed to exogenously fixed alternative sets and preferences rankings. Deliberative democracy includes elements derived from bargaining and negotiation. It has been argued that with the help of the deliberative approach important negative social choice results can be escaped from. The basic stratagem is to dismiss the universal domain condition typically assumed in social choice results. Thus, the validity of the results escaped from is obviously not in question. The position taken in this paper is that while in some respects plausible, the escape argument is based on a too narrow view of the incompatibility results of the social choice theory. Some fundamental paradoxes remain beyond the reach of the deliberative techniques and are even exacerbated by them. This said, the deliberative approach can certainly be adopted for making voting alternatives more meaningful to those involved.</p><p><br></p>