Identity Politics Redux: Apologies for Historical Injustice and Deliberation about Race
Deliberative democracy has, over the past ten years, come largely to replace the older
interest pluralist or aggregative paradigm of democratic theory, in both academic and public
policy discourse. This classical liberal model, developed in the 1950s by Robert Dahl and other
American pluralists, may be understood in both juridical and proprietary terms; it posited
individuals as both the bearers of negative rights against the state, and the possessors of private
interests they wish to protect from governmental control. In the political process, individuals are
understood to assert those interests and combine with others who share them, in order to
influence electoral candidates (whose own interest it is to achieve elected office.) The focus of
this aggregation of interests is the ballot box, and its purpose is to influence the formation of
governments and policy.
1
The democratic process seen in these terms is competitive and ends-
focused – comparable, critics argue, to the functioning of the market economy, in that political
actors reason strategically in a competitive context to influence outcomes.
2
It is unconcerned
with the processes by which interests are formed and altered, and with the relationship between
political action and the self-understanding of actors. Moreover, this model assumes that the chief
1
For a classic and originary statement, see Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory
(Chicago: 1956.) For a critical formulation, see Jurgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of
Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla
Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996,) 22. Iris Marion Young terms this the
“aggregative model” of democracy. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000,) 19-21.
2
Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 19-20, fn. 5; C.B. Macpherson describes this model
as the “entrepreneurial market analogy,” in The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977,) ch. IV.
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