Smits/2
political actors are the elites – politicians – who compete for popular endorsement from
otherwise passive voters.
The development of deliberative democracy can best be understood as a response to the
challenges to the liberal pluralist paradigm posed by two significant and related developments in
the post-war politics of western pluralist democracies – which I outline briefly here. The first of
these was the movement for participatory democracy, which emerged in the 1960s amongst New
Left student groups, and which shaped the philosophical foundations of the new social
movements organized around gender, race and sexuality. Participatory democracy challenged the
notion that the political process was engineered by elites responding to organized popular
interests, expressed through voting. Like the civic republican tradition from which it derived,
participatory democracy focused on the moral value of public action – which accrued to both
actors and the community. Politics was redefined as public action, and political actors as
citizens.
3
While participatory democrats emerged from outside of traditional political
institutions, even the federal government has responded to popular demands for more
participation in politics, as early as with the formation of Community Action programs in 1964,
and more recently with the Town Hall meetings popularized under the Clinton Administration.
3
For an influential early assessment from a theoretical perspective, see Carole Pateman,
Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.) See
also the essays in J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman, eds., Participation in Politics (NOMOS
XVI) (New York, 1975.)
Convention