INEQUALITY AND DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Abstract

Although increased deliberation has been proposed to cure democracy’s ills, we know very little about under which societal conditions it can thrive or wither. For instance, deliberation tends to require a relatively high amount of communicative skills and cognitive abilities which are dependent on socioeconomic factors such as class and education. This could potentially favor the more socioeconomically advantaged groups of society. Critics have therefore argued deliberative democracy as possibly anti-democratic or even utopian. This begs the question whether deliberation as an ideal for decision-making is possible in societies where substantial inequalities pervade. In addition, studies exploring this question have mainly focused on small deliberative experiments limiting the generalizability of the results. This thesis therefore explores if educational (H1) and income inequality (H2) have a significant negative effect on the quality of deliberation by using countries as the unit of analysis. These hypotheses are explored by using data from the V-Dem and SWIID databases between the years 1960-2000 together with a cross-sectional times-series approach and autoregressive modeling. The analysis fails to identify an effect of educational or income inequality on the quality of deliberation. These results suggest that societal inequalities do not seem to be detrimental in creating deliberative democracy. In conclusion deliberative democracy does not seem to be as utopian or anti-democratic as critics suggest.