Reason, Passion and Participation: Paradoxes of Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democrats' understanding of democracy includes both participation and discussions before making collective decisions. However, there is a tension between the particular ways they conceptualize participation (as extensive and active) and public discussions (as deliberations under the precepts of public reason). This paper challenges the feasibility of deliberative democracy in the following ways: 1) by demonstrating the inability of deliberative democrats to provide a convincing account of why their conceptualizations of participation and deliberation should occur simultaneously; 2) by delineating, through historical and theoretical evidence, that what should reasonably be expected to occur simultaneously with active and extensive participation is not reason governed, but passion-driven public deliberations; and, 3) by arguing that these two aspects (extensive participation and public reason) may have adverse effects on each other.