Customer Reviews

Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure

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Teson and Pincione have developed a very powerful theory. Their work here has wide-ranging implications for our political process. If accepted, their theory requires that we take a step back from the common modern push from those on both the left and right towards indefinite devolution of political power to direct democracy.

Teson and Pincione's theory builds on a number of intellectual works, most notably theories of the rational voter and the value of deliberative democracy. Their theory adds very important nuances to the works it builds on. One of their most interesting twists is their idea that the common citizen is not to be blamed for their rational ignorance of complicated public policy questions, it is rational - and arguably even virtuous - for common individuals to devote time developing what is directly valuable to their lives (i.e. their family, their profession).

This book is very well written. It is a serious academic work, so it is very thorough in examining the supporting and opposing literature. For readers who are not very familiar with the topics of deliberative democracy and/or rational voters this book serves as a very good and objective literature review.

Highly recommended,

Dave

So, here's the basic idea of democratic discourse failure as discussed by the authors and those whose works they build upon: it's naive to think that ordinary citizens, through processes of deliberation, will arrive at optimal or near optimal solutions to social issues. Why? Part of it is because they are stupid (err, subject to cognitive biases) and lazy (err, rationally can not allocate all their time to know the darkest details of every issue) and part of it is because they are routinely fed lines of nonsense by biased/rent-seeking parties. One needs to look no further than the current status of socialized healthcare "debate" in the USA to see clear evidence of this. I saw a photo on the internet the other day of an anti-nationalized health care 'tea partier' holding up a picket sign that read 'Medicare Users say NO to Obama's Socialized Medicine!' (in case you don't know - what the protester was missing is that the Medicare program is equivalently "socialist"). In short, there are excellent reasons why decisions on flying the 747 are best left to the qualified pilot in front and not left to a democratic process among the passengers. While this basic idea in the realm of policy, politics, and governance is hardly new, this book does an excellent job of discussing and extending the theory of it. There's much good to be gotten on it to the point where the work stands out in an era where criticizing democracy (in theory and/or in practice, in its various guises) is in some intellectual fashion among serious people, and not just French pseudo-intellectuals.

This work is ultimately a healthy re-evaluation of democracy itself by exposing weaknesses in the popular discourse process that is often said to be one of its key underpinnings. Brilliant, great. Clearly the authors are visionary thinkers who are prepared to challenge naive models of... oh wait.. what's this? Hmm.. the first example they use to illustrate their point seems to be based on the authors' "Econ-101"-quality understanding on the relationship between economic protectionism and economic success. Oh - and here's another one based on a similarly naive view of minimum wage laws. and on and on it goes. For a pair so quick and sharp to identify the fundamental (and "rationally occurring") -- MARKET FAILURES -- that exist in democratic deliberative processes, they are tragically naive in being able to identify the same -- MARKET FAILURES -- that exist in economic markets for what are ultimately analogous reasons. As a result, the authors examples' constantly hint a sort of naive free market orthodoxy that they have that would make the president of a college young republicans' club blush. In fact, all of the examples in this book take on a right-wing sort of slant - for example, that of the poor right wing professor who faces a decision on hiding or obscuring his political views when before a (left wing) academic hiring panel. Even in cases where the example is taken as a conditional - for example [paraphrased] "if X believes that imposition of the death penalty leads to less intentional killing through deterrence" ... "x is still acting rationally." Particularly egregious are the authors' characterization of the actions of environmentalists and advocates for the poor - their contempt for them is barely disguised, even if the examples are nominally phrased in terms of conditional, apocryphal terms. Maybe, just maybe, environmentalists don't go after people simply who drive cars (even though cars create substantial pollution) because they realize that such an approach is political suicide and not simply because they're showboaty, naive, and foolish.

In fairness, chapter 5 on 'symbolic behavior' does provide much needed nuance, though it is incompletely argued and one gets the sense that it was written through gritted teeth at the behest of an incredulous editor.

I do recommend this book for its excellent theory. I wish it were a little better organized in terms of structure, but that's a minor quibble. I do wish the examples were better - this is not just because of my personal political distaste for some of the authors views (you know, the ones where they pompously pontificate on the naive economic views of the general public while promoting views that are in some sense equally naive), but also because I think some of the theory is underdeveloped because the authors are too quick to assign simplistic explanations to observed irrational behavior. Still, it's a valuable work.