Encouraging Vernacular Democracy

Abstract Today, some scholars use the term “dialogical democracy” to denote a highly participatory, egalitarian, and pragmatic form of politics that occurs when people with different beliefs and social backgrounds meet, propound, and launch collective actions through open disagreements, rebuttals, negotiations, and counterproposals. During the long process of forging a consensus, the participants treat each other’s rights to speak, question, disagree, and propose alternatives as inviolable; and they eschew the formal separation the roles of decision-makers and subordinates. In hopes of fomenting change in American society, a group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, used a similar participatory and egalitarian mode of decision-making (as opposed to a formally hierarchical style of management) when coediting one of the first issues of New Political Science in the early 1980s. That short-lived experiment illustrates both the practical inconveniences of participatory democracy as well as its potential contributions to the education of citizens.