“What Would the Public Think if It Had a Chance to Think?” (Deliberative Forums as a Cure for Democratic Deficit)

The theory of deliberative democracy is well known and has been studied thoroughly so far; however, the practical side of the functioning of different types of deliberative forums is discussed not so frequently, especially in Russian-language literature. Meanwhile, over the past decades, various countries around the world have accumulated a great deal of experience in the work of consultative mini-publics: one can recall the National Forum in Iceland, convened to discuss the draft of a new Constitution, regular National Public Policy Conferences in Brazil, the Citizens’ Convention on Climate in France, the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in Canada, and much more. The article presents an analysis of this experience. Having focused on two most common types of deliberative institutions — citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polls, — the author attempts to find an answer to the question: can deliberative democracy help to solve key problems of representative political system, such as depoliticization of society, decline of trust in political institutions, etc? Drawing on the results of the conducted research, the author comes to the conclusion that deliberative practices can really contribute to the revival of liberal democracy and repoliticization of society by supplementing customary institutions of political participation with new forms of citizens’ involvement in politics, and many experiments of that kind look truly promising. At the same time, according to the author, deliberative democracy does not have sufficient transformational capabilities to drastically change the political status quo.