Ideas about what constitutes a just society are diverse and sometimes contradictory. Ideas of justice can, for example, relate to distributive justice or meritocratic justice. This can make it impossible to realise competing ideas of justice to the same extent. With democratisation since the 18th century, more and more societies have agreed that the best way to peacefully resolve the conflict between these different notions of justice is through majority voting. This raises the question of how appropriate decision-making processes should be organised in democracies in order to achieve fair majority decisions.
Deliberative democracy: the importance of debate
Helmut Schmidt had a clear opinion on this. He said of democracy that it consists of "debate and subsequent decision based on debate" and that democracy is not a state but a process. These two statements apply to representative democracy as well as to the deliberative approach. Perhaps the two most prominent representatives of this conception of democracy are John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. In the deliberative conception of democracy, reason-led debates among citizens interested in the common good are of central importance. According to this ideal, decisions in democracies should be made on the basis of the persuasive power of reasonable arguments exchanged in social discourse. Only arguments that are convincing due to their orientation towards the common good, rather than the defence of particular interests or emotional appeals, are considered reasonable.
A comparison of deliberative democracy between Germany, the USA and Turkey
Like any ideal, the idea of deliberative democracy can never be fully realised in reality. Over the last 15 to 20 years, political scientists have increasingly focused on empirically investigating the realisation of various democratic paradigms. Deliberative democracy is one of the ideals by which the quality of democracy is measured in political science. Every year, the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg surveys several country experts per country on the development of democracy in almost every country in the world and calculates various democracy indices. One of these is the so-called "index of deliberative democracy". A value of 1 would mean that, according to the experts surveyed, the ideal has been fully realised, while a value of 0 would mean that the reality is as far removed as possible from the ideal of a deliberative democracy.
The values of the deliberative democracy index can develop quite differently between countries with similar democratic standards. In 2015, for example, the USA and Germany had the same very high deliberative democracy index score of 0.86. By 2023, this score for Germany had fallen barely noticeably to 0.82, while the score for the USA had fallen to 0.72 over the same period. The change in the value for Germany is so small that it could also be due to measurement errors. This is not the case for the USA. The fall in the value indicates increasing social polarisation, which makes it more difficult to conduct social debates in which arguments are strongly oriented towards the matter in hand, or may be due to such polarisation.
However, the opportunities to make political decisions in a deliberative process are fundamentally at a different level in democracies such as Germany and the USA than is the case in less democratic states. Turkey is a good example of this. The deliberative democracy index for Turkey peaked at 0.51 in 2004. According to the data from V-Dem, the conditions for a public debate orientated towards the common good in the deliberative sense deteriorated steadily until 2016. Since 2016, the value measured by V-Dem for deliberative democracy in Turkey has stagnated at 0.1. This very low value is not exclusively due to polarisation and the associated more emotionalised debates, but also to increasing repression by the Turkish state, for example against journalists. Such measures have a much greater impact on the quality of deliberative democracy than the polarisation of politics and society, as many debates can no longer be held, or can no longer be held in full, in a more repressive environment.
Democracy as a multidimensional concept
Deliberative democracy is only one of the possible conceptualisations of democracy. In addition to the conduct of debates, there are other relevant aspects by which the quality of democracy can be measured. These include questions of participation, material opportunities for citizens and the protection of individual and collective civil liberties. Political scientists have deduced from this that democracy should be defined as a multidimensional concept. Overall, the various dimensions of democracy are very strongly interlinked, as, for example, the opportunity to participate in social debates depends heavily on the material opportunities available to citizens. Nevertheless, it is worth taking a closer look at the various dimensions of democracy, especially with regard to possible democratic improvements and innovations. As part of this year's Helmut Schmidt Lecture on the topic "For a Just Democracy!", we will take a closer look at how democracy can be strengthened worldwide.
