ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what a systemic approach to deliberation entails, and discusses in more detail the benefits of this approach. A deliberative systemic approach suggests looking for 'deliberative ecologies', in which different contexts facilitate some forms of deliberation and avenues for information while others facilitate different forms and avenues. Face-to-face deliberation happens only in small groups. Parliamentary deliberation is confined to those forms of deliberation organized by states or subnational units. Schools and universities, hospitals, media, and other organizations can be understood along the lines offered by a deliberative system approach. The ideal of a deliberative system is a loosely coupled group of institutions and practices that together perform the three functions – seeking truth, establishing mutual respect, and generating inclusive, egalitarian decision-making. The chapter describes five pathologies that keep political institutional arrangements from approaching more closely the deliberative ideal in the system as whole: tight-coupling; decoupling; institutional domination; social domination; and entrenched partisanship.
