Deliberative practices in Western democracies and «authoritarian deliberation» in China: opposing trends and ambiguities of deliberative methods

The crisis in the legitimacy of stabilised democracies has been a well-known fact for some time now: scholars from a variety of disciplines have embarked on various strands of reflection, first and foremost, on whether democracy was in crisis, and then on why it was going through a pathological phase that was now systemic in nature. In this context, since the second half of the 20th century, new theorisations on the concepts of democracy and reflections on deliberative politics began to mature from scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, providing fertile ground for those studies that today fall under the large umbrella of deliberative democracy. It is precisely from the crisis of representative democracy, in a polemical and sometimes provocative manner, that the reflections of political scientists and jurists are born on the deliberative method as a complementary tool to attempt to put a stop to it. Thus, a living and breathing democracy would require more than the mere aggregation of individual preferences: the quality of decisions comes, rather, from the degree of quality of the public debate that precedes the voting stage. In other words, the quality of decisions depends on extensive argumentation about political choices, even before voting on them. In particular, after various experiments with deliberative practices as early as the second half of the 20th century, the 2000s saw the gradual spread of new practices and articulations of deliberative democracy: Citizens’ Assemblies, which have found their driving force – and today their reason for revitalisation – from moments of political fibrillation. And so, a new space for a new form of articulation of participation is coming to maturity: a space in which two dimensions are fundamental: a democratic one, and hence the centrality of public and inclusive modes, implemented through the method of the lottery; and a deliberative one, so that communicative forms of exchange and information based on rational arguments become essential. However, deliberative instruments have not only developed within democratic contexts. As a matter of fact, “controlled” forms of political participation and deliberation have long since found application in some authoritarian regimes in Asia. Among these, the Chinese experiences are particularly significant: village-level elections, public hearings and deliberative polls. To indicate this phenomenon the doctrine has developed the concept of “authoritarian deliberation”, elaborated from a theoretical and conceptual distinction between democracy and deliberation. Therefore, I would like to propose a speech that, after a brief historical introduction on the development of deliberative practices within the Chinese regime, analyses the concept of authoritarian deliberation and emphasises the similarities and differences between the deliberative practices in Western democratic regimes and those that have found experimentation in China. Subsequently, an attempt will be made to analyse the reasons why such tools may be functional to authoritarian patterns and dynamics. The aim is to develop a comparative reflection – a comparison not between different regimes, but of the deliberative instrument itself within different political contexts – between the development, trends, perspectives and ambiguities of deliberative practices starting from the observation that their use in non-democratic regimes is not only possible, but is already in full experimentation.