Innovating Democratic Systems? From a Proliferation of Democratic Innovations to a Systemic Design Framework

The systemic approach is becoming the new orthodoxy of deliberative democracy. Although there are diverse interpretations of this theoretical shift, the necessity of focusing on political systems' overall value is widely acknowledged. In this perspective, the deliberative democratic quality of a political system lies in the manner deliberative and non-deliberative elements are distributed and articulated to constitute a comprehensive and coherent system. Beyond the focus on institutions such as representative arenas and participatory mechanisms, the systemic approach to deliberative democracy entails a greater consideration of innovative communicative practices in the complex discursive settings characterising contemporary societies. Furthermore, scholars from this approach stress the importance of the context-sensitivity of democratic deliberative systems: deliberative democracy's core values can be instantiated very differently within different political systems. Therefore, a crucial contribution of the systemic approach is to open the road for the diagnosis of institutional pathologies in their broad societal context, taking into account deliberative and non-deliberative practices and institutions. Ultimately, such diagnoses of particular political systems allow conceiving some specific institutional transformations, rather than generic ones. While few scholars have attempted such systemic assessments, I argue that much remains to be done at the theoretical level for adequately operationalizing such a task and leading sound and fruitful assessments. In order to do so, I conceptually clarify and articulate the central metaphors that the systemic approach to deliberative democracy draws on, notably the "functional division of labour" and its implications. Firstly, I show that the axioms of the systemic approach to deliberative democracy lead to a major ambiguity regarding the role of deliberation within democratic systems. On one hand, deliberation is conceived as an end in itself, under the form of the deliberative quality of the democratic system. On the other hand, deliberation is instrumental to the performance of democratic goods. I argue that tenants of the systemic approach to deliberative democracy cannot contend both that non-deliberative elements can perform deliberative goals and that deliberation is a goal in itself. Consequently, I claim that deliberative democrats must requalify their aim towards the normative horizon of democratic systems per se, freed from the presumption of a deliberative primacy within these. Secondly, building on the "functionalist" tendency of current democratic theory, I show the entanglement of the functional and normative dimensions of the "division of labour" within major contemporary accounts, and discuss the importance to distinguish those in order to build an operational framework for the assessment of existing political systems and for the design of contextually relevant democratic innovations.