Theorizing actually-existing deliberation: Self-convened popular assemblies

The academic field of deliberative and participatory democracy famously rests on seminal works from the 1970s-1980s, such as those by Carol Pateman, Jürgen Habermas, John Dryzek, Jane Mansbrige, and James Fishkin. Their theoretical contributions have been essential to delineate the normative underpinnings of institutional alternatives to representative democratic systems and have rightfully called attention towards political projects that empower ‘ordinary’ citizens to conduct political matters. However, these theories have also been produced overwhelmingly in and for the global north (Curato 2022, Morán and Ross 2021), often disconnected from larger, context- and community-bound sociopolitical processes (Bussu et al. 2022, Felicetti 2021). This paper invites reflection and contestation over some of the established theoretical principles that shape deliberative and participatory democracy, especially those most frequently associated with effective process design, such as randomized selection, structured and mediated deliberation, and institutionalized impact over policy (Curato, Farrel et al 2021). It does so by turning the gaze towards ‘actually existing’ deliberation, meaning publics convened by its own participants, open-ended in its features and goals, often juncture-driven, extra-institutional, and even anti-institutional in their aims (Pogrebinschi 2023, 2022, Lin 2019). In particular, it focuses on popular assemblies (asambleas populares) in the Latin American Southern Cone. Adopting a bottom-up, theory-building approach, I argue that examining civil society-led deliberation can challenge – but also complement and course-correct – normative assumptions about participation and deliberation. First, by focusing on the more disruptive elements in democratic ecosystems, rather than on neatly designed, ‘laboratory-made’ (Welp 2022) mini-publics, the paper introduces a characterization of actually-existing deliberation. In a second step, I probe whether the deliberative principles of equity in participation, reason-giving, and consensus-building hold for non-designed cases of deliberation, such as popular assemblies, and explore what alternative principles might underlie these cases. A third step concludes with a reflection on the decolonizing potential of a reconstructive approach to democratic theorizing (Fraser 2021).