Applying Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Uganda’s First Deliberative Polls
Practical experiments with deliberative democracy, instituted with random samples of the public, have had success in many countries. But this approach has never before been tried in Sub-Saharan Africa. Reflecting on the first two applications in Uganda, we apply the same criteria for success commonly used for such projects in the most advanced countries. Can this approach work successfully with samples of a public low in literacy and education? Can it work on some of the critical policy choices faced by the public in rural Uganda? This essay reflects on quantitative and qualitative results from Uganda's first Deliberative Polls. We find that the projects were representative in both attitudes and demographics. They produced substantial opinion change supported by identifiable reasons. They avoided distortions from inequality and polarization. They produced actionable results that can be expected to influence policy on difficult choices.
The last two decades have seen a great rise in interest in deliberative democracy, in both theory and practice.1 In political theory, this “deliberative turn” has largely supplanted the previous enthusiasm for “participatory democracy,” a change sometimes decried by advocates of the latter. Participatory democracy generally relies on self-selected mass participation. In development contexts, an iconic form is the “participatory budgeting” practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil.2 By contrast, the form of deliberative democracy that we will discuss here emphasizes designs that promote both the representativeness and the thoughtfulness of public participation. Instead of mobilizing as many people as possible, the idea is to foster thoughtful weighing of the arguments for and against policy alternatives by representative . . .
Endnotes
- 1For some collections that gather the most influential of these discussions, from various perspectives, regarding deliberative democracy, see James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007); Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). The phrase “deliberative turn” was coined by John Dryzek in his Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- 2Carole Pateman, “Participatory Democracy Revisited” Perspectives on Politics 10 (1) (March 2012): 7–19.