Well written and thoroughly researched, Ana Tanasoca’s book deftly mixes empirical political science with normative theory to paint an optimistic picture of deliberative democracy’s prospects. Deliberation Naturalized furthers our understanding of deliberation as it occurs naturally among people via their already existing social networks. Tanasoca’s sophisticated account identifies key barriers to informal networked deliberation and offers specific ways to overcome them.
Informal deliberation, or everyday talk, is a key component of deliberative democracy and figures prominently in Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative model as one of the two “tracks” along which deliberation is supposed to occur. Still, our understanding of informal deliberation in the public sphere has been limited until now. Tanasoca’s book departs from recent scholarship on citizens’ deliberation that often focuses on discrete, small-scale deliberative initiatives. She argues that it’s a mistake for deliberative democrats to prioritize mini publics. Informal, spontaneous, and networked deliberation—what she calls “naturalized deliberation”—is “the real existing currency of deliberative democracy” (p. 21).
The book is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on formal deliberation that occurs—or more often, does not occur—in organized political institutions like the US Senate. Given the entrenched preferences of actors within these bodies, they typically produce a kind of “ritual deliberation,” lacking “any genuine intention or realistic expectation to let the force of the better argument prevail” (p. 79). Although there are upsides to “faking it,” Tanasoca shows that our deliberative aspirations are bound to derail if we pursue only this track of deliberation (p. 78).
Tanasoca’s optimism stems, instead, from her research on the real existing deliberation that occurs au naturel. In part II, Tanasoca challenges assumptions regarding general deliberative incompetence, arguing that the prospects for genuine democratic deliberation are much brighter when we consider this informal mass deliberation in the public sphere. A major strength of the book is the attention Tanasoca pays to both internal deliberation and external deliberation and to the interplay between the two. She gives an admirably clear and specific account of how people can and do update their opinions and preferences in light of what they hear from others. Appealing to the logic of Bayesian updating, Tanasoca explains how we assess a claim based on its content and source, as well as the number of credible sources making it (chapter 4).
Appealing to the idea of “six degrees of separation,” Tanasoca demonstrates how even weak social ties can facilitate the flow of information through a political system and allow us to deliberate “together” (p. 110). The networked quality of this already occurring deliberation offers a convincing solution to the problem of “scaling up” deliberative democracy. According to Tanasoca, naturalized deliberation already occurs and also satisfies “the standards generally associated with democratic deliberation in micro settings (inclusion, equality, and reciprocity)” (p. 147).
Still, in part III, Tanasoca considers problems that could undermine the democratic or epistemic quality of informal networked deliberation, including mass polarization (chapter 7), pluralistic ignorance (chapter 8), and message repetition (chapter 9). She draws on empirical research to assuage certain concerns and suggest solutions to others. For example, she explains how pluralistic ignorance—wherein a majority of people go along with a norm they actually reject because they mistakenly believe it enjoys broad support—can undermine deliberation by impeding the discussion of sensitive issues, from climate change to racism (pp. 191–93). To address this problem, Tanasoca proposes designing deliberative arenas that “immunize [participants] against the costs they might normally incur for challenging a group norm” (p. 197). Here, secrecy and anonymity are leveraged to break the cycle of pluralistic ignorance, allowing “everybody across the wider community [to] discover that they were wrong about the rest of the community’s belief” (p. 195).
Tanasoca persuasively shows how deliberative democracy is undermined when people are unwilling to “‘stick their necks out’ and publicly express their own personal disdain for a norm that is surrounded by pluralistic ignorance” (p. 197). But this analysis obscures another important obstacle to networked deliberation: exclusion. In the case of Jim Crow segregation, countless people did publicly challenge these racist norms. More than pluralistic ignorance, the problem was that many white Americans either were not exposed to these arguments or were wholly unreceptive to them.
Moreover, by focusing on pluralistic ignorance as driving the majority’s reluctance to reassess racist norms, Tanasoca implies that internal deliberation should concentrate on whether some norm is supported by the majority of one’s fellow citizens (p. 205). But whether the majority sincerely supports a particular norm is not the relevant question. As Habermas reminds us, what matters for democracy is how “a majority comes to be a majority.” And here, we know that the majority position, whether sincerely held or not, was achieved through a process that systematically excluded Black Americans, both formally and informally.
Tanasoca often emphasizes the “frequency” with which claims are held in our communicative networks, arguing that the epistemic and democratic quality of internal deliberation depends on an accurate assessment of the prevalence of particular positions (p. 140). The question of frequency is central to her concerns over “message repetition and epistemic overinclusion” (chapter 9). Here, internal deliberation is reduced to a kind of counting, which Tanasoca concedes may not sit right with many deliberative democrats (p. 86). Still, she maintains that “the more independent assertions there are of” a particular claim, “the more epistemic weight we should ascribe to it, and the more we should update our beliefs” (p. 87). Later, Tanasoca insists that only “independent” claims should influence our internal deliberation, that we should not update our beliefs when a person is repeating another’s input that we already considered (p. 214). This kind of “double-counting” results in overinclusion.
Rather than a problem of overinclusion, I would argue that simple message repetition represents a failure of critical judgment. Although message repetition can distort our perceptions of what others think, the purpose of deliberation is not to help people accurately identify the “general opinion across the community” (p. 213) but to jointly reflect on issues of collective concern. Expressing unreflective opinions is problematic whether or not one is repeating someone else’s ideas, and the problem is “overcounting” only if “counting” is the goal (p. 222). Here, Tanasoca applies an aggregative logic to deliberative democracy, even arguing that we should discount claims we hear from secondhand sources because they lack independence (p. 223). But wouldn’t this severely limit the reach and inclusiveness of our networked deliberation?
Regarding inclusion, Tanasoca contends that, for a person to be discursively included in informal deliberation, “all that is required is for that person to be connected to others who are themselves further connected to yet other people” (p. 127). But even if our existing communicative networks are sufficiently diverse, they are not necessarily going to be inclusive in a democratically meaningful way (p. 234). Tanasoca acknowledges that some will inevitably be seen, “rightly or wrongly,” as less epistemically credible than others—and these perceptions affect how much weight we “attach to their claims when updating our opinions” (p. 145).
There are severe epistemic and democratic costs to what Iris Young calls “internal exclusion,” when someone is allowed to speak but then is dismissed or ignored. To address this issue in the context of “public media spectacles” (chapter 6), Tanasoca argues that organizers “ought to be sensitive to these dynamics and, where the same opinions are held both by people whose views would and would not be discounted in this way, they should choose the latter to represent that view on the public stage” (p. 145). Tanasoca thus endorses a strategy of choosing speakers “whose identity will lead the audience to more accurately weigh deliberative inputs in internal deliberation” (p. 145).
With this, Tanasoca alleviates the epistemic costs of internal exclusion. Missing, however, is a full appreciation for how racism, sexism, and ascriptive inequalities affect perceptions of credibility. Tanasoca mostly sidesteps the democratic costs of identity-based exclusions, calling these exclusions “orthogonal to the principal concerns of the book” (p. 144). If these exclusions were just a matter of epistemic concern, we could address them, as Tanasoca suggests, by simply ensuring all inputs are voiced. But a commitment to deliberative democracy requires that we actively resist rather than accommodate these kinds of biases. And so, although there may be strategic value to, say, having sympathetic men speak out against sexism, capitulating to epistemic injustice in the very design of deliberative forums lets democratic citizens off the hook in terms of the fundamental expectation that they treat all their fellow citizens equally.
Importantly, the ills of epistemic injustice and internal exclusion are not unique to informal deliberation, nor can they be solved, as is often assumed, by turning to formal deliberation. Still, if informal networked communication is to deliver on the promise of deliberative democracy, we must confront these challenges more directly. Ultimately, Deliberation Naturalized makes a compelling case for seeing informal networked deliberation as the real existing currency of deliberative democracy. Tanasoca has identified new avenues for normative and empirical research and will undoubtedly help shape these emerging debates.
