文档介绍：Communicative Sovereignty: A Solution to Social Choice Paradox?
The question this article investigates is: given social choice theory draws the
conclusion that it’s impossible to aggregate, at least in an universally accepted way,
preferences by voting, is democracy still possible? And, in what sense, to what extent, is
it possible? Deliberative democracy’s answer for this question is: yes, if democracy is to
be understood as municative structure and an ongoing process instead of only
preferences aggregation by voting; and in this sense, sovereignty in democracy should be
deemed as municative process instead of a substantive body. This is also my
argument here.
My argument anized into four sections. First section explains in which way
deliberative democracy can e the limitation of aggregative democracy; Second
section is on the accusations deliberative democracy are faced with; The third section
discusses that how deliberative democracy survives those criticisms and grounds itself on
a firmer base; And the last section is about how deliberative democracy leads to
communicative sovereignty.
1. Deliberative democracy: the claim to e social choice paradox
In Liberalism against Populism, Riker raised two points: first, because no method
of counting votes is self-sufficiently persuasive, the es of aggregating
preferences are inevitably ambiguous; second, as a result, not only the voting is easily
manipulated by agenda control and strategic voting, but also it’s almost impossible to
distinguish es being and not being manipulated. According to the above two
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discoveries, Riker drew the conclusion that only minimum democracy is necessary for
Starting from the discoveries of social choice theorists, however, a conclusion
totally different with Riker’s can be made: exactly because aggregation by voting is
inevitably ambiguous, democracy essentially cannot define itself as aggregation by
voting.