Neither Completely Political nor Completely Unpolitical. The Third Way of Deliberative Arenas

Sometimes governments choose to include ordinary people at some stage of the policy making process by setting up temporary and structured arenas where participants are put in a posi-tion whereby they can deliberate on public issues and make decisions or propose suggestions. Do such deliberative arenas depoliticize democracy, as a vast amount of literature suggests? This article is aimed at challenging this point of view, by giving a close look at two cases of democratic experi-mentation. An analysis of what actually happens in those venues shows that such arenas appear to display, at the same time, both unpolitical and political features. On one hand, they are non-majoritarian bodies, just like other depoliticized venues, but on the other, they deal with conflicts and discuss goals, and thus perform typical political activities. It is possible to say that they are nei-ther completely political nor completely unpolitical. They instead have a hybrid nature that can coun-teract the continuous fluctuations between (hyper)politicization and (hyper)depoliticization that are so typical of our times. This implies a revision of the standard theory of politicization/depoliticization that does not consider the possibility of gray areas. Overcoming the rigid opposition between the two terms of the dichotomy can lead to the discovery of some interesting possibilities that often tend to be overlooked.

正如大量文献所指出的，这类协商议事场域（deliberative arenas）是否会导致民主去政治化？本文旨在通过深入分析两个民主实验（democratic experimentation）案例，对这一观点提出挑战。对这些场域实际运作情况的分析表明，这类议事场域同时呈现出非政治性与政治性特征。一方面，它们是非多数决机构（non-majoritarian bodies），与其他去政治化场域类似；另一方面，它们处理冲突、讨论目标，因此开展典型的政治活动。可以说，它们既非完全政治化，也非完全非政治化，而是具有混合性质，能够抵消当今时代典型的（过度）政治化与（过度）去政治化之间的持续波动。这意味着需要修正未考虑灰色地带（gray areas）可能性的政治化/去政治化标准理论。打破这一二分法中两个术语的僵化对立，可能会发现一些常被忽视的有趣可能性。