To be fair, arguments againts some of the points listed in the quotes below can sometimes be found in other places of the same source, or in other sources. Only the challenges are presented here, as a survey of past criticisms.
The experience of Burley Design Cooperative is a reminder that worker-owned firms require workers to assume critical costs of control and oversight and some workers resist taking on those costs.34 The collective interest is often difficult (costly) to determine and the member-workers may have to be sufficiently similar or to devote resources to become similar along many dimensions to arrive at agreeable policies. The relevance of the homogeneity of workers has been emphasized by Hansmann (1996) and by Abramitzky (2011) in their studies of American and Israeli communes. It figures also in Rothschild and Whitt’s (1986) investigation of cooperatives in California. They write, “Efforts to develop democratic workplaces often run into difficulties if they have a very heterogeneous work force” (p. 96).
Why is homogeneity important? Perhaps because the lubricant of trust is more easily engendered among like individuals.35 Or is it because consensus decisions are more easily reached and implemented? On the other hand, homogeneity “....narrows the membership base of the collective and it makes it less representative of the surrounding community” (Rothschild and Whitt (1986, p. 97)). Others have suggested that heterogeneous decision-makers make better decisions when faced with complex problems.
In every genuine democracy today, majority rule is both endorsed and limited by the supreme law of the constitution, which protects the rights of individuals. Tyranny by minority over the majority is barred, but so is tyranny of the majority against minorities.
…
Majority rule is limited in order to protect minority rights, because if it were unchecked it probably would be used to oppress persons holding unpopular views. Unlimited majority rule in a democracy is potentially just as despotic as the unchecked rule of an autocrat or an elitist minority political party.
In every constitutional democracy, there is ongoing tension between the contradictory factors of majority rule and minority rights. Therefore, public officials in the institutions of representative government must make authoritative decisions about two questions. When, and under what conditions, should the rule of the majority be curtailed in order to protect the rights of the minority? And, conversely, when, and under what conditions, must the rights of the minority be restrained in order to prevent the subversion of majority rule?
These questions are answered on a case-by-case basis in every constitutional democracy in such a way that neither majority rule nor minority rights suffer permanent or irreparable damage. Both majority rule and minority rights must be safeguarded to sustain justice in a constitutional democracy.
From Understanding Democracy, A Hip Pocket Guide (Oxford University Press) by By John Patrick
Deliberative democracy is too idealistic and ignores power and politics. Speaking for what sounds like mainstream political science, Ian Shapiro (1999) holds: “Enough of deliberation: Politics is about interests and power.” According to Shapiro, a deliberative account of politics is not sensitive enough to conflicting interests and powerful players who have no willingness to enter a deliberative process, but will strategize and if necessary use coercive means to realize their interests. In a more economistic vein and focusing on the link between politicians and citizens, Pincione and Teson (2006, see also Achen and Bartels 2016) diagnose what they call a “discourse failure” in politics. In their account, citizens face high costs in obtaining reliable knowledge about political issues. Politicians can then take advantage of the “rational ignorance” of the public. For political gain, they will posture and use vivid rhetoric rather than engage in rational discussion, because such posturing and rhetoric are more accessible to citizens and have greater emotional appeal. The philosopher Michael Walzer (1999, 71) further claims that most political debates generally do not produce anything like a deliberative exchange: “a debate is very often a contest between verbal athletes with the object to win the debate. The means are the exercise of rhetorical skill, the mustering of favorable evidence (and the suppression of unfavorable evidence), and the discrediting of the other debaters.”
...
A related and frequently mentioned criticism is that ordinary citizens lack the cognitive capacities for deliberative democracy (e.g., Achen and Bartels 2016, 301; see also Brennan 2016). On the basis of a study of some US citizen groups, Rosenberg (2014) reports that “most ‘participants’ who attend a deliberation do not, in fact, engage in the give and take of the discussion.” Instead they “offer simple, short, unelaborated statements of their views of an event.” Biases in human reasoning compound the problem (Kahneman 2011). Notably, “motivated reasoning” makes people who initially feel strongly about an issue evaluate supportive arguments as more compelling than opposing arguments, even when they try to be objective (Taber and Lodge 2006). The individual capability for weighing arguments in an unbiased way would thus seem quite limited. Finally, studies on the social psychology of group polarization reveal that discussion often induces groups to move to extremes as individuals hear new arguments in support of the positions they already hold, leading them on average to hold those positions more strongly (Sunstein 2002). ...
One element of group information processing commonly noted in the psychological literature is polarization. This is the well-known finding that the post-deliberation group average position on an issue tends to be a more extreme version of the pre-deliberation average. Polarization is the product of two distinct processes. The first, social comparison, describes the tendency of deliberators to adopt whatever position appears to be the norm within the group. For example, in a group where the average position on an issue tilts liberal, all deliberators will feel pressure to adopt a position at least as liberal as the perceived norm; as those below the average move toward the group’s mean, they push the new group mean higher, and those at the old mean may shift higher as well (for a review see Mendelberg 2002, 158-161). The second process, persuasive arguments, suggests that in a group with a starting majority, the pool of arguments that can be introduced in conversation consists mainly of arguments that support the majority view. For example, in a group of liberals, the pool of available arguments will be mostly liberal, and sharing these arguments will tend to push deliberators in an even more liberal direction. This explanation emphasizes a more rational process of persuasion through the balance of arguments for one side, in contrast to the first explanation, which emphasizes the desire for social acceptance. However, these explanations may interact; members of groups with a liberal median may feel uncomfortable expressing conservative arguments, further biasing the argument pool.
From Political Deliberation, by Myers and Mendelberg
The competitive elections and referenda of most current democracies depend on mobilizing millions of voters within a context of advertising, social media, and efforts to manipulate as well as inform public opinion. Competing teams want to win and, in most cases, are interested in informing voters only when it is to their advantage. The rationale for competitive democracy, most influentially developed by the late economist Joseph Schumpeter, held that the same techniques of advertising used in the commercial sphere to get people to buy products can be expected in the political sphere. On this view, we should not expect a “genuine” public will, but rather “a manufactured will” that is just a by-product of political competition.4
Yet the ideal of democracy as the rule of “the people” is deeply undermined when the will of the people is in large part manufactured. The legitimacy of democracy depends on some real link between the public will and the public policies and office-holders who are selected. Although some have criticized this “folk theory of democracy” as empirically naive, its very status as a folk theory reflects how widespread this normative expectation is.5 To the extent that leaders manufacture the public will, the normative causal arrow goes in the wrong direction. ...
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The next two groups of essays alternately present and respond to some of the main criticisms of deliberative democracy. Arthur Lupia and Anne Norton argue in their elegant phrasing that “inequality is always in the room.” If the outcome of deliberation is inevitably distorted by the more advantaged participants dominating the discussions, the results are not likely to represent the true views of the rest of the group. Rather, any such results would reproduce the inequalities and power relations among the participants. Inequality among participants is one of the major challenges to the larger idea of implementing deliberative democracy – a challenge that must be pursued with great seriousness.
From Dædalus Summer 2017, Introduction, by Fishkin and Mansbridge
Bounded rationality describes the way that humans make decisions that departs from perfect economic rationality, because our rationality is limited by our thinking capacity, the information that is available to us, and time. Instead of making the ‘best’ choices, we often make choices that are satisfactory.
To act according to perfect rationality would require us to not be influenced by any cognitive biases, to be able to access all possible information about potential alternatives, and have enough time to calculate and project the benefits and detriments of each possible choice.
Since it is next to impossible to make decisions that satisfy all those factors we take shortcuts and make decisions that satisfy us, even if they are not the most optimal. Within our temporal and cognitive limitations, we make choices to the best of our understanding and ability, meaning that we are still rational, but not perfectly so.
That all democracies have, by their very nature, the potential to destroy themselves is a fact too rarely documented by the acolytes of democracy. Indeed, in the brief decades since Joseph Goebbels, then as Reich Minister of Propaganda, reminded the world that it “will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed”, democrats have quickly forgotten just how precarious a thing democracy can be (see Fox and Nolte 1995, 1; Issacharoff 2007, 1408). Democracy, if we are to take Goebbels seriously, is the very thing that can bring democracy to its knees – or, in the words of Robert Moss (1977, 12), the Australian historian, “democracy can be destroyed through its own institutions.”
At its most rudimentary, the logic at work here is as follows. Because most conceptions of democracy are premised on some notion of majoritarian rule, pluralism and tolerance, it follows that were a majority of citizens in a society or country to decide after an open and fair election that they no longer wish to abide under their present democratic constitution, that instead they desire to end democracy’s tenure and institute another form of political governance, they will have nonetheless acted in accordance with the principles of democracy despite their resolution to suspend democracy. In other words, in a democracy views and policies that are anti-democratic in nature – whether they be authoritarian or not – cannot technically be excluded from the political domain nor deemed illegitimate where they have been backed by a majority (Kirshner 2010, 424; Howard 2002, 551). ...
Nathalie Karagiannis (2010, 35), that “[d]democracy contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction.”
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