Habermas: The Ideal Deliberative Process

Habermas offers a characterization of an ideal deliberative procedure whose normative validity rests on the following criteria: (1) Processes of deliberation must take the form of an exchange of information and arguments backed by reasons; (2) Deliberations are inclusive and public: no one may be excluded in principle and all those affected have a right to take part; (3) Deliberations are free of any external or internal coercion that could detract from the equality of the participants; (4) Deliberations aim at rationally motivated agreement and can in principle be continued indefinitely or resumed at any time. Political deliberations, however, must be brought to a close by majority vote given the institutional pressures to reach a
decision.

In this respect, political deliberations must extend across the broad spectrum of moral, ethical and pragmatic discourses, as well as leaving a space for bargaining and fair compromises among conflicting and non-generalisable interests that take place in non-deliberative institutional settings (a prime example would be corporatist forms of interests intermediation) ----------------.
In contrast to Cohen, however, Habermas does not think that such an ideal deliberative procedure could be applied to society as a whole or to the entirety of its institutions. Rather, he conceives the ideal deliberative procedure as "the core structure in a separate, constitutionally organised political system", not

The reason for this is that if, as he puts it, "deliberative politics is supposed to be inflated into a structure shaping the totality of society, then the discursive mode of sociation expected in the legal system would have to expand into a self-organisation of society and penetrate the latter’s complexity as a whole". This is an impossible task, since