Speech and Leadership: The Actors of Mediated Deliberation

• In Event: Innovations in Democratic Theory

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the model of deliberative democracy offers a surprisingly fertile territory for the development of a normative theory of democratic leadership. Although scholars of this tradition rarely refer to the problem of leadership, the theoretical framework they defend provides useful conceptual tools for theorizing this activity. The two-track model of democracy proposed by Habermas, I argue, enlarges the democratic territory and makes the informal public sphere as much a site of sovereignty as the formal institutions of the state. Unlike postwar realists, who accepted the presence of leaders but restricted their focus to the institutional mechanisms we have to contain their power, the field of deliberative democracy opens up the conceptual space for theorizing the circumstances under which leaders emerge in the first place. What are the structural conditions of the informal public sphere? Do all citizens have equal opportunities for forming and voicing political opinions? Do some groups of people have greater opportunities for becoming leaders? By forcing us to shift our focus away from the institutional domain and into the extra-institutional one, the theorists of deliberative democracy become unexpected allies in the project of theorizing leadership — a crucial yet understudied political activity.

Author

• Nicole Peisajovich, Columbia University