Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and The People: A Critical Review

This paper is an attempt to critically review the book “Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People” (2014) by Nadia Urbinati. The work gains prominence in the wake of recent experiments in deliberative democratic practices that are meant to deepen the democratic practice in a vertical manner. These experiments are challenging regular representative mechanisms with certain designs that allow the demos to participate in the decision making process directly. Different practices like deliberation day, citizens’ forum etc. methods that depend on deliberative opinion polls are claiming legitimacy over democratic power, and are challenging the legitimacy of the decisions made by regular democratic representative institutions. Practices like opinion polls, internet ratings, urban centered protest movements, expert discussions in television channels etc. have been playing an important role in the democratic decision making process. While these practices may appear close to some sections of people the representativeness of these practices stands out to be out of the domains of democratic practice. Different aspects of deliberative forums like random selection of the deliberators by using sampling methods, forming citizen forums based on the interest, deliberation or discursions done by few experts, questionnaires or issues identified by experts, picking up issues based on media based public opinion, taking seriously issues that are widely reported by the press, giving preference to issues that are invoking more violence etc. practices make them stand far away from regular democratic practices where the demos register the mandate through general elections. The deliberators or citizens who participate in the deliberation process are presented with selected versions by those who sponsor or initiate the events. Issues are picked up by nondemocratic entities like civil society organizations, interest groups, research institutes, academics, voluntary groups and etc. intermediaries who claim to be representing the interests of the people. All these groups are not elected by the voters in a competitive manner. All these nondemocratic entities do not follow a structured democratic practice of electing the representatives. All these nondemocratic entities are not accountable to the people in any manner. In the face of these deficiencies, Nadia Urbinati's Democracy Disfigured: Opinions, Truth, and the People is an attempt to analyze how certain recent nondemocratic-democratic practices are actually disfiguring democracy.