The Use of Deliberative Democracy in Public Policy Making Process

Abstract

This paper intends to highlight the intensity of the use of deliberative democracy in the policy making process. It assists policy makers to understand the significance of deliberative democracy and the preliminary conditions to conduct effective and successful deliberation for the purpose of producing best quality decisions.  This paper stressed the relationship between deliberation and citizen's satisfaction of government decisions. It indicated that deliberative democracy helps citizens to directly influence on the quality of the decision and better represent their preferences by proposing their agenda and views on policy alternatives and issues. Deliberative democracy is a technique that stabilizes citizens' interests by diminishing domination, despotism, and better assessing public choices. This paper found that deliberation legitimizes government decisions and maximizes the outcome of the policies. This article defined several advantages of deliberative democracy in the public policy making process which pursues equality, mutual interest; reason based discussion, public goods, the decision focused and agreement on disputed preferences.  It also concluded that deliberative democracy facilitates free and fair participation and creating opportunity for discussion and information sharing between participants prior to the implementation process of government policies.

Keywords: Public deliberation, deliberative democracy, public participation, decision making, public policy