Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 26, Number 3, July 2012 199 WHY DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY IS (STILL) UNTENABLE Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij 1. The Problem of Widespread Incompetence Revisited T he term “deliberative democracy” denotes a family of views united by the idea that social deliberation is central to democratic decision making. 1 While there is, undoubtedly, something inherently appealing about the idea of a deliberating public, a common objection to deliberative democracy builds upon the fact that the majority of the public is likely to be incompetent with respect to the issues of relevance to governance. 2 Consider, for example, the following indings, due to Michael Carpini and Scott Keeter: Only 13 percent of the more than 2,000 political questions examined could be answered correctly by 75 percent or more of those asked, and only 41 percent could be answered by more than half the public. Many of the facts known by relatively small percentages of the public seem critical to understanding—let alone effectively acting in—the political world: fundamental rules of the game; classic civil liberties; key concepts of political economy; the names of key representatives; many important policy positions of presidential candidates or the political parties; basic social indicators and signiicant public policies. (Carpini and Keeter 1996, pp. 101–102) In what Jeffrey Friedman describes as an “ocean of indings about political ig- norance” (2005, p. x), results such as these constitute the norm rather than the exception, at least as far as the North American citizenry is concerned. Indeed, according to Larry Bartels, “[t]he political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best-documented features of contemporary politics” (1996, p. 194). Why does this fact of widespread incompetence, as we may call it, present a problem for the deliberative democrat? Could it not be that citizens who deliberate socially, thereby, also learn from each other and rectify each other’s individual ignorance? As will be argued in section 2, available social psychological research on the mechanics of social deliberation suggests that the answer is “most likely not.” Rather than revealing an educational effect in the uninformed, the outputs of deliberating groups tend to simply track the majority opinion—which, given