systems, provided it leaves behind all liberal institutions and traditions that are at odds with increased public involvement. Quite possibly, the most fundamental distinction to be made between liberal and deliberative forms of democracy is their respective attitudes to legitimacy: what makes a decision legitimate and how this legitimacy is garnered. Crucially, liberal democratic systems tend to source legitimacy out of the decision itself, regardless of prior events. Deliberative models, by contrast, base the legitimacy of a political decision on the process of the decision’s formation. In other words, a legitimate decision is the result of the discussion, debate and argumentation process from which the final decision has culminated from. Thus, both liberal democratic theorists and deliberative democratic theorists’ respective conceptions of legitimacy are vital to the question of participation and why the level and nature of political participation is bound to change under a deliberative system. Essentially, the question of whether or not a decision is legitimate under a deliberative system is based primarily on the process of participation. For a decision to be considered legitimate in a liberal democratic system, no such levels of participation are required, but merely a single act of voting. Manin draws attention to liberal democratic theory that goes a distance in explaining its scepticism of citizen involvement in the formation of decisions. 114 He makes note of Rousseau’s idea that citizen deliberation on public policy can only be counterproductive and harmful to the uncovering of general public will. He argues this on the assumption that individual citizens’ will is determined before he or she enters a public meeting or assembly in order to debate and discuss. Hence, any such process
114 Bernard Manin, ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’, Political Theory , 15.3 (1987), 338-368 (pp. 347-48).
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