reasons -- reasons that seek to justify proposed legislation that they (citizens) will be subjected to. 116 These reasons must possess a number of qualities in order to be considered legitimate and accepted as justification by fellow citizens. They consist of, briefly: public accessibility, ability of citizens to easily understand and assess, and the ultimate purpose of creating binding legislation. 117 The public accessibility principle, in its requirement that the reason provided must be comprehensible to the public, stands in direct opposition to Rousseau’s idea of private deliberation. While Rousseau asserted that an individual’s decision is immediately made less legitimate by the influence of external actors, Gutmann and Thompson argue that legitimacy cannot be achieved until the individual’s ideas and conceptions are open to public scrutiny. They draw attention to the Bush administration’s endeavours in Iraq with relation to this point, and their heavy use of secret information used to justify the invasion. 118 On this occasion, in their view, the administration fell short of deliberative standards, and had they followed the author’s model, public support might well have been in a different place. The point being, it was impossible to know whether the decision had genuine, authentic public support because the reasons used as justification were not entirely open to the public. It was therefore illegitimate. Again, in not requiring consent on every reason provided, the liberal republican model held by the United States undermines and discourages public participation. Another characteristic of deliberative models related to legitimacy is the idea of collective spirit on public issues, which seems to hold increased public participation as a central
116 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 1-21.
117 Ibid, pp. 3-4. 118 Ibid, pp. 5-6.
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