The Facilitator Problem: Politicizing Epistemic-Democratic Assumptions in the People's Republic of China

Within discussions of deliberative democracy, the role of facilitator is ever-present: they gather participants, introduce expert information, correct for discursive prejudices, and more. Few recognize, however, that facilitators therefore exercise substantive, normative control over the process, thereby constituting a threat to the legitimacy and reliability of deliberation outcomes when those norms themselves are not subject to political regulation. This issue—the Facilitator Problem—is especially profound for epistemic democrats, who offload many of the presumptions for the reliability and discursive virtue of citizen deliberators onto their being moderated by these innocuous agents. While existing literature has yet to fully appreciate the Facilitator Problem, by focusing almost exclusively on Western democratic experiences, it has also failed to see that there may be a better way forward. Applying a comparative lens, this paper draws insights from contemporary Chinese political practices—specifically Democratic Centralism—to show how an institutionalization of the facilitator as a political office, exposed to public scrutiny via constitutional ideals like the mass line and party-state structure, better realizes deliberation's epistemic virtues while answering the Facilitator Problem. The gap between this theoretical ideal and political reality is empirically reviewed and the modest feasibility of deliberative reforms in China is demonstrated.

Duke Scholars

Author Emerson Robert Bodde DKU Faculty