Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 341
Habermas’ (1989) democratic ideals based on public deliberation and “communicative
action,” given that public deliberation may be uninformed and
have little effect upon decisions already made on the basis of private deliberations
behind closed doors. (That Habermas developed his political philosophy
in multi-actor Germany should come as no surprise.)
There are ways in which multi-actor systems can balance out some of the
“democratic deficit” related to the thinness of the communicative discourse,
however, mainly by ensuring the inclusiveness and transparency of the coordinative
discourse. Where the coordinative discourse covers most relevant
groups in society, the communication between policy elites and their constituencies
may substitute for a communicative discourse by government directed
toward the public. Problems occur mainly where the coordinative
discourse marginalizes certain groups (typically immigrants, the unemployed,
and women), or where policy elites do not communicate sufficiently
with their own constituent members, in which case they may lose their
members’ trust and allegiance, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the
agreements and jeopardizing their continuation. This was the case of the
Italian unions in the l980s, but it was remedied in the l990s (see Baccaro
2000; Ferrera/Gualmini 2000; Schmidt 2000b). Finally, where the coordinative
discourse is transparent because it is made public through news reports
and open to modification in response to public criticism, the public
nature of the deliberation among policy elites may substitute for a fully
communicative discourse directed toward the public. Problems occur mostly
where the coordinative discourse is entirely confidential, as in Austria, where
the doors don’t leak; less so where it spills out into the public sphere, as in
Germany, where the doors always do leak; and least where it is quasi-public,
as in the Netherlands, where the internal debates are regularly exposed in
the media and open to modification in response to public comment. Where
the coordinative discourse is entirely closed, the public is left without much
orienting or legitimating information about the policy program, making it
more vulnerable to the communicative discourse of extremists, such as that
of Haider in Austria beginning in the late l990s (see Schmidt 2000b).
But however open or closed to the public the coordinative discourse, its
tenor is generally cooperative. 7 The discursive interaction leading up to
7 However, as Scharpf (1997, 2001a) points out, there are multi-actor systems which are
negotiating systems rather than the joint-decision systems I focus on here. In these cases,
the tenor of the coordinative discourse can easily be one of conflict, as is often the case in
the U.S. policymaking process.