Normative controversies in the literature

While theorists have paid little attention to the conditions that lead to good deliberation, they have always been very interested in speculating about the consequences of good deliberation. Generally speaking, the expectation among theorists is that deliberation has favorable consequences. Claudia Landwehr makes this argument at a general level:

For Jürgen Habermas, “deliberation causes a pressure for rationality that improves the quality of the decisions.” For John S. Dryzek, deliberation is “a means for joint resolution of social problems … a large public policy literature points to the effectiveness of deliberation on the part of those concerned with a common problem in generating solutions that are both effective and mutually acceptable and that can work when top-down solutions are resisted by those whose interests and arguments are overridden.” Giovan Francesco Lanzara postulates that deliberation opens opportunities for new and beneficial actions for the community. Daniel Oliver-Lalana, a legal theorist, states with regard to the legislative process “that there exists a link between the quality of a law and that of its underlying reasoning: broadly speaking, the better is the legislative argumentation the better will be the law resulting from it.”