Aggregate Democracy and Deliberative Democracy: An Inevitable Practical Circle

The paper sets forth programmatically a series of conditions necessary for a deliberative theory of democracy to be able to account for the normative value of the two fundamental principles of democracy: human rights and popular sovereignty. The starting point is the question of whether aggregate conceptions are capable of designing collective decision-making procedures in which those two principles are mutually entailed. The article emphasizes the importance for democratic procedures to include a reciprocal justification requirement that cannot be fully satisfied by aggregate or agonistic conceptions.