Majoritarian democracy without the discursive dilemma

The discursive dilemma maintains that incoherent collective judgments can result from the aggregation of coherent individual judgments on logically connected propositions. For democratic theory, the implication is that if democratic institutions such as assemblies are to be coherent, they must forgo responsiveness to the individual attitudes of constituents and have ‘minds of their own.’ To achieve this, proponents of the dilemma argue that democratic institutions should adopt particular procedures, such as deliberation, and institutional models, such as the republican state. This paper, however, argues that this is a false choice. There are alternative ways out of the dilemma that don’t force us to choose between responsiveness and coherence. This paper presents one such approach developed in the computer science literature and argues that adopting it brings us closer to satisfying important democratic imperatives. It also suggests that the approach bolsters majoritarian approaches over republican alternatives.