PROMESSE E LIMITI DELLA DEMOCRAZIA DELIBERATIVA. UN’ALTERNATIVA ALLA DEMOCRAZIA DEL VOTO?

Deliberative democracy (DD), to date, represents perhaps the chief defying paradigm with which representative democracy is bound to deal with. In this paper we try to en-compass the outstandingly heterogeneous and multivocal debate from which this new democratic concept stemmed. The core idea, both normative and procedural, of DD, is brought out, starting from the Habermasian foundations up to the most recent and pragmatic variants. The DD, as it turns out, is affected with substantial aporias in its theoretical corpus, and with paradoxes in its practical implementation. Nonetheless, the deliberative-participative rhetoric and policies are seeing a noticeable success which, we argue, can be traced back to the fact that the DD represents a useful answer to clear-cut needs of the contemporary society: filling the gap between the citizens and their government, by building consensus, on one hand, and providing new tools to deal with the uncertainty and the complexity which undoubtedly characterize the management of the res publica, on the other hand.