Arenas for Democratic Deliberation : Decision-Making in an Infrastructure Project in Sweden

Abstract: Democracy today faces challenges in the form of declining levels of electoral participation, dwindling membership in and attachment to political parties, decreasing involvement in established non-governmental organisations and diminishing citizen trust in politicians, political institutions and systems.This study elucidates the democratic status of the Swedish formal political system through an analysis of the decision-making process related to the first power transmission link between Sweden and Poland. The analysis, which is structured around six arenas for political action derived from Jürgen Habermas’s discursive model of deliberative democracy, displays a number of significant power-related distortions in the process and supports the earlier findings indicating declining vitality of established democratic institutions and systems.But the study also gives reason to believe in a brighter future of democracy. It indicates that people are willing to devote considerable time and effort to politics. The results also make clear that deliberation can contribute to social learning. Furthermore, they manifest that a devoted and well-informed local resistance was able to compete relatively successfully with the economic and social power of companies and administrative power of the state, and that this resistance led to the introduction of a more rational technical solution, a solution that would otherwise not have been implemented.