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I am somewhat skeptical, more so than I used to be, at the idea of a successfully deliberative democracy.

The idea of a rational public reaching optimal policy preferences via open discourse is indeed an old one, but I wonder to what extent the assumptions still hold that authors such as Rousseau rested their theories on.

Over the last twenty years the field of behavioral economics has shown that even in the face of complete information people may still make choices that are not rational, in the classic sense of the term, but are instead significantly attributable to the way that people process information and the way choices and issues are framed. When it comes to politics we can safely assume that there will be no shortage of framing campaigns and that power will play just as big of a role as rational dialogue in determining public opinion. It is unclear to me how you avoid this. We could say that since it will be an open system competing frames may cancel each other out, but that is effectively what we have now.