Reflexive democracy: a system for correcting state errors

The article presents a vision of democracy not as a set of procedures, but as a system of reflective self-correction of errors. Drawing on the concepts of James S. Fiske and John Dewey, the author argues that deliberation should serve to increase the state's capacity to recognize and rectify mistakes before they become entrenched. A key contemporary challenge is the distinction between the formal freedom of the act of voting and the actual autonomy of the judgment-forming process, which is threatened by digital cognitive colonization. The state is presented here as a nervous system that must effectively receive signals from the periphery (the local knowledge of citizens) to avoid errors resulting from technocratic centralization and information asymmetry.