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Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as citizen's panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, and deliberative polls at the center of their hopes for deliberative democratization. In light of experience to date, the authors chart the ways in which such mini-publics may have an impact in the "macro" world of politics. Impact may come in the form of actually making policy, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debates, market-testing of proposals, legitimation of public policies, building confidence and constituencies for policies, popular oversight, and resisting co-option. Exposing problems and failures is all too easy. The authors highlight cases of success on each of these dimensions.

Effective deliberation is central to democracy and so should enter any definition of democratization. However, the deliberative aspect now ubiquitous in the theory, practice, and promotion of democracy is generally missing in comparative studies of democratization. Deliberation capacity can be distributed in variable ways in the deliberative systems of states and other polities. A framework is described for locating and analyzing the contributions of its components and so evaluating the degree to which a polity’s deliberative system is authentic, inclusive, and consequential. An emphasis on deliberation reveals important determinants of democratic transition and consolidation, thereby providing substantial explanatory as well as evaluative and normative purchase.

Deliberative Democracy and Beyond takes a critical tour through recent democratic theory, beginning with the deliberative turn that occurred around 1990. The essence of this turn is that democratic legitimacy is to be found in authentic deliberation among those affected by a collective decision. While the deliberative turn was initially a challenge to established institutions and models of democracy, it was soon assimilated by these same institutions and models. Drawing a distinction between liberal constitutionalism and discursive democracy, the author criticizes the former and advocates the latter. He argues that a defensible theory of democracy should be critical of established power, pluralistic, reflexive in questioning established traditions, transnational in its capacity to extend across state boundaries, ecological, and dynamic in its openness to changing constraints upon, and opportunities for, democratization.

Democracy can entail the representation of discourses as well as persons or groups. We explain and advocate discursive representation; explore its justifications, advantages, and problems; and show how it can be accomplished in practice. This practice can involve the selection of discursive representatives to a formal Chamber of Discourses and more informal processes grounded in the broader public sphere. Discursive representation supports many aspects of deliberative democracy and is especially applicable to settings such as the international system lacking a well-defined demos.

This is an electronic version of anNuffield College in 1998, and Dryzek thanks the College for its hospitality. For helpful comments, we thank Keith Dowding, James Fishkin, Natalie Gold, Robert Goodin, Iain McLean, Gerry Mackie, David Miller, Claus Offe, Anne Sliwka, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers of this paper.2 Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy:A Reconciliation AbstractThe two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled.After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect. Two Traditions of Democratic TheoryIn the past decade the theory of democracy has been dominated by two very different approaches. Within democratic theory as conventionally defined the strongest current is now deliberative. 1 For deliberative democrats, the essence of democratic legitimacy is the capacity of those affected by a collective decision to deliberate in the production of that decision. Deliberation involves discussion in which individuals are amenable to scrutinizing and changing their preferences in light of persuasion (but not manipulation, deception, or coercion) from other participants. Claims for and against courses of action must be justified to others in terms they can accept. Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, respectively the most influential continental and Anglo-American political philosophers of the late 20 th century, have both identified themselves as deliberative democrats. 2 Deliberative democrats are uniformly optimistic that deliberation yields rational collective outcomes.The main competing tradition is social choice theory, whose proponents generally deduce far less optimistic results. To social choice theorists, the democratic problem involves aggregation of views, interests, or preferences across individuals, not deliberation over their content. From the seminal work of Kenneth Arrow on, it has been argued that such aggregation is bedeviled by impossibility, instability and arbitrariness. 3 Arrow proved the non-existence of any aggregation mechanism satisfying a set of seemingly innocuous conditions. This critique of democracy was radicalized by William Riker, who argued that any notion of a popular will independent of the mechanism used to aggregate preferences was untenable. 4 Given that there is no good reason to choose any particular mechanism over any other, supposedly democratic collective choices are arbitrary, and dem...

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. W / Chile the idea of democracy has never been more universal or more popular, both democratic theory and the empirical study of democratic possibilities are in some disarray. We seek a productive reconnection of these two endeavors with democratic discourse through close attention to the language of democracy as used by ordinary people and political actors. Reconstructive inquiry determines how the individuals who are the potential constituents of any democratic order themselves conceptualize democracy and their own political roles and competences. We deploy an intensive method-Q methodology-for the study of individual characteristics, capabilities, and dispositions in combination with political discourse analysis. Four discourses are discovered in an analysis of selected U.S. subjects: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. These results can be used to relate democratic theory to live possibilities in democratic discourse. T he triumph of democracy as an abstract idea is nearly complete, and further democratization is on the agenda worldwide. There is scarcely a political leader, analyst, dissident, or activist who would today justify his or her preferred polity in anything but the language of democracy. On the other hand, democratic theory is in some disarray. Liberal constitutionalists, pluralists, social democrats, Marxists, communitarians, feminists, libertarians, participatory enthusiasts and others all have their own favored forms of democracy. By any of their standards, real democracy is hard to find.A cynical resolution of this paradox might be that "democratic theory is the moral Esperanto of the present nation-state system, the language in which all Nations are truly united, the public cant of the modern world, a dubious currency indeed" (Dunn 1979, 2). Here, we shall argue exactly the opposite, namely, that careful empirical study of the language of democracy used by the subjects of political regimes can help overcome some contemporary impasses in democratic theory. We combine political discourse analysis and a "Q-methodological" study of selected individuals in order to model discourses of democracy present in the United States and to ascertain how people conceptualize their political roles and competences. Four such discourses are identified: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. Our approach is reconstructive in that it does its utmost to find its categories in how its subjects actually do apprehend the world, not in how the researcher expects them to do so. The findings thus generated should prove a more secure foundation for theorizing than the fin...

Competing interests: A.Fu. serves on the Board of Directors of Common Cause and Everyday Democracy and is an occasional consultant to Apple.