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s Abstract Deliberative democratic theory has moved beyond the "theoretical statement" stage and into the "working theory" stage. Although this essay revisits some of the main theoretical debates, this is done via a survey and evaluation of the state of deliberative democratic theory as it is being applied in a number of research areas and as it intersects with related normative debates. Five research areas are covered: public law, international relations, policy studies, empirical research, and identity politics.

I. THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL REFORMULATEDD ELIBERATIVE democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power. Our assessment differs in two ways from the traditional one. First, we contend that self-interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision. Indeed, some forms of negotiation involving self-interest meet all of our criteria for ideal deliberation, in particular the criterion that in their ideal form deliberative methods eschew coercive power. We thus include such constrained self-interest and these forms of negotiation in our reformulation of the deliberative ideal, that is, the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. Second, we argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative. These nondeliberative mechanisms, such as aggregation through voting as well as fair bargaining and negotiation among cooperative antagonists, involve coercive power in their mechanisms of decision. Yet they can and must be justified deliberatively. Our ideal polity is diverse and plural. Its members both strive for

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

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The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.

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