Introduction: Democratizing Deliberation (original) (raw)
In the mid-20th century most people had come to think of democracy as the biannual trip to the ballot box punctuated by occasional protests and letters to the editor and supplemented with membership in a special-interest group. During the latter part of the century this conception of democracy started wearing thin, especially with Watergate's breach of public confidence in the political system. 1 A quiet revolution within democratic theory and practice began to take place as scholarly attention turned to civil society and the importance of public deliberation about matters of common concern. By the 1990s, political theorists in academia and practitioners of community forums around the world were using the language of deliberative democracy to describe their new focus. Even with this transformation, the theory and practice of deliberative democracy did not always converge. Instead, first-generation deliberative theorists hypothesized a rather narrow conception of deliberation as rational discourse that could guarantee the legitimacy of democratic procedures and decisions, putting theory at odds with the rich but messy world of deliberation in practice. Deliberative democracy in turn became stereotyped as impractical and divorced from action. But during the past decade another generation of thinkers and practitioners has started developing ideas about deliberative democracy that are open to more forms of political talk, practical on a wider scale, and better connected with collective action. In so doing, theory and practice have together arrived at more robust forms of deliberation than had been proposed in the original generation of deliberative theory. This latest turn is the subject of this collection of essays. The authors whose work is collected in this volume have each contributed to deliberative theory in their own ways. Combined, however, they represent a trend within deliberative theory towards a " democratized " conception of deliberation. If, as John Dryzek has argued, the 1990s saw a " de
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