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In recent years, democratic theory has taken a ‘deliberative’ turn. Deliberative democrats tell us, most fundamentally, that we should shun merely adding up votes in favour of talking together. What especially distinguishes the deliberative democracy movement is its concern with finding ways of putting the theory into practice. A host of micro-deliberative innovations — Citizen's Juries, Consensus Conferences, Deliberative Polls — show us what deliberative democracy might look like in miniature.

Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as Citizen's Juries, Consensus Conferences, Planning Cells, and Deliberative Polls at the centre of their hopes for deliberative democratization. This chapter charts the ways in which such mini-publics can impact on 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 chapter highlights instead cases of success along each of these dimensions.

This chapter explores ambiguities and contradictions in the thinking of Milton and other republicans, whose ideas about toleration came into conflict with their demands for freedom of conscience. Beginning with the politics of virtue whereby they strove to displace divine right with secular claims to an ethical absolute, the chapter demonstrates how republican requisites for both societal cohesion and free conscience were compromised by simultaneous commitments to temporal and eternal orders of value. Drawing on evidence of rhetorical strain in Milton's Readie and Easie Way, deliberative pathos in Samson Agonistes and Buckingham's The Rehearsal, and the devastating triumph of virtue over uncertainty dramatized during the Exclusion Crisis by Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, the chapter demonstrates representative variations on the free conscience dilemma. Restoration era pressures for free agency are thus shown to be a struggle both for and against temporal reality, both for and against an eternal ideal.

This chapter discusses how US citizens love democracy in theory but hate it in practice. The problem is not with democracy as a concept. In practice, invitations into public life often amount to little more than clicking on an online petition. What people need are better opportunities to participate in ways that are personal, effective, and engaging. The chapter explains how democracy is not a static concept. Recently, visionaries have developed new ways to engage the public, including 21st Century Town Meetings, Citizens' Initiative Reviews of ballot measures, and Deliberative Polls that yield more informed public opinions across the globe.

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument for a right to education and how that right can be realized through democratic activism. The introduction first notes how rights discourse is increasingly used in education reform today despite challenges it faces. Two challenges are highlighted: from a practical perspective, educational rights have an uncertain place in the US legal system; and from a theoretical perspective, rights claims are in tension with the principle of majority rule. The introduction then explains the two questions the book addresses: What is the place of a right to education in a participatory democracy? And how can this right be realized? The rationale for using deliberative democracy as a framework for analysis is explained, and a brief overview of the chapters is offered. The introduction highlights the reciprocal relationship between the book’s theoretical arguments and case studies; the case studies of democratic activism showcase theory in action to some degree, but they also determine the practical value of theoretical arguments about educational justice. The analysis therefore considers how activism may bring democratic theory to fruition, and how theory may need to be revised given constraints advocates face as they press for education rights.

This chapter begins to advance the book’s main argument: that we should regard the education that prepares individuals for equal citizenship as a fundamental right that is shielded from majoritarian politics far more than existing practices permit, and far more than most theory recognizes is necessary. Concern for this right is motivated by the worry that leading accounts of democracy often fail to protect the interests of marginalized students. In this and subsequent chapters, arguments about a right to education are located in a deliberative democracy. As education scholars and reformers increasingly look to deliberative ideals to improve the education policy process, it is especially important to consider how well this approach to policy-making serves less advantaged students. The chapter first calls attention to the opportunities and challenges that deliberative theory presents for advancing just education policies. It next shows how leading conceptions of deliberation fail to ensure that all students receive a high quality education due to the wide discretion they give democratic bodies to determine public provisions for education. Finally, it discusses the unique relationship between educational opportunity and political equality, which underscores the need for a right to education that is set above democratic decision-making.

This chapter addresses the question: If we should treat education as a preconditional right to enable fair deliberative decision-making, what should this right include? Rights claims have become ubiquitous in education reform discourse, but little work to date has focused a philosophical lens on the substantive argument for a right to education, its democratic implications, and what this entitlement should include. This chapter begins with a brief overview of rights theory to call attention to how education is sidelined in existing accounts of welfare rights, and argues why it merits a place alongside the other social goods covered by this literature. The chapter next defends the deliberative view of citizenship as the proper framework in which to situate educational rights, and then turns to its educational demands. The general contours of this right are outlined by focusing on the civic skills associated with meaningfully exercising free speech and voting rights, which illustrate the conditions that facilitate equal citizenship. The chapter focuses in particular on the development of citizens’ cognitive autonomy and ability to use public reason as central to the meaningful exercise of political liberties.

In Chapter 5, I examine rights claims that are expressed and pursued outside courtrooms through a case study of a leading community organization, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth in San Francisco, that has long advocated for children’s rights in the education arena. The purpose of this case study is two-fold: to demonstrate how the rights claims I have argued for can be powerful tools in democratic politics in the US, and to suggest ways in which deliberative theory needs to be revised in light of the inequalities that advocates face as they employ rights claims. I consider what type of citizenship and view of politics Coleman’s efforts endorse, and how it uses rights discourse to advance its education reform goals. I also consider how deliberative ideals may need to be relaxed to make room for rights-based advocacy in non-ideal conditions.

The introduction introduces the topic and central argument of the book: that at the heart of the human embryo research debates was the question of how the public should reason together about a domain of science and technology that touches upon the most fundamental dimensions of human life. It introduces the methodological approach and coproductionist theoretical framework of the study. It introduces the idea of the “constitutional position of science” in American democracy, and illustrates the unacknowledged but constitutional position of scientific authority in John Rawls' idea of public reason.

Chapter 8 concludes by reflecting upon the scientific and political developments that ended the stem cell controversy of the 2000s. It argues that the most lasting consequences of this political moment lie less in the scientific and technological trajectories that it engendered, than in the imaginations—and institutions—of democracy that emerged out of it. It argues that the embryo debates reflect the dynamics of public reasoning in the United States about the meaning of emerging biotechnologies for democratic visions of progress and the good.

This chapter explains the concept of democratic deliberation and considers its implications for ethical review of human subjects research. Democratic deliberation is an ethical principle relatively new to research ethics. It involves a public exchange of ideas within and across groups of ordinary citizens, experts, and political representatives, and requires participants to engage actively with one another, to offer reasons that are acceptable and intelligible to their interlocutors, and to revise their decisions as new information and new perspectives come into view.Incorporating democratic deliberation into human subjects research would recommend greater inclusion of participants in the review process. This might be achieved by seating participants or their advocates on IRBs, and by otherwise involving them on advisory committees overseeing research. Such inclusion of research participants would follow the model of advisory committees elsewhere in the health care system, which include patients and other stakeholders. It would also counsel against exempting public benefits research, such as experimentation with Medicare and Medicaid benefits, from ethical review.

The linkages between society and the human environment generate normative challenges across at least three distinct dimensions: distribution and social equity, arrangements to institutionalize policy goals and objectives, and production of concrete plans of action. Deliberative democracy offers options for matching techniques to tasks. A process of juristic deliberation can identify widely supported normative principles and general propositions of law through adjudication by citizen juries of hypothetical cases involving environmental disputes. Deliberative polling, policy juries, and other minipublic techniques can identify and cultivate consensus underlying choices among competing policy models. Stakeholder partnerships can structure the kinds of social consensus needed for effective action, plans, and self-regulation. Deliberative democratic processes have potential to inform and legitimate environmental governance at each level in ways that respond to the challenges of ecological rationality, popular participation, and globalization. This model of deliberative policy development offers a coherent picture of a set of processes that lend concreteness and plausibility to the idea of consensus as a something more than a political ideal.

Existing international law consists of a collection of agreements that represent the will and consent of nation-states with respect to the rules governing their relationships. Although international law does not include rules promulgated by a unified sovereign authority, its sources are not unique or distinctive--analogous sources contribute to the domestic law of all societies. But three elements of domestic legal systems are lacking in the existing international legal system: an autonomous capacity for growth, democratic legitimacy, and sufficient implementation mechanisms. Development of international environmental law through juristic democracy is a feasible response to the first two of these deficiencies. The democratic legitimacy provided by that continuing development would then support creation of more effective compliance mechanisms—although probably never ones with recourse to the kinds of coercion available domestically--that would lead to a greater general regard of international law as a fact as well as norm.

Deliberative panels are commonly criticized as both too subject to irrationality and excessively rational, and as producing substantively inferior results compared with more elite decision making. Each of these complaints has also been leveled at real world legal juries in civil and criminal cases, and there is an extensive base of research evaluating their merit. Jury irrationality generally refers to poorly reasoned biases being magnified or too little challenged in deliberation, a phenomenon that can be avoided or mitigated using sophisticated techniques. Excessive rationality is alleged to occur as a result of imposing a rationalistic framework with its own blind spots and unresponsive to the concerns of the underrepresented and disadvantaged, which requires ongoing attention to the diversity of juries. In the case of juristic democracy, panel diversity is under the control of facilitators, who also can even create majority minority panels composed of individuals whose perspectives and opinions might otherwise be neglected. The evidence from research on real world legal juries suggests that citizen juries often reach the same results as judges and do as well as knowledgeable professionals such as judges in processing scientific evidence and evaluating expert witnesses.

Both Westphalian nation-state sovereignty and majoritarian democracy are conceptual models and languages of discourse whose uncritical acceptance constrains the way the world is understood, blinding people to the advantages of other ways of structuring governance and democracy. There are promising alternatives. Deliberative democratic theory offers a coherent approach to using nonmajoritarian, microdeliberative techniques to identify and develop norms for global governance. A consociational-federal-consensual governance paradigm of democracy is far better suited to global politics than a majoritarian-unitary paradigm ever can be. Moreover, a consociational-federal-consensual governance system can be institutionally adapted to the present and likely future conditions of global environmental politics—making virtues out of some of the necessities of the human predicament.

The chapter is based on the integration of social media in an interactive TV political debate programme broadcast daily by the BBC Arabic Service called Nuqtat Hewar (NH). Our argument is that the BBC s traditional journalistic ethos is at odds with the social media practices of Arab news audiences and, in the case of NH, that this creates huge difficulties for widening and diversifying participation on the programme and for political engagement. Although the empirical realities of user participation online are far from the BBC s aspiration to foster  a global conversation , there is evidence that a  democratic deepening  is evolving alongside participatory forms of journalism. New forms of deliberative and media literacy are developing among NH users and this is contributing to energising political communication. But political communication is itself undergoing a sea change, not least in the more varied places and spaces in which it occurs and as repertoires of political participation multiply and change.