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This chapter presents a brief conclusion which summarizes the main argument: that fully legitimate, deliberative, and democratic decision making can only be of the macro kind, not the micro. It poses questions for future research and answers a hypothetical question from the Leicester case, giving a group of protestors six reasons to think that the outcome of the citizens’ jury was legitimate, and one reason — its restricted, local scope — to think that it was not.

This chapter argues that deliberative democracy theory is an invaluable resource for thinking about how liberal democracies and minority cultural groups might mediate conflicts of culture. However, it needs to be amended in important ways if it is to respond to the needs of minority cultural communities. This chapter makes the case for a deliberative democratic approach to resolving tensions between gender equality and cultural recognition, grounding it in principle of political inclusion and democratic legitimacy. This conception of democratic deliberation is open-ended with respect to outcomes, and takes its cue from an agonistic account of power and dialogue rather than the reasoned deliberation usually urged by proponents of discourse ethics, such as Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and Seyla Benhabib. This approach to negotiating conflicts, which emphasizes negotiation and compromise, can also help to empower vulnerable members of cultural groups who dissent from prevailing cultural roles and arrangements in their communities.

This chapter outlines the theory of deliberative democracy and deliberative institutions, highlighting the legitimacy problems — to do with the scale of the deliberations and the motivation to participate — as experienced by the organizers of a citizens’ jury in Leicester, England, in 2000. It explains the approach and methods, outlines the argument, and summarizes five cases of deliberation in the UK’s National Health Service.

This chapter discusses the concept of legitimacy, distinguishing between procedural and substantive legitimacy. Theoretical solutions to the scale and motivations problems are surveyed, drawing out three key ideas to explore further: representation, publicity, and rationality. It shows how some of the solutions to the motivations problem undermine solutions to the scale problem, and suggests that thinking in terms of a ‘deliberative system’ might help resolve the tensions before sketching the principles of what a legitimate deliberative democracy might look like.

This chapter summarizes the criteria for a legitimate deliberative democracy and assesses the different deliberative democratic models against those criteria. It points out that no single process can meet them all, thus criticizing the ‘minipublic’ approach. It suggests that a deliberative system approach is necessary, using different processes at different points of the decision making process. The outlines of such a scheme are described, linking activists in civil society and parliamentary processes with a variety of agenda-setting and decision-making tools.

This chapter turns to deliberative democracy frameworks to further expand the meaning of accountability beyond instrumental and disciplinary approaches and to raise questions about institutional exclusions at local, national, and transnational levels. For deliberative democrats, accountability is not only about exerting control, it is also about justifying behavior: Accountability means answerability. Having to answer in deliberative publics for the consequences and rationales of one’s actions has transformative potential. It enhances the probability of realizing justice and of finding common ground. Deliberative accountability also places pressure upon the boundaries of political communities, including national ones, and demands that those whose actions affect others be compelled to justify their actions to all those affected. This all-affected principle provides considerable normative leverage against exclusive political communities, but it also poses creates impossible inclusion demands. The chapter argues that the ensuing tension should offer an opening for critical theory, a prod for innovation, and a lesson about the need for institutional humility.

This chapter explores the context of the cases, setting out the history of patient involvement initiatives and deliberative experiments in the UK. It highlights the antipathy to interest groups and the ‘research orientation’ of those experiments, and the effects that orientation has had on limiting the scope and agenda of deliberation. It argues that whether deliberation occurs at the local level or at the centre matters a great deal, but that deliberative experiments tend to be at least as much about resource battles between the centre and the periphery as responding to citizens’ needs.

Social change to undermine injustice usually should be pursued through democratic processes. A suitably defined model of deliberative democracy articulates how democracy can produce just policies. As usually understood, however, the model of deliberative democracy focuses too much on argument, privileges unity, assumes face‐to‐face discussion, and assumes a norm of order.

One of the central aims of deliberative theory is to redeem the ideal of impartiality by defining political processes in a manner that avoids bias against valid social interests. The first section of this chapter presents the broad outlines of theories of deliberative democracy and explores the place of the concept of impartiality within them. In the next section, the different kinds of contributions that marginalized group perspectives make to democratic deliberation are explored. Next, drawing on and extending the recent feminist critiques of deliberative democracy, two interrelated challenges to deliberative theory are examined: one focused on the standard of reasonableness and the idea of reason‐giving, and the other on the contingent social and political circumstances under which marginalized‐group perspectives may sway the judgement of other citizens. Finally, the implications of these changes for our more general notions of the virtues and responsibilities of citizenship are examined.

This chapter explores the ideas of representation, the first broad solution to the legitimacy problems in deliberative democracy. It considers the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of three different types of representation claims made by participants in the cases, namely random selection, self-selection, and elected representation. It argues that elected representatives have the strongest claims simply because they can be removed from decision-making posts, but this strength depends on there being strong communicative relationships between representatives and the represented. It concludes that while representation claims are important, no one kind of representative has perfectly legitimate authority.

This chapter argues that the definition of rationality is a major source of disagreement over the legitimacy of decision making processes. It draws attention to battles over competing problem definitions and agendas as a means of controlling debate, and the failure of micro-deliberative processes to handle such battles. It identifies the rhetorical devices used by deliberators to persuade their external audiences, and the impact these have on the rationality of the process. It argues that the more decisive a process is, the more it will attract publicity and the more inclusive it will be, but also the greater the incentives are to act strategically.

How is it possible for individuals to exercise any control over a political order, i.e. supranational and multilayered? This is the key question in reconciling cosmopolitan justice with democracy. The most popular answer is that of Jurgen Habermas and other deliberative democrats. This chapter argues that deliberative democracy fails to take seriously both the problems and opportunities of large-scale societies, and so cannot provide adequate foundations for a deepening democracy. The participation requirements of Habermas’s normative theory can be met only by making assumptions about human cognitive capacities and institutional capabilities that are not remotely plausible in any large-scale society–faced with limitations of numbers, time, information, and understanding. Deliberative theorists turn to five conceptions of representation that are supposed to ‘mirror’ deliberation and thereby rescue the theory; but all of them fail. A stronger theory of representation is needed.

This chapter discusses the second broad solution to the legitimacy problems: sharing arguments through the media. It sets out the structural features of the news media and shows how they filter out certain kinds of arguments and issues, using the example of a deliberative poll. It argues that successful argument sharing (or publicity) depends on the salience of the issue, but in such cases, small-scale deliberative processes can provide a useful focal point for coverage of all the arguments. ‘Manufacturing’ salience can lead to distortion of the issue and arguments.

What sort of democracy is more likely to sustain environment‐friendly policies? Unlike a number of recent works that have praised representative democracy as the optimal form of democracy for the environment, it is argued that the more deliberative and participatory the democracy the more environment friendly it will be. It is shown that many environmental activists support such conclusions.

In any large and complex community, deliberation cannot realistically take place in the agora (or its electronic equivalent), with everyone potentially affected by the decision taking an active part in all the deliberations. Deliberative democracy, in such a world, simply has to work on and through our inherited institutions of representative democracy. Revisioning those institutions through a deliberative lens, we can think of them as constituting a ‘deliberative system’, with different parts of the deliberative task being allocated to each. Political parties play a key (but non-exclusive role) in all that. The public sphere can best be connected to that process through networked accountability mechanisms.

Recounts the roots of the deliberative turn in democratic theory in liberalism and critical theory. Losing sight of its critical theory origins, deliberative democracy gains an ever‐closer association with the institutions of the liberal state. As an alternative, this chapter lays the foundations for an account of discursive democracy grounded in a critical theory of communicative action.