Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include: the nature and value of deliberation; the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues; the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making; and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements. This anthology opens with four essays by Jon Elster, Jurgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls that help establish this inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens.
Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.