The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...) Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad.Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests. (shrink)

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. These values belonged to a traditional theory of representation which held that Parliament ought to be a mirror of the nation (...) in its diversity and which judged democracy, in contrast, to be an illiberal mode of regulating the franchise because it risked handing the representation wholly to one part or class within society. In response to this school of thought, democratic theory developed two conflicting responses: first, that democracy could accommodate social and ideological diversity; second, that democracy was irreconcilable with the goal of mirroring diversity, but that nevertheless democracy had to be preferred on grounds of fairness and non-arbitrariness. (shrink)

Scholars have long debated whether welfare policymaking in industrialized democracies is responsive to citizen preferences and whether such policymaking is more responsive to rich than to poor citizens. Debate has been hampered, however, by difficulties in matching data on attitudes toward particular policies to data on changes in the generosity of actual policies. This article uses better, more targeted measures of policy change that allow more valid exploration of responsiveness for a significant range of democracies. It does so by linking (...) multicountry and multiwave survey data on attitudes toward health, pension, and unemployment policies and data on actual policy generosity, not just spending, in these domains. The analysis reveals that attitudes correlate strongly with subsequent changes in welfare generosity in the three policy areas and that such responsiveness is much stronger for richer than for poorer citizens. Representation is likely real but also vastly unequal in the welfare politics of industrialized democracies. (shrink)