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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2007
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. By Diana C. Mutz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 184p. $60.00 cloth, $20.99 paper.
Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. By Andrew J. Perrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 208p. $45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.
Deliberative democracy is no longer reserved for the theorists. Empiricists now want a part of the action. With their various tools, social scientists are testing and considering both deliberative democratic institutions (e.g., juries, town hall meetings, deliberative polls, and other fora for citizen discussion) and the preconditions of context and character that theorists have proposed are necessary to make deliberative democracy work. Political scientist Diana Mutz and sociologist Andrew Perrin have written new books purporting to bring empirical work to bear on the claims of deliberative democratic theory. Both books are short and illuminating, though their postures as serious challenges to deliberative democratic theory are overstated and potentially misplaced. This failure to undermine the enterprise of deliberative democracy, however, does not prevent each from making a serious contribution to helping us understand how citizens engage in political debate and discussion among themselves in their everyday environments.