Deliberation Day. By Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288p. $30.00.
Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular
Branch of Government. By Ethan J. Leib. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 156p. $27.50.
Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of
Policy. By Henry S. Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002. 328p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Compelling theories of politics invite us to see the world
differently. But once we see political life in different terms, what
will we be moved to do? Redesign our political institutions? Or revise
our reasons for supporting those that currently exist? As the authors
of the three books reviewed here illustrate, those who have taken up
deliberative theories of democracy are moved to engage in profoundly
different kinds of projects, marked either by redesign or revision.
Bruce Ackerman, James Fishkin, and Ethan Leib believe their commitments
to theories of deliberative democracy require them to focus on drafting
extensive plans for institutional redesign. By contrast, Henry
Richardson, while endorsing institutional reforms, ranging from
changing electoral law to opening administrative rule making to greater
citizen participation (pp. 200–202, 219–22), devotes the
majority of his book to showing how the ideals of his theory of
deliberative democracy can make better and more complete sense of
political life as it is. The deep contrast between how these authors
understand what one ought to do with a commitment to deliberative
democracy prompts us to consider whether they are simply committed to
different things or are striking out on different paths from
substantially similar starting points instead.