Book Review: Making Deliberative Democracy a More Practical Political Ideal

Date01 April 2005
DOI10.1177/1474885105050451
AuthorColin Farrelly
Published date01 April 2005
Subject MatterArticles
Making Deliberative Democracy a
More Practical Political Ideal
Colin Farrelly University of Waterloo, Canada
Robert Goodin Reflective Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003. 279pp. + x,
£19.99 (hbk), ISBN 0–19–925617–9.
Iris Marion Young Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press2000. 304pp.
+ vii, £21.99 (hbk), ISBN 0–19–829754–8.
Henry Richardson Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. 316pp. + xii, £19.99 (hbk), ISBN 0–19–515090–2.
Introduction
Deliberative democrats conceive of the democratic process as a transformative process, one
that requires citizens to participate in authentic deliberation with others rather than engag-
ing in the strategic behaviour characteristic of existing democratic practices. Current prac-
tices often pit factions of society against one another in a struggle to win or retain political
power. The moralized conception of democracy defended by deliberative democrats is one
that emphasizes the importance of being open-minded, reasonable and accommodating.
These civic virtues are necessary if we are to treat others as equals when decisions are made
concerning the use of political power, power that will influence the life prospects of every-
one. Deliberative democrats are thus concerned with the normative legitimacy of a demo-
cratic decision; this legitimacy depends ‘on the degree to which those affected by it have
been included in the decision-making processes and have had the opportunity to influence
the outcomes’.1
Since the early 1990s the so-called ‘deliberative turn’2in democratic theory has con-
tinued to build in momentum and the recent publication of Robert Goodin’s Reflective
Democracy, Iris Young’s Inclusion and Democracy and Henry Richardson’s Democratic
Autonomy are confirmation that this area of study continues to preoccupy the thoughts of
some of the most gifted political theorists and that the maturation of theories of delibera-
tive democracy has borne many valuable fruits. The fact that normative political theorists
are taking democracy seriously is a welcome, though relatively recent, trend in mainstream
political theory. In the decades following the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice
200
review article
Contact address: Colin Farrelly, Department of Political Science, University of
Waterloo, 200 University Ave W., Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3GI, Canada.
Email: farrelly@watarts.uwaterloo.ca
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 4(2)200208
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885105050451]

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