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Deliberation, Democracy, and Civic Forums: Improving Equality and Publicity. By Karpowitz Christopher F. and Raphael Chad . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2014. 409p. $99.00.
Book Reviews: American Politics
Early in their book, Christopher F. Karpowitz and Chad Raphael note that the U.S. Constitution sought "to form a more perfect union" rather than form the most perfect union (p. 21). With their book, Karpowitz and Raphael set as their goal nothing less than creating a more perfect democracy. This more perfect democracy will include deliberative forums--which the authors assume are clearly normatively good, but always fall short of perfection in practice. In improving a wide variety of civic forums the authors hope to increase the voice of the traditionally underrepresented and increase the legitimacy of these forums in the minds of the wider public and policy makers. It is an ambitious undertaking that all democratic theorists and public opinion scholars must consider.
The book is somewhat unusual because it is, in many ways, a piece of normative theory which relies on empirics to help explain how the theory works in practice. The empirics are not tests of hypotheses, and serve primarily to categorize, evaluate, and understand the decisions of previous forums. This mix of normative theory and empirics continues the efforts of Fishkin and colleagues to move beyond "thought experiments" (James S. Fishkin and Robert Luskin, "Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative polling and Public Opinion," Acta Politica 2005, p. 294), but with a more serious consideration of deliberative democracy's flaws and limitations.
The authors define a deliberative forum as "[any] search for agreement among political equals engaged in public reasoning" (p. 215). Key to their understanding of why deliberation improves democracy is that the discussion takes place among "political equals." In particular, the book is very concerned with giving voice to the "disempowered." The disempowered are...