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John Dryzek with Simon Niemeyer
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, 256pp., EUR28.00,
ISBN: 978-0199562947
The core ideas of deliberative democracy are simple: in addition to viewing democratic institutions and practices as the collective aggregation of preferences, we should also understand them as means of generating communicative influence and collective reflection. Decisions made through communicative influence are, on average, better than decisions that merely aggregate preferences because they are tested through the give and take of reasons. They are better epistemically, in that they are more likely to reflect evidence; they are better ethically, in that they are more like to respond to individuals affected by collective decisions; and they are better politically, in that they are more likely to be accepted by those subject to them.
There is enough broad agreement about these normative features of deliberative democracy to have generated a rapidly expanding set of theoretical discourses, research paradigms, institutional experiments, public policy processes and political practices. These have produced an expanding universe of possibilities and challenges, as ideas meet evidence and practice. John Dryzek's book (with Simon Niemeyer coauthoring two chapters) is an attentive and masterful guide to this expanding universe. It is simultaneously a consolidation of recent achievements, a contribution to rethinking key foundational issues, and - last but not least - an approach to integrating normative insights into institutional and practical venues: hence term 'governance' in the title. The book is timely and ambitious, and it succeeds admirably.
The book is organized into three parts. In the first, Dryzek summarizes the state of the deliberative democracy as research paradigm, noting especially its several 'turns': into institutional analysis, system contextualizing, new 'real world' practices such as minipublics and empirical assessment (pp. 6-9). Dryzek acknowledges these developments, but also notes that we need to be thinking about deliberative systems . Contemporary polities and politics are enormously complex and demanding of knowledge, and their scope ranges from small locales to global regimes. We must, therefore, understand that whatever else deliberative institutions are, they will involve highly divided political labors, which are connected in the manner of a system. While the problems of conceptualizing political systems are legion, Dryzek uses a strategy increasing common to democratic theorists: he starts with a normative identifier of...