Deliberative Democracy: A Conceptual Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the discourse on deliberative democracy, which Amy Gutmann and DennisThompson describe as a second order theory capable of sorting out conflicts among first order theories through a process of mutual elimination and outwitting. Participatory democracy favours citizen participation and its increase while deliberative democracy emphasized the quality of politics and the public sphere. The deliberative democracy theory includes three generations. The first-generation lays a normative framework for deliberative democracy. The second-generation considers the institutionalization of deliberative democracy. The third generation promotes an institutional design of deliberative democracy. There are a number of big questions in deliberative democracy such as whether deliberation should be seen instrumentally or in expressive terms, whether the focus should be on the procedure of deliberative democracy or on its substance. Some argue that deliberative theorists have yet to respond to the challenge that divided societies pose to their theories.