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Democracy When the People Are Thinking contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation. It should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.
List of contents
- Part I: Introduction
- 1. Party Competition and Its Limits
- 2. Deliberation and Reform
- Part II: Can the People Rule?
- 1. Four Criteria for Popular Control
- 2. Four Forms of Democracy
- 3. Popular Control in Competitive Democracies
- 4.Is There Democracy for 'Realists'?
- 5. Manipulation
- 6. Elite Deliberation and Popular Control: Madison's Filter
- 7. Participatory Democracy and Democratic Control: From Town Meetings to Referenda
- 8. Reflections on the Athenian Case
- Part III: Making Deliberation Practical
- 1. Designing Deliberative Democracy
- 2. Deliberative Agenda Setting: California In One Room
- 3. Mongolia: Deliberative Participatory Budgeting
- 4. Applying Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Uganda's First Deliberative Polls
- 5. Deliberating European Wide
- Part IV: Re-imagining Democratic Possibilities
- 1. Designs for Deliberation: Where and How?
- 2. It Works in Practice, But Does It Work in Theory?
- 3. From Thought Experiments to Real Experiments: Reflections on Rawls and Habermas
- 4. Deliberative Democracy and Candidate Selection
- 5. Texas: Connecting Public Deliberation to Policy Elites
- 6. Connecting Deliberative Designs to Participatory Democracy
- 7. Deliberating Before Ballot Propositions: Reflecting on the 'Australian Republic'
- 8. Japan: Deliberation for Hard Choices
- 9. Deliberation Day
- 10. Connecting Deliberative Democracy to Constitutional Change
- 11. Speculating on New Institutions
- 12. Mongolia Deliberates for Constitutional Change
- 13. 'Deliberative Authoritarianism'?
- 14. 'Deliberative Systems' and Popular Control
- 15. Toward Collective Self-Rule
- Appendix
About the author
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy. He is the author of
Democracy and Deliberation (Yale, 1991),
When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (OUP, 2009) and other books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.
Summary
Democracy When the People Are Thinking contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation. It should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.
Additional text
A provocative book that makes the case for the importance of deliberation as the foundation of real democracy. It challenges our beliefs about what is possible and outlines an institutional framework for creating a real deliberative democracy. It is an antidote to those who are pessimistic about the future of democracy.
