The Theory and Practice of Deliberative Democracy

This project links the theory of deliberative democracy to institutional innovation, to benefit both, through comparative case analyses of democratic innovations in different countries. It is hypothesized that particular kinds of institutional innovation (such as consensus conferences, policy dialogues, dialogical networks) will work out quite differently in different political contexts. If so, then the emphasis of almost all democratic theory on models of democracy is misplaced: instead, theorists should attend to processes of democratization in particular contexts. The results of the comparative case analyses will be used to reflect back upon, and reformulate, deliberative democratic theory.