Participatory Democracy Revisited

O ver the past two decades we have heard an histor-ically unprecedented volume of talk about andpraise of democracy, andmany governmental, non-governmental, and international organizations have been engaged in democracy promotion. Democracy is a subject that crosses the boundaries in political science, and within my own field of political theory there has been a major revival of democratic theory. In political theory, argument about “democracy ” is usually now qualified by one of an array of adjectives, which include cosmopolitan, agonis-tic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 JohnDryzek could write that “deliberative democ-racy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory).”1 Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democ