2012/03/01 by Carole Pateman · 914 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Argument (complex analysis) #Deliberative democracy #Democracy #Democratic theory #Direct democracy #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Law #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political economy #Political philosophy #Political science #Politics #Praise #Psychology #Representative democracy #Social Media and Politics #Social psychology #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1017/s1537592711004877
published in Perspectives on Politics 10(1), 7-19 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2012/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
Over the past two decades we have heard an historically unprecedented volume of talk about and praise of democracy, and many 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, agonistic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 John Dryzek could write that “deliberative democracy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory).” Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democracy, but its influence has spread far outside universities.