Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Blind Spots and Complementarities*

IN the last decade deliberative democracy has developed rapidly from a “theoretical statement” into a “working theory.” Scholars and practitioners have launched numerous initiatives designed to put deliberative democracy into practice, ranging from deliberative polling to citizen summits. Some even advocate deliberation as a new “revolutionary political ideal . . . about how political actors should behave here and now.” Deliberative democracy has also experienced the beginning of an empirical turn, making significant gains as an empirical (or positive) political science. This includes a small, but growing body of literature tackling the connection between the normative standards of deliberation, how well they are met, and the empirical consequences of meeting them. This trend has, for instance, included the use of methods and frameworks borrowed from other fields, such as political and social psychology. Such studies suggest that cases approaching ideal deliberation are rare, but that group interaction sometimes works surprisingly well according to such ideals.