Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality

While deliberative democracy is the most important theory of democracy in the last 30 years, many empirical political scientists have dismissed it as irrelevant to the study of existing democracies. This book argues that this is not because the theory is irrelevant, but because many empirical scholars have misunderstood the theory or have applied it in misleading ways. The authors distinguish between deliberation, the noun, and ‘deliberative’ as an adjectival quality. They show how the first can be used to better understand political discussions at the small scale; and the second to understand critical features of democratic reasoning, something that has never been more important in a world of post-fact politics.