The Third Generation of Deliberative Democracy

The article argues that deliberative democracy has now entered a third generation, to which the three recent books considered here contribute. The first generation included the normative assertions of Habermas and Rawls. The second generation involved the fusing of these two first generationalists, and reconciling them with features of social complexity. The second generation has rendered deliberative democracy more practically achievable, and the three books here seize this opportunity to provide considerable institutional innovation about how to achieve the reformed deliberative theory in practice. In doing this the third generation of deliberative democracy is emerging. In the main, a more practically relevant version of deliberative democracy is welcomed, but we must also guard against jettisoning its normative ideals in the process.