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Tocqueville's view that a virtuous and viable democracy depends on robust associational life has become a cornerstone of contemporary democratic theory. Democratic theorists generally agree that issue networks, recreational associations, support circles, religious groups, unions, advocacy groups, and myriad other kinds of associations enhance democracy by cultivating citizenship, promoting public deliberation, providing voice and representation, and enabling varied forms of governance. Yet there has been little work to show how and why different kinds of association have different effects on democracy--many supportive but others minimal or even destructive.This book offers the first systematic assessment of what associations do and don't do for democracy. Mark Warren explains how and when associational life expands the domain, inclusiveness, and authenticity of democracy. He looks at which associations are most likely to foster individuals' capacities for democratic citizenship, provoke political debate, open existing institutions, guide market activities, or bring democratic decision-making to new venues. Throughout, Warren also considers the trade-offs involved, noting, for example, that organizational solidarity can dampen internal dissent and deliberation even as it enhances public deliberation. Blending political and social theory with an eye to social science, Democracy and Association will draw social scientists with interests in democracy, political philosophers, students of public policy, as well as the many activists who fortify the varied landscape we call civil society. As an original analysis of which associational soils yield vigorous democracies, the book will have a major impact on democratic theory and empirical research

Political philosophers rarely take on the topic of political corruption, despite the fact that corruption is so costly to human wellbeing, and so clearly separates well-governed from poorly governed polities. Ceva and Ferretti's book is the most complete attempt to remedy this deficit to date. Their key contribution is to conceptualize institutions in such a way that the offices they define link clearly to public ethics. Officeholders are accountable for their power mandate, not just within a hierarchy, but ethically, because their duties serve the public purposes that justify the institution. This said, their approach works best for impartial institutions in which the public duties of offices are clear and actionable, such as professional bureaucracies. We also need an ethically driven conception of political corruption for political institutions that contain and channel political partiality, especially democratic institutions within which the ethical purposes of public legislation are argued, deliberated, and voted. Extending a public ethics account of political corruption to democratic institutions can and should be a next step in this important project.

In the developed democracies, the public discourse of political corruption and conspiracy remains stubbornly pervasive, in spite of the fact that these countries are, comparatively, the cleanest in the world. Everyday talk about corruption expresses a politics of distrust and disaffection, corrodes deliberative responses to political conflict and – most alarmingly – can be mobilized by populist authoritarians who would replace democratic institutions with decisionism. The phenomenon that Rosenblum and Muirhead call 'the new conspiracism' – assertions of conspiracies without evidence or even claims that could be refuted – is deepening the discourse of corruption, particularly in the United States. These discourses are expressive rather than discursive: they cannot be refuted because they signal fears and discontents rather than positions within public arguments. Because democracies only work when they channel political conflict into credible speech, these developments corrode the life-blood of democracies. A key problem for democrats today is to diagnose this pathology, identify powers of speech and devise responses that might protect the common pool resource of promise and commitment in speech-based politics.

What might participatory deliberative democracy look like in complex, mass societies? Cristina Lafont's Democracy Without Shortcuts (2019) challenges us to revisit this question by taking contemporary democratic theory to task for recommending a variety of shortcuts that would seem to reconcile democratic self-government with complex, mass societies, but do so by requiring 'blind deference' of citizens to decisions made by others. Here I make three general points. First, democracy is possible in mass, complex societies just because democratic societies and governments are full of shortcuts, through representation, political, epistemic and advocacy divisions of labour, differentiated institutions, multi-level governance, and trust relationships both among citizens and between citizens and governments. Few of these shortcuts require 'blind deference' of citizens. Second, because complex societies are highly differentiated in their structures, they also multiply opportunities for participation in ways that Lafont does not theorise owing to a statist focus on constitutional, rights-based politics. But, third, in arguing against shortcuts, Lafont underscores the importance of assessing the many kinds of principal–agent relationships in complex mass societies to ensure they advance rather than undermine the norms of participatory deliberative democracy.

Abstract
James Fishkin's Democracy When the People Are Thinking (2018) is a comprehensive account of why Deliberative Polling is now the gold standard for a type of deliberative mini-public. Fishkin's book is nicely theorized, and counts as a major contribution to the empirical study of democratic innovations. The book does, however, leave a number of questions open that we need to frame and answer as we look forward to using innovative processes such as Deliberative Polling to deepen democracy. These include questions of (1) the democratic legitimacy of randomly selected bodies; (2) the boundaries of relevant publics, particularly when they do not correspond to established jurisdictions; (3) managing legitimate exclusions of special interests that are powerful enough to undermine deliberative mini-publics; (4) when and why political elites might have incentives to use deliberative mini-publics; (5) when and where divisions of labor among venues and activities deepen democracy, and (6) locating democratic possibilities outside of electoral democracy, particularly within governance systems.

James Bohman's work involves a paradigm shift in how we conceive democracy in complex, pluralized, globalized contexts comprised of multiple, overlapping constituencies that often have broad extension in space and time. He breaks with theories that view democracy as comprised of a bounded demos legislating for itself, and which conceptualize democracy as ways of organizing territorial, state-organized political entities. Elements of a progressive democratic theory that travels across borders should be built out of three ideas: (a) a nonutopianism that pays close attention to the "circumstances of politics"; (b) institutions that enable nondomination, which helps to push conflict resolution toward the democratic media of deliberation, bargaining, compromise, and voting; and (c) reflexive institutions that enable the deliberative generation, revision, and renewal of collective procedures and decisions, and which organize the creativity, intelligence, and energy of individuals.

Over the last few decades, democratic theory has grown dramatically in its power and sophistication, fueled by debates among models of democracy. But these debates are increasingly unproductive. Model-based strategies encourage theorists to overgeneralize the place and functions of ideal typical features of democracy, such as deliberation or elections. Here I sketch an alternative strategy based on the question: What kinds of problems does a political system need to solve to count as "democratic"? I suggest three general kinds: it should empower inclusions, form collective agendas and wills, and have capacities to make collective decisions. We can view common practices such as voting and deliberating as means for addressing these problems, and theorize institutional mixes of practices that would maximize a political system's democratic problem-solving capacities. The resulting theories will be both normatively robust and sufficiently fine-grained to frame democratic problems, possibilities, and deficits in complex polities.

En el presente artículo, el autor afirma que la forma de combatir la corrupción es a través de la democracia. Partiendo de la base de que la sociedad civil es el medio conductor para evitar la corrupción, analiza la participación de aquella en la solución de este fenómeno. Asimismo, se pone énfasis en el papel del gobierno y de las asociaciones para la creación de una democracia que, a la larga, deberá combatir al "mal comportamiento de la política", como es denominada la corrupción. El autor demuestra que hay un vínculo intrínseco entre las formas democráticas de organizar las instituciones y el ejercicio de la política, llevando esto a resolver la corrupción.

Democracy is about including those who are potentially affected by collective decisions in making those decisions. For this reason, contemporary democratic theory primarily assumes membership combined with effective voice. An alternative to voice is exit: Dissatisfied members may choose to leave a group rather than voice their displeasure. Rights and capacities for exit can function as low-cost, effective empowerments, particularly for those without voice. But because contemporary democratic theory often dismisses exit as appropriate only for economic markets, the democratic potentials of exit have rarely been theorized. Exit-based empowerments should be as central to the design and integrity of democracy as distributions of votes and voice, long considered its key structural features. When they are integrated into other democratic devices, exit-based empowerments should generate and widely distribute usable powers for those who need them most, evoke responsiveness from elites, induce voice, discipline monopoly, and underwrite vibrant and pluralistic societies.