How Can Deliberative Democracy Get a Grip?

Abstract

One of the most exciting innovations within 'practical democratic theory' in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well-honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small-scale deliberative exercises to the 'main game', politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.