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'Beyond Empathy and Inclusion' examines how to achieve democratic rule in large pluralistic societies where citizens are deeply divided. Scudder argues that listening is key; in a democracy, citizens do not have to agree with their political opponents, but they do have to listen to them. Being heard is what ensures we have a say in the laws to which we are held. While listening is admittedly difficult, this text investigates how to motivate citizens to listen seriously, attentively, and humbly, even to those with whom they disagree.

What is the relationship between deliberation and democracy? Despite the volumes dedicated to this question, recent admissions by prominent deliberative democrats—that we need not pursue a necessarily deliberative political system, but merely a democratic one—suggest that this remains an open question. Here, I defend the deliberative model's staying power against those who argue that it has been set normatively adrift. Addressing concerns of "concept-stretching," I show that the deliberative model provides much more than a defense of the practice of deliberation. Indeed, its key contribution is the answer it provides to the question of what democracy itself means in large pluralistic societies. Moreover, I show that by de-centering the practice of deliberation from deliberative theories of democracy, we can acknowledge the weakness of deliberation and the strengths of non-deliberative practices, while retaining the model's normative commitments.

Recent political theory in the area of deliberative democracy has placed listening at the normative core of meaningfully democratic deliberation. Empirical research in this area, however, has struggled to capture democratic listening in a normatively relevant way. This paper presents a new, theoretically informed instrument for measuring and assessing listening in deliberation. Here, I tackle the observational challenge of measuring the act of listening itself, as opposed to either the preconditions or outcomes of listening. Reviewing existing measures, I show that each, in isolation, fails to capture the most democratically meaningful aspects of listening. The paper argues, however, that existing and novel measures can be usefully combined to allow researchers to capture different degrees of democratic listening. Using Rawls's concept of "lexical priority," I aggregate relevant components of listening into a normatively significant lexical scale. The paper describes this novel measurement and highlights how it can be used in empirical research on democratic deliberation.

Those who want to defend democracy against right-wing anti-democratic forces are at odds with one another: some want a politics that puts vehement conflict at the centre of democratic strategies, while others assert the necessity of more civil and deliberative strategies. What should our stance be as defenders of democratic life? In 'The Two Faces of Democracy', Mary F. (Molly) Scudder and Stephen K. White present an analysis of these two stances, the deliberative and agonistic models of democracy, arguing that neither is adequate on its own. Moreover, Scudder and White develop a distinctive portrait of the core commitments of a democratic life, from the perspective of which we can better appreciate the respective roles of both orientations in the current struggles for a healthy democratic future.

This article explores the role of institutional listening in deliberative democracy, focusing particularly on its contribution to the transmission process between the public sphere and formal institutions. We critique existing accounts of transmission for prioritizing voice over listening and for remaining constrained by an 'aggregative logic' of the flow of ideas and voices in a democracy. We argue that formal institutions have a crucial role to play in ensuring transmission operates according to a more deliberative logic. To substantiate this argument, we focus on two recent examples of institutional listening in two different democracies: Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the United States' Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. These cases show that institutional listening can take different forms; it can be purposefully designed or incidental, and it can contribute to the realization of deliberative democracy in various ways. Specifically, institutional listening can help enhance the credibility and visibility of minority groups and perspectives while also empowering these groups to better hold formal political institutions accountable. In these ways, institutional listening helps transmission operate according to a more deliberative logic.