Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory
Democracy. By Diana C. Mutz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
184p. $60.00 cloth, $20.99 paper.
Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life.
By Andrew J. Perrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 208p.
$45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.
Deliberative democracy is no longer reserved for the theorists.
Empiricists now want a part of the action. With their various tools,
social scientists are testing and considering both deliberative democratic
institutions (e.g., juries, town hall meetings, deliberative polls, and
other fora for citizen discussion) and the preconditions of context and
character that theorists have proposed are necessary to make deliberative
democracy work. Political scientist Diana Mutz and sociologist Andrew
Perrin have written new books purporting to bring empirical work to bear
on the claims of deliberative democratic theory. Both books are short and
illuminating, though their postures as serious challenges to deliberative
democratic theory are overstated and potentially misplaced. This failure
to undermine the enterprise of deliberative democracy, however, does not
prevent each from making a serious contribution to helping us understand
how citizens engage in political debate and discussion among themselves in
their everyday environments.