Compelling theories of politics invite us to see the world differently. But once we see political life in different terms, what will we be moved to do? Redesign our political institutions? Or revise our reasons for supporting those that currently exist? As the authors of the three books reviewed here illustrate, those who have taken up deliberative theories of democracy are moved to engage in profoundly different kinds of projects, marked either by redesign or revision. Bruce Ackerman, James Fishkin, and Ethan Leib believe their commitments to theories of deliberative democracy require them to focus on drafting extensive plans for institutional redesign. By contrast, Henry Richardson, while endorsing institutional reforms, ranging from changing electoral law to opening administrative rule making to greater citizen participation (pp. 200–202, 219–22), devotes the majority of his book to showing how the ideals of his theory of deliberative democracy can make better and more complete sense of political life as it is. The deep contrast between how these authors understand what one ought to do with a commitment to deliberative democracy prompts us to consider whether they are simply committed to different things or are striking out on different paths from substantially similar starting points instead.

Ackerman and Fishkin argue for opening elections to citizen deliberation on a grand scale. The proposal at the heart of Deliberation Day, a two-day national holiday several weeks before election day, differs in several important respects from the deliberative polls Fishkin advocated in Deliberation and Democracy (1991) and The Voice of the People (1997). In his earlier work, Fishkin argued for selecting a random, representative group of people from across the country to meet together for at least several days before the beginning of the presidential primary season—in effect, a national primary in microcosm. Deliberation Day substantially revises these earlier proposals. Gone is the case for constituting the public in microcosm, as is the ambition to begin the primary season on a national, deliberative note. Instead, Ackerman and Fishkin hope to open up deliberations about national elections to every citizen at a time when many are likely to be paying attention—just a few weeks before election day. Meeting at local public places with around 500 other citizens from the immediate area, each participant would receive a $150 honorarium for spending the day listening to the candidates debate, taking part in small group discussions, and posing questions to party representatives in plenary sessions.

A substantial portion of Deliberation Day is devoted to laying out the details of how the event would work and to allaying fears about its costs or vulnerability to the wiles of career politicians and interest groups (Part I, Chapters 1–6). In other words, this is largely a work of institutional design. To be sure, Ackerman and Fishkin engage several broader, more fundamental issues, such as the place of mass participation in a representative government (Chapter 7) and the political consequences of deep inequality (Chapter 9). But as the placement of these chapters in the book suggests, what the authors have to say on these matters reads more like an extension of their argument for Deliberation Day than an explication of what led them to devise it in the first place.

So what moves Ackerman and Fishkin to embark on this project of institutional design? In a book so clearly and accessibly written, this turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Rhetorically, they present their picture of what ails the American polity as an obvious, uncontroversial one (pp. 5–13). But if we “grant” what Ackerman and Fishkin say we must—that “a majority of voters are woefully ignorant and readily manipulated” (p. 13)—a great deal of the groundwork for embracing Deliberation Day as the solution to these ills has already been laid. Add to this their claim that “[o]rdinary men and women can function successfully as citizens” given the right “institutional contexts” (p. 5), and the fundamental case for Deliberation Day is nearly made.

Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal, however uncontroversial its presentation, will fail to convince any deliberative democrat who believes “political poverty” is not principally an informational deficit (e.g., James Bohman, Public Deliberation, 1996, pp. 110–11). If, instead, what makes people politically poor are low wages, little free time, and rare opportunities to connect with others in similar circumstances, then the imperative that participants in Deliberation Day look for middle-of-the-road challenges to pose to candidates on which most people can agree (p. 28) will tend to muffle, rather than give voice to, what the politically poor need. This tendency is especially worrisome since Ackerman and Fishkin concede that if their Deliberation Day proposal were adopted, its operation could “enhance the legitimacy of the remaining inequalities haunting contemporary life” (p. 193). This concession highlights the difference between those problems that the authors believe the deliberative institutions they have designed are best suited to solve and those that they are likely to leave in place or even make worse.

Like Ackerman and Fishkin, Leib puts institutional design at the center of Deliberative Democracy in America. Chiding other deliberative democrats for being “notoriously short on proposals for practical institutional reform,” Leib announces his intention to take what he deems the road less taken, calling his first chapter, “Getting Right Down to the Business of Institutional Design” (p. 9). His proposal is an ambitious one: He argues that only the creation of a new branch of government can make popular sovereignty a reality. The “popular branch” would be staffed principally by citizens selected at random from the jury pool; its charge would be to replace votes on referenda and initiatives with deliberative discussions leading to binding decisions on policy matters. Though binding, the popular branch's decisions could be overridden by other branches; other branches could also forward matters to the popular branch for consideration. Those selected to participate in the popular branch would be compensated for their time but would be required to serve (pp. 12–27).

Leib devotes much of his brief book to filling in the details of the proposal introduced in his first chapter, often by contrasting his aims and methods with those proposed by others. It is to Fishkin more than anyone else that Leib pays such attention (pp. 5, 23–27, 36–38, 93–95), albeit to the Fishkin of Deliberative Polling (1991, 1997), rather than the Fishkin of Deliberation Day (a proposal to which Leib makes no reference). Of course, Leib and Fishkin are of one mind on the importance of institutional design, but Leib wants popular deliberation to have a more settled place and more power in the political system than Fishkin does. For readers looking for a thorough exposition of differences between various proposals for institutional reform made by deliberative democrats and some of their predecessors, Leib's book, particularly in Chapters 2, 5, and 6, is a fine resource. This very quality, however, might make it forbidding to a reader relatively unacquainted with deliberative democratic theory; although he writes engagingly, Leib too often allows relatively small disagreements with other writers to structure his chapters (as in Chapter 6, in which five successive sections, from pages 93 to 103, are each devoted to explicating his relatively minor disagreements with five different theorists). What is more, he is so eager to introduce his proposal that he skimps a bit on making a case for its necessity. To say, as Leib does, that our political system suffers from “legitimacy deficits” (pp. 4, 34) is not terribly controversial. But how one ought to judge the scale or depth of this ill and whether his ambitious proposal is especially well suited to cure it are central questions he leaves unaddressed.

While Ackerman, Fishkin, and Leib think too few deliberative democrats have directed their energies toward full-fledged proposals for institutional reform, Richardson, in Democratic Autonomy, locates the shortcomings of deliberative democratic theory in its advocates' failure to explain how deliberation yields the goods ascribed to it (p. 74). If public deliberation can indeed be “open-ended, preference- and end-changing,” Richardson argues, we must show how this can be so. This would mean giving an account of deliberation as a noninstrumental form of reasoning—reasoning that “can extend to the ends of policy and not just concern the selection of means” (p. 74). Constructing such an account does not entail a project of institutional design; rather, it requires only that one make explicit and defend “a mode of reasoning that our best public servants actually use” (p. 76). He offers both an extended critique of understanding public deliberation instrumentally (including in cost–benefit terms, pp. 119–29) and presents an exposition of noninstrumental public reasoning in the six chapters that make up Part II. On its own, this part of the book makes a major contribution to deliberative democratic theory.

Spelling out what it is about public deliberation that enables it to yield the goods we prize, however, is only one of several large tasks Richardson sets for himself. He also sets out to examine whether and how the administrative power that contemporary representative governments grant bureaucracies can be squared with the ideal of popular sovereignty. He makes a compelling case for the importance of this issue, one that rests in part on showing how infrequently contemporary democratic theorists have addressed it (pp. 8–16). But especially if one takes this criticism to heart, one is likely to feel a bit disappointed that the body of the book includes relatively few discussions of the workings of administrative power and how they might be made more compatible with popular self-rule. Chapter 16, “Democratic Rulemaking,”offers the most sustained discussion of this issue; here, Richardson argues both for making administrative rule making more open to popular participation (pp. 219–22) and for the ways in which administrative expertise can enhance rather than frustrate popular rule (pp. 224–30). But this chapter, even taken together with the discussions of bureaucratic domination and the importance of allowing administrative deliberation to redefine preferences and ends (pp. 28–36, 107–12), does not fully satisfy one's heightened expectations that reconciling bureaucratic power and popular sovereignty will figure centrally in the book.

To return to the question I posed above: Why, then, do these authors embark on such different projects, given that all say they are committed to the ideals of deliberative democracy? Although I cannot fully show this here, I do not think that Ackerman's, Fishkin's, and Leib's reasons for focusing on institutional redesign, as opposed to Richardson's for reimagining the ideals that govern existing institutions, can be traced back to some fundamental disagreement about what the ideals of deliberative democracy are. Rather, the disagreement centers on whether each thinks those ideals are themselves a fruitful topic for inquiry. For Ackerman, Fishkin, and Leib, little about the ideals of deliberative democracy needs to be spelled out or justified—not only are these our ideals already, but many of us also have a sense of the parts of our political system to which their more stringent application would be most salutary. The task of the theorist, then, is to put a complete institutional skin on already solid, intuited bones. Richardson, by contrast, focuses on unpacking the concept of public deliberation and the ideals it includes to show that how we understand them will affect the expectations to which we hold institutions, public officials, and citizens. On this approach, the task of the deliberative democrat is to refashion older, often conflicting ideals while working in a new theoretical medium—a task logically prior to any project of institutional redesign. The contrast between these approaches illustrates how big a tent deliberative democratic theory has become.