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I. THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL REFORMULATEDD ELIBERATIVE democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power. Our assessment differs in two ways from the traditional one. First, we contend that self-interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision. Indeed, some forms of negotiation involving self-interest meet all of our criteria for ideal deliberation, in particular the criterion that in their ideal form deliberative methods eschew coercive power. We thus include such constrained self-interest and these forms of negotiation in our reformulation of the deliberative ideal, that is, the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. Second, we argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative. These nondeliberative mechanisms, such as aggregation through voting as well as fair bargaining and negotiation among cooperative antagonists, involve coercive power in their mechanisms of decision. Yet they can and must be justified deliberatively. Our ideal polity is diverse and plural. Its members both strive for

P roposed as a reformist and sometimes even as a radical political ideal, deliberative democracy begins with the critique of the standard practices of liberal democracy. Although the idea can be traced to Dewey and Arendt and then further back to Rousseau and even Aristotle, in its recent incarnation the term stems from Joseph Bessette, who explicitly coined it to oppose the elitist or`a ristocratic'' interpretation of the American Constitution. 1 These legitimate heirs to the tradition of``radical'' democracy have always tempered their vision of popular and inclusive participation with an emphasis on public discussion, reasoning and judgment. It is now also tempered by concerns for feasibility. In developments over the last decade, proponents of deliberative democracy have moved further away from participatory conceptions of citizenship and the common good and towards the very institutions they originally rejected as impossible locations for public reasoning. This new, practical emphasis on feasibility is perhaps the most striking feature of the recent boom in theories of deliberative democracy that I will survey here. Far from being merely à`r ealistic'' accommodation to existing arrangements, I show that this concern with feasibility leads to a richer normative theory and to a fuller conception of the problems and prospects for deliberation and democracy in the contemporary world.In the early formulations of the deliberative ideal in the 1980s, deliberation was always opposed to aggregation and to the strategic behavior encouraged by voting and bargaining. 2 Moreover, the superiority of deliberative democracy over competitive pluralism was established precisely by developing the distinctive rationality of``the forum'' rather than``the market.'' Rather than simple compromise or bargaining equilibrium, the goal of deliberation was consensus, the agreement of all those affected by a decision. While some worried about committing deliberative democracy to such a dichotomous characterization of democratic politics that so strongly split real and ideal conditions of legitimacy,

New technologies are often greeted with political optimism. The Internet was thought to herald new possibilities for political participation, if not direct democracy, even in large and complex societies, as 'electronic democracy' might replace the mass media democracy of sound-bite television. The high hopes for electronic democracy seem to have faded, however, as critics such as Sunstein (2001) and Shapiro (1999) have come to argue that central features of the Internet and computer-mediated communication generally undermine the sort of public sphere and political interaction that is required for genuine democratic deliberation. Whatever the empirical merits of such criticisms, they do point to an, as yet, unclarified problem in discussions of 'electronic democracy': we still lack a clear understanding of how the Internet and other forms of electronic communication might contribute to a new kind of public sphere and thus to a new form of democracy. Certainly, globalization and other features of contemporary societies make it at least possible to consider whether democracy is undergoing another great transformation, of the order of the invention of representative democracy and its institutions of voting and parliamentary assemblies in early modern European cities.Both the optimistic and pessimistic positions in the debate suffer from clear conceptual problems. Optimists take for granted that the mode of communication or technological mediation itself is constitutive of new possibilities. As examples such as the Chinese discovery of gunpowder show, however, technology is embedded in social contexts that may make its various potentials unrealizable. Pessimists make the opposite error of holding institutions fixed, here the institutions of the sovereign nation state. If we ask the question of whether or not electronic communication contributes to deliberation in representative institutions and to national public spheres, the answer is that more than likely it contributes little or even undermines them. Indeed, there has been much discussion concerning whether or not the Internet undermines sovereignty, much in the way that states previously considered the telegraph's capacity to cross borders as a direct threat to its sovereignty (see Held, 1995; Poster, 2001 and Indiana Journal of

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