This essay reflects on the development of the field of deliberative democracy by discussing twelve key findings that capture a number of resolved issues in normative theory, conceptual clarification, and associated empirical results. We argue that these findings deserve to be more widely recognized and viewed as a foundation for future practice and research. We draw on our own research and that of others in the field.

Citizens who support populist leaders are often portrayed in negative terms. They are disparaged for their prejudice and naiveté, some even earning the label “basket of deplorables” from Hillary Clinton. Rodrigo Duterte's supporters were not exempted from such criticism. In the 2016 Philippine presidential race, they were pejoratively labelled Dutertards, which pathologised their fervent and unrelenting support for the controversial candidate. This article interrogates such depictions by examining the logics that underpin Duterte's strong public support. I argue that part of Duterte's appeal hinges on “penal populism,” built on two political logics that reinforce each other: the politics of anxiety and the politics of hope. While the former foregrounds the language of crisis, danger and uncertainty, the latter reclaims democratic agency. The article examines the articulations of these logics among Duterte's supporters based on ethnographic fieldwork in disaster-affected communities where Duterte enjoyed decisive victories.

The systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory has shifted the focus away from seeking to design separate, internally deliberative 'minipublics' and towards a new appreciation of their external, systemic quality. Yet, so far, such accounts have not gone beyond recognising a potential for mini-publics to contribute to deliberative systems. In this paper, we argue that a systemic conceptualisation of mini-publics must recognise their fundamentally ambivalent character: Since mini-publics have the potential both to foster and to undermine systemic deliberation, it is insufficient to celebrate their positive potential alone, and vital to develop frameworks that allow for a critical evaluation of minipublics' systemic role. To this end, we propose a framework based on the systemic qualities of deliberationmaking, legitimacy-seeking and capacity-building, and conclude that key to mini-publics' quality, when judged against these criteria, is not just their own features, but the degree of 'co-development' of all system components.

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