Portal:Politics/Selected article/2008, week 25

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Deliberative democracy, also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term used by some political theorists, to refer to any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry.

The term "deliberative democracy" was originally coined by Joseph M. Bessette, in "Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government," in 1980, and he subsequently elaborated and defended the notion in "The Mild Voice of Reason" (1994). Others contributing to the notion of deliberative democracy include Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, John Rawls, Amy Gutmann, James Fishkin, Dennis Thompson, and Seyla Benhabib.