The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-first Century

The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is a terrific resource for democratic practitioners and theorists alike. It combines rich case material from many cities and types of institutional settings with careful reflection on core principles. It generates hope for a renewed democracy, tempered with critical scholarship and political realism. Most important, this handbook opens a spacious window on the innovativeness of citizens in the U.S. (and around the world) and shows how the varied practices of deliberative democracy are part of a larger civic renewal movement.

John Gastil is associate professor of communication at the University of Washington. He has collaborated with members of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), the National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), AmericaSpeaks, and the Kettering Foundation’s National Issues Forums. He is the author of Democracy in Small Groups and By Popular Demand.

Peter Levine is deputy director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) and a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, both housed in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs. He is a cofounder of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and author of The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy.