Do transparency and publicity have the power to civilise politics? In deliberative democratic theory this is a common claim. Publicity, it is argued, forces actors to switch from market-style bargaining to a behaviour more appropriate for the political sphere, where the proper way of reaching agreement is by convincing others using public-spirited arguments. Daniel Naurin has conducted the first comprehensive analysis and test of the theory of publicity's civilising effect. The theory is tested on business lobbyists - presumably the most market-oriented actors in politics - acting on different arenas characterised by varying degrees of transparency and publicity. Innovative scenario-interviews with lobbying consultants in Brussels and in Stockholm are compared and contrasted with a unique sample of previously confidential lobbying letters. The results are both disappointing and encouraging to deliberative democratic theorists. While the positive force of publicity seems to be overrated, it is found that even behind closed doors business lobbyists must adapt to the norms of the forum.

Drwaing on extensive archival sources, Laura Stark reconstructs the daily lives of scientists, lawyers, administrators, and research subjects working - and 'warring' - on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, where they first wrote the rules for the treatment of human subjects.

Deliberative democracy has challenged two widely-accepted nostrums about democratic politics: that people lack the capacities for effective self-government; and that democratic procedures are arbitrary and do not reflect popular will; indeed, that the idea of popular will is itself illusory. On the contrary, deliberative democrats have shown that people are capable of being sophisticated, creative problem solvers, given the right opportunities in the right kinds of democratic institutions. But deliberative empirical research has its own problems. In this book two leading deliberative scholars review decades of that research and reveal three important issues. First, the concept 'deliberation' has been inflated so much as to lose empirical bite; second, deliberation has been equated with entire processes of which it is just one feature; and third, such processes are confused with democracy in a deliberative mode more generally. In other words, studies frequently apply micro-level tools and concepts to make macro- and meso-level judgements, and vice versa. Instead, Bächtiger and Parkinson argue that deliberation must be understood as contingent, performative, and distributed. They argue that deliberation needs to be disentangled from other communicative modes; that appropriate tools need to be deployed at the right level of analysis; and that scholars need to be clear about whether they are making additive judgements or summative ones. They then apply that understanding to set out a new agenda and new empirical tools for deliberative empirical scholarship at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

In the wake of controversial disclosures of classified government information by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, questions about the democratic status of secret uses of political power are rarely far from the headlines. Despite an increase in initiatives aimed at enhancing government transparency – such as freedom of information or sunshine laws – secrecy persists in both the foreign and domestic policy of democratic states, in the form of classified intelligence programs, espionage, secret military operations, diplomatic discretion, closed-door political bargaining, and bureaucratic opacity. This book explores whether the state’s claim to restrict access to information can be justified. Dorota Mokrosinska answers this question with a qualified "yes," arguing that secrecy in exercising executive and legislative power can be seen as a legitimate exercise of democratic authority rather than as its justified suspension. Past and recent examples of state secrecy are used throughout the book, including the Manhattan Project, decision-making leading to the Iraq War, the extraordinary renditions programs and secret detention sites in Eastern Europe, collaboration between international secret services, and the WikiLeaks and Snowden disclosures. State Secrecy and Democracy: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for those in political philosophy, ethics, politics, international relations and security studies, and law.

Deliberative democracy has been one of the main games in contemporary political theory for two decades, growing enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, in philosophy, in various research programmes in the social sciences and law, and in political practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought and discusses their philosophical origins. The Handbook locates deliberation in political systems with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliaments, courts, governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution, documenting the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world and in global governance.

Deliberative democracy is now an influential approach to the study of democracy and political behaviour. Its key proposition is that, in politics, it is not only power that counts, but good discussions and arguments too. This book examines the interplay between the normative and empirical aspects of the deliberative model of democracy. Jürg Steiner presents the main normative controversies in the literature on deliberation, including self-interest, civility and truthfulness. He then summarizes the empirical literature on deliberation and proposes methods by which the level of deliberation can be measured rather than just assumed. Steiner's empirical research is based in the work of various research groups, including experiments with ordinary citizens in the deeply divided societies of Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Belgium, as well as Finland and the European Union. Steiner draws normative implications from a combination of both normative controversies and empirical findings.

This Handbook concentrates on democracy beyond the traditional governmental structures to explore the full scope of participatory governance. It argues that it is a political task to turn the shift from government to governance into participatory forms, and reflects on the notion of democracy and participatory governance, and how they can relate to each other. The volume offers key examples of how governance can be turned into a participatory form.