IN the last decade deliberative democracy has developed rapidly from a “theoretical statement” into a “working theory.”1 Scholars and practitioners have launched numerous initiatives designed to put deliberative democracy into practice, ranging from deliberative polling to citizen summits.2 Some even advocate deliberation as a new “revolutionary now.”3 Deliberative democracy has also experienced the beginning of an empirical turn, making significant gains as an empirical (or positive) political science. This includes a small, but growing body of literature tackling the connection between (...) the normative standards of deliberation, how well they are met, and the empirical consequences of meeting them.4 This trend has, for instance, included the use of methods and frameworks borrowed from other fields, such as political and social psychology. Such studies suggest that cases approaching ideal deliberation are rare, but that group interaction sometimes works surprisingly well according to such ideals.5. (shrink)

This article investigates the prospects of deliberative democracy through the analysis of small-scale deliberative events, or mini-publics, using empirical methods to understand the process of preference transformation. Evidence from two case studies suggests that deliberation corrects preexisting distortions of public will caused by either active manipulation or passive overemphasis on symbolically potent issues. Deliberation corrected these distortions by reconnecting participants’ expressed preferences to their underlying “will” as well as shaping a shared understanding of the issue.The article concludes by using these (...) insights to suggest ways that mini-public deliberation might be articulated to the broader public sphere so that the benefits might be scaled up. That mini-public deliberation does not so much change individual subjectivity as reconnect it to the expression of will suggests that scaling up the transformative effects should be possible so long as this involves communicating in the form of reasons rather than preferred outcome alone. (shrink)

The authors of the ELSIcon special issue have advanced the conversation on ethics and genetics. Nevertheless, we have some concerns. Here, we respond specifically to Conley et al. (2023). We choose...