Consider a sentence that opens as follows: ‘As a result of the committee's deliberations, we have concluded…’. Such a sentence is more likely to be written than spoken. The phrase is less likely to come from the lips of a politician than from those of a public figure, respected and deemed independent. It is still likely – although perhaps a little less so than in the past – that the speaker will be white and will be male. Invoking the word deliberation in this context conjures not only a ‘who?’ but also a ‘how?’ question. We are invited to picture the committee's exchanges as cool and calm, as exchanges that will have involved careful and respectful listening and the weighing and balancing of competing arguments. The implied contrast is with what we might call ‘normal’ political debate. Here participants are clearly positioned in the argument and have an eye to the interests that they represent. They are often seemingly angry and emotional, and they are frequently keen to demolish not only the arguments but also the person of their ‘opponents’.

Theorists of democratic deliberation and deliberative democracy both draw on, and distance themselves from, political debate construed in this way. They envisage a politics where there is well-informed reflection and argumentation on the part of a much wider citizenry, who are both prepared and able to engage. This chapter will examine debates about deliberation and explore some of the practical questions that arise when efforts are made to put deliberation into practice. The concern is not so much with the notion of a deliberative democracy and how its various institutions might dovetail with each other, but rather with the possibility of a practice of democratic deliberation. Chapter One charted the rising interest in and demand for citizen participation in policy making, highlighting some of the practical and political difficulties that Labour governments faced after 1997, when they tried to instigate such practices. How far does current theory illuminate the problems they faced? How does it need to be developed in order to carry out the in-depth empirical studies that, as we shall see, the theoretical analysts now feel are necessary if understanding is to go further?