This chapter develops a framework for analyzing public debates in advanced industrial democracies. Although public deliberation is an essential feature of these states, there are certain periods when a society appears to be involved in a “national discussion” – periods when politicians, the media, intellectuals, and civic activists intensely debate a particular set of issues. Some examples in the United States include the health care debate of the early 1990s, the debate about Iraq in 2002, and, potentially, the unfolding debate over gay marriage. To go back further, one might include battles over civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Vietnam War as episodes of public debates over foundational issues in American politics. Public debates about such foundational or easy issues are marked by clashes between basic political orientations and values.

Do such public debates matter for political outcomes? Many political scientists argue that they do not. Politics, after all, is all about power and interest; those who possess enough of each determine policy, regardless of what others have to say. Several central paradigms in political science also assume that the interests of political actors are fixed (or exogenous) and do not change markedly through social interaction. In such accounts, public debates and political discourse have, at best, only a marginal influence on political outcomes.

This book challenges this view. As scholars working in the deliberative democracy paradigm have suggested, deliberation produces changes that are not reducible to power or interest.