Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism

Deliberative democracy is widely associated with a public sphere that is more inclusive of cultural and religious minority groups than that established by a model of politics as interest aggregation. But it has also been criticized for stipulating unjust terms for this political inclusion, and for being insufficiently responsive to identity group-based claims. Such challenges have prompted much internal debate about the validity and the practical consequences of different norms and mechanisms of deliberative democracy. This chapter argues that models of public deliberation less beholden to Habermasian discourse ethics are able to offer a more promising response to these multicultural challenges.