Today's Democratic Theory Offers Sketches Of Tomorrow's democratic polity. How innovative, and how compelling, are the visions it offers us? This article explores possible democratic futures by scanning a selection of today's key democratic innovations – cosmopolitan, deliberative, ‘politics of presence’, ecological, associative and party-based direct models – in the light of a set of six central issues useful for examining the core aspects of democratic theories. It concludes by suggesting a way forward in which insights from diverse innovations might helpfully be accommodated within an overarching framework. Overall, it represents a deliberate attempt at a bird's eye view of the subject; the aim is to be suggestive rather than definitive. The scope of the analysis is broad but quite strictly qualified in the following ways: the six innovative ideas scrutinized arise from, and largely address, countries of the rich North rather than the developing South; they do not exhaust the range of current innovations in democratic theory; and they are based largely on English-language sources.