I would like to thank Fabio Wolkenstein for his insightful and sympathetic review. I am also thankful for his questions, because they give me the opportunity to clarify some important issues. The first question concerns the role of judicial review within my participatory conception of deliberative democracy. The structure of the book, culminating as it does with a discussion of judicial review may, against my own intentions, be misleading. I definitively do not recommend that we entrust constitutional courts alone with doing the “heavy lifting” of ensuring that principled reasons for laws and policies are advanced in the public sphere. I agree with Wolkenstein that other sites and political actors—not only political parties and social movements but, of course, also parliaments, civil society organizations, the media, and the citizenry as a whole—play an essential role in ensuring that questions about fundamental rights are put on the political agenda and made sufficiently salient to generate and maintain political debate in the public sphere. The point of showing the democratic significance of the institution of judicial review is not to elevate legal contestation to a special status in the exercise of self-government. This is not because I think that some other exercise of political rights (e.g., voting) is more special. Rather, it is because no single exercise of political rights can have genuine democratic significance in the absence of all the others. In the absence of a mobilized civil society and a receptive public sphere, legal contestation would hardly have any democratic effect at all. Conversely, voting in the absence of effective opportunities for political and legal contestation would hardly count as an exercise in self-government for persistent minorities. These are just two examples. However, the idea of mutual reinforcement holds for all opportunities, venues, and sites of political participation.

This leads me to Wolkenstein’s second concern, namely, the lack of explicit attention to more “conventional” democratic agents like movements and parties. In the book I endorse Habermas’s feedback loop model of political participation. In this model political parties play a unique mediating role between the citizenry and the state. Along with social movements, nongovernmental organizations, the media, and other political actors, parties also contribute to the generation of considered public opinion—which is the ultimate source of legitimacy of political decisions. Following this model, my participatory conception of deliberative democracy requires these actors and forums to aim at generating considered public opinion, rather than influencing the political system through shortcuts that bypass citizens’ deliberation in the public sphere. It is true that I do not analyze political parties in the book. But this is not because I do not consider them essential contributors to democratic self-government. It is because properly addressing the problems they currently face goes beyond the scope of the book. In my view, there is a mismatch between the national level at which political parties operate and the transnational and global nature of the problems that need to be addressed to protect the fundamental rights and interests of citizens. Whereas a few transnational courts already exist (e.g., regional human rights courts), we do not yet have transnational political parties (e.g., European political parties) that could articulate global political programs whose implementation would effectively tackle the most urgent problems that citizens face worldwide: climate change, the current pandemic, the economic downturn, and so on. Addressing the current crisis within political parties is crucial, but it would require nothing less than expanding my participatory conception of deliberative democracy into a global participatory democracy.