This book is a welcome addition to our understanding of the shape of deliberative democracy as it is actually used by people throughout the United States. It provides a comprehensive map of the extent and nature of a broad array of talk about public affairs, which Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini call “discursive participation.” They define this kind of participation to include informal conversations, face-to-face organized forums, and Internet deliberation and talk.

Talking Together asks a number of questions: What is the extent of discursive deliberation? Who is doing discursive participation? What is the nature of this communication? And what are the civic and political effects of deliberation? In addition to a comprehensive overview of discursive participation at the individual level, the book also provides insight on the organizations conducting face-to-face deliberative forums. The study is based on a nationally representative survey of 1,001 people in 2003 plus an oversample of 500 people who participated in face-to-face organized forums, as well as a 1998 survey of 396 organizations involved in administrating face to face forums. Also included is a case study of the Pew Charitable Trusts/America Speaks/Americans Discuss Social Security deliberation conducted in Phoenix in 1998.

This is a landmark study to which students of deliberative democracy will refer for years to come. Its comprehensiveness and straightforward conclusions cut to the heart of some of the most persistent debates in the deliberative literature. In addition, the conclusions are largely positive about discursive participation, suggesting that students of participation in general should pay attention to the phenomenon of democrats talking together.

The authors show us that discursive participation is far more widespread than previously thought. For example, they estimate that 68% of the adult population engaged in informal talk about public affairs in 2002, and 25% participated in an organized face-to-face deliberative forum (p. 37), a figure, they note, that is roughly equal to the percentage of respondents who reported contacting an official (28%).

Another striking finding of the study is that a relatively small amount of all discursive participation takes place via the Internet. According to the authors, Internet talk makes up less than 10%. Four percent of the study's respondents reported taking part in online deliberation (e.g., chat rooms, message boards, etc.), and 24% reported participating in informal online talk about public affairs (p. 37). Although these percentages have likely increased since 2002, the results are a healthy reminder that Internet talk does not overshadow face-to-face communication.

The book focuses on face-to-face deliberative forums in order to examine how well that form of discursive participation measures up to the standards set by democratic theory. The authors' conclusions are mainly supportive of deliberative democracy. They argue that although discursive participation does not mirror all of the qualities of ideal deliberation, it is not the realm of antidemocratic tendencies that some fear. For example, they argue that much of the talk is focused on agreement but at the same time does not suppress disagreement, and that it is conducted in contexts in which tolerance is the norm and collective considerations outweigh self-interest.

Some of these claims may be overstated. For example, the conclusion that people were exercising tolerance is based on self-reports of tolerance. Also, these forums were likely taking place in relatively homogenous groups, given residential segregation (even given the authors' argument that many participants did not know one another), leaving the level of tolerance in the more demanding case of heterogeneous face-to-face deliberative forums an open question.

The authors also argue that the talk in face-to-face forums lives up to another democratic standard: that it is informed. They make this argument based on the fact that large numbers of their respondents who participated in these events reported that they were sent briefing materials ahead of time, and had the opportunity to learn from neutral experts during their forum. However, the study does not directly test knowledge gains, and so it is difficult to tell just how well the availability of information via the forum actually leads to learning.

In general, the evidence that deliberative democracy is alive and well across the country and that people typically have positive experiences with it is hard to deny. Also, the survey of organizations conducting deliberative forums provides yet more evidence of the democratic merits of this talk. The organizers' responses suggest that the forums are grassroots, arising from community needs, and, perhaps most importantly, are premised on the radical idea that, yes, citizens can govern themselves.

One may ask: Who is it that is doing this governing, however? Are there not huge selection effects, leaving out the already politically marginalized, as deliberative naysayers would suggest? The authors argue to the contrary. Yes, the better educated are more likely to participate in discursive participation, and high socioeconomic status (SES) boosts organizational membership, which in turn increases an individual's likelihood of participating in discursive participation. However, SES appears to exert a weaker influence on discursive participation than on other forms of participation. In other words, if anything, discursive participation seems to open up democracy to a broader array of participants, rather than restrict it.

Part of the value of this book is its attempt to analyze the effects of forum participation. Although the data are cross-sectional, the authors use two-stage least squares to examine effects, and they find that participating in organized deliberation leads to further participation among one-third of forum participants. They also observe a positive effect on “political capital,” a large index that includes political efficacy, trust, knowledge, and attention, as well as ideological strength, partisan strength, and political tolerance. Remarkably, they find that forum participation has a stronger effect on this political capital than income, and almost as strong an effect as education.

Taken together, these results present a positive and hopeful map of discursive participation. But how can this be? Did we not learn from John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (Stealth Democracy, 2002) that people simply do not want to be involved in governance, and that they do not want to be involved because they abhor the procedures of democratic government? We will have to wait to find out, because much of the discursive participation examined by Jacobs, Lomax Cook, and Delli Carpini is not directly related to governance. That is, very little of the decision making occurring in these face-to-face forums had binding implications for policy decisions. There is a lot of discursive democracy going on out there, but so far, it has not been widely used as a procedure of governance.

The positive experience with deliberation that the respondents to the Talking Together study report, however, and the sizable portion of the population that has participated in face-to-face forums do pose a challenge to the pessimistic picture presented in Stealth Democracy. It is possible that if these forums do become more frequently connected to policymaking, a larger portion of the population will see them as a viable alternative form of democratic government, which they may find more appealing than politics as usual.