The condition of democracies around the world is a concern for many. Citizens, journalists, and academics lament their poor health, pointing to a decline of trust, lessening participation, deteriorating institutions, and increasing polarization. In Mending Democracy, Carolyn Hendricks, Selen Ercan, and John Boswell join the ranks of normative political theorists seeking to address this dysfunction. The result is an illuminating and hopeful book that mines theory and practice to tell us what is broken in modern democracies, where to look for solutions, and what these might be. Simultaneously, it also makes an intervention into discussions about the current course of deliberative democratic theory.

The democratic defect the authors identify is a lack of connectivity between the institutions and practices of political participation. Mending Democracy focuses on three communicative disconnects, summarized in Chapter 1: the representative disconnect between citizens and their elected representatives, the public disconnect between citizens within an increasingly fragmented public sphere, and the governance disconnect between citizens and the policy-making process. These are problematic, for they produce subtle forms of exclusion; restrict the movement of ideas, arguments, and opinion between the public and decision makers; and make achieving legitimacy at a large-scale difficult.

In Chapter 2, the authors ground their work within deliberative systems theory, a branch of deliberative democratic theory that holds that norms of deliberation can be “distributed across a diversity of communicative settings within a broad ‘deliberative system’” (p. 21). However, they incisively criticize its several types for relying on communicative miracles, i.e. assuming that the disconnects do not occur, thereby deemphasizing key concepts such as inclusion and agency and generating the wrong remedies for today’s democratic ailments. Specifically, the authors fault deliberative theorists and reformers for relying upon ill-fitting theory-driven and top-down institutional or procedural design efforts such as mini-publics. Rather, attention should be shifted to the small incremental steps local actors already take to mend connections in their democratic environments. The authors thus put forward a methodological recommendation, urging an embrace of what they call “abductive inquiry,” which involves the “specific observations of ‘real-life’ events, trends, or social processes” from which researchers “progress analytically to broader abstractions and theories that help to understand observed cases” (p. 32).

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 form the heart of the book, demonstrating abduction and the authors’ insistence that the solutions to connectivity deficits lay in existing homegrown repair work. Chapter 3 looks at how disaffected constituents in the Division of Indi in Victoria, Australia overcame their representative disconnect, manifested by a neglectful representative and an overall sense of democratic ennui, through small-scale meetings at kitchen tables and larger yet personal community organizing. This led to the election of a new independent representative in 2013 and a revitalized populace. Chapter 4 focuses on the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG). This group of “grannies” and their supporters knit in public, distribute leaflets, and organize petitions to protest coal seam mining in Australia. By leveraging the nanny stereotype to generate conversation among diverse groups and using colorful art and humor to sustain widespread community attention, KNAG epitomizes an effective means of repairing the fractured public sphere that characterizes public disconnects. Chapter 5 explores four agencies involved in British health policy that tried to overcome the governance disconnect. Mending Democracy shows how administrators within these agencies, whose missions range from ensuring food standard compliance to setting guidelines for health spending prioritization, worked with civil society actors to enable greater public input in and examination of the traditionally hidden world of policy making.

Chapter 6 frames the case studies as instances of connective practices—individual and collective local efforts to fix tears in the political fabric—and highlights five characteristics common to successful democratic mending. Fruitful connective practices are relational, with actors drawing upon their existing social relationships, and creative, helping to foster solidarity and drive nontraditional political actors into repair efforts. They are also adaptive, working within the social and political context and formal institutions to strengthen existing connections and organically establish new ones, as well as constituted, meaning that both sides of a disconnect must be willing and able to work together. Finally, connective practices are not one-off but iterative efforts, involving constant activity and experimentation. Chapter 7 continues the discussion in Chapter 2 of the weaknesses in contemporary deliberative systems theory. The authors argue that attention to connective practices and the more mundane world of everyday politics can ease reliance on communicative miracles. They also advocate for a “connective turn” in deliberative theory. This could “potentially move the field from mapping and measuring components of deliberative systems to understanding, facilitating, and monitoring connections” (p. 142). Chapter 8 ends the book by helpfully summarizing its key insights.

This summary does not do justice to this thought-provoking book. It has much to offer many different readers, from those interested in beating back democracy’s present dysfunction, to normative theorists who want a skillful example of how to blend theory with qualitative research, to deliberative democrats who want a new and creative take on their field. At the same time, and precisely because the argument is generative and provocative, I wish to raise several constructively critical observations and questions.

First, in a book at least partially dedicated to pushing deliberative democratic theory in a new direction the authors might unintentionally have provided an argument against the theoretical program’s usefulness when it comes to addressing their central concern. Put simply, the connectivity problems the authors focus on are comprehensible without knowledge of deliberative systems theory—as they demonstrate in Chapter 1. The source of solutions are the actions of everyday citizens trying to work through the problems they face, not experts trained in political theory (p. 144). And the solutions these local actors come up with—talk with your neighbors, infuse activism with creativity and playfulness, seek the opinions of those to be served by technocratic agencies, and so forth— do not clearly benefit from being translated into the language of deliberative democracy. This suggests the question: What value does a deliberative democratic approach provide in understanding and solving communicative issues in today’s democracies? Further, what reason is there to hold onto the framework of deliberation in this context, once doing so requires stretching its core concepts to accommodate both the systemic and now the connective turn?

Second, in arguing for abduction and a case-based political theory, the authors invite questions about their cases and findings. For instance, how generalizable are the characteristics of successful connective practices that the authors put forward in Chapter 6? Australia and the United Kingdom have much in common, and the book’s argument would have been stronger if it included a discussion about what we should expect to find in different democratic contexts. One might suspect, for example, that connective practices of the sort described by Mending Democracy require a certain degree of democratic institutional stability, trust, and development to have their desired effects. This, of course, is the sign of a good book, as it suggests clear paths forward for future research.

Third, Mending Democracy sometimes seems to fall prey to Jon Elster’s criticism of participatory democracy for being more concerned with by-products rather than ends (“The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland, eds., Foundations of Social Choice Theory, 1986). By this I mean that the actual goals of the actors chronicled in the book are sometimes oddly deemphasized. Indi constituents likely wanted a representative and a government more attune to their desires. KNAG wants to end coal seam development. And British citizens want a better health care system that is easier to use. What is often missing from the book is a discussion of whether what makes a political practice successful for connectivity purposes also makes it good for achieving the desired ends of the actors, and whether it is fair or sensible to pursue connectivity if and when such an overlap is absent.

Fourth and finally, I wonder if the frame of mending and repair slightly warps the meaning or implications of the authors’ findings. The practices covered in the book don’t have to be understood as fixing something damaged. Grannies prompting local reflection on complex environmental issues by knitting in public, as well as the other connective practices chronicled in the book, can instead be seen as just what a healthy democracy needs to prosper. Importantly, this seems to be the authors’ point. The thrust of their argument is that large-scale top-down interventions, things that do look like emergency efforts to repair something broken, are insufficient because they overlook the basic communicative needs of a democracy that shift and change depending upon context. In this sense, rather than give examples and detail a theory of democratic mending or repair, I think the authors paint a picture of something different and maybe more important—perhaps we might call it democratic nurturing. This emphasizes that democracy is not merely an appliance that might break and need a visit from a repair person, or a piece of ripped clothing needing some stitching but also or rather a living thing that requires constant care and attention to ensure that it prospers. What this routine care looks like, often overlooked in a literature that focuses on institutional design and abstract theories that only meet practice during efforts of emergency resuscitation, comes into focus in this important book.