Early in their book, Christopher F. Karpowitz and Chad Raphael note that the U.S. Constitution sought “to form a more perfect union” rather than form the most perfect union (p. 21). With their book, Karpowitz and Raphael set as their goal nothing less than creating a more perfect democracy. This more perfect democracy will include deliberative forums—which the authors assume are clearly normatively good, but always fall short of perfection in practice. In improving a wide variety of civic forums the authors hope to increase the voice of the traditionally underrepresented and increase the legitimacy of these forums in the minds of the wider public and policy makers. It is an ambitious undertaking that all democratic theorists and public opinion scholars must consider.

The book is somewhat unusual because it is, in many ways, a piece of normative theory which relies on empirics to help explain how the theory works in practice. The empirics are not tests of hypotheses, and serve primarily to categorize, evaluate, and understand the decisions of previous forums. This mix of normative theory and empirics continues the efforts of Fishkin and colleagues to move beyond “thought experiments” (James S. Fishkin and Robert Luskin, “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative polling and Public Opinion,” Acta Politica 2005, p. 294), but with a more serious consideration of deliberative democracy's flaws and limitations.

The authors define a deliberative forum as “[any] search for agreement among political equals engaged in public reasoning” (p. 215). Key to their understanding of why deliberation improves democracy is that the discussion takes place among “political equals.” In particular, the book is very concerned with giving voice to the “disempowered.” The disempowered are people whose views are often left out of opinion surveys, in part, because they simply say “do not know” when asked a question (see e.g., Scott L. Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics, 2003). They will also often be left out of free flowing discussion. For example, as Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg point out (The Silent Sex, 2014), women are less likely to speak unless the number of women in a room reaches a critical mass.

So important is the issue of political equality that the authors devote the entire middle of the book to setting guidelines for improving equality in deliberative forums. In doing so the authors stress the importance of deliberation through “enclaves of the disempowered” where politically underrepresented individuals deliberate separately. Importantly, the authors stress that this does not mean grouping people by their preferences, but rather grouping them by their political, situational, or deliberative status within society. Grouping based on status encourages discussion of all types of people while, hopefully, avoiding the polarization that would come with preference-based grouping.

The authors provide good evidence that enclaves of the disempowered will improve participants’ understanding of their own opinions and give them greater opportunities to participate effectively in the democratic process. The authors use a case study to convincingly demonstrate that enclaves will help policy makers understand the opinions of the disempowered, but they fail to explain how those opinions should be integrated into larger public opinion. The authors mention several ways this could happen, but do not do so with the rigor they demonstrate in the rest of the book. I think they would argue that the way we do things typically ignores the disempowered. Hence, any effort to give them greater influence in the democratic process is worthwhile.

The second major area in which they try to evaluate and improve civic forums is in the area of publicity—that is, helping the public and policy makers to understand what occurred at the forum and to believe it is a legitimate expression of public opinion. Unlike elections or juries, forums are a new form of citizen participation and as such, people might view them with suspicion. The authors argue transparency regarding the forum’s sponsors, goals, participants, procedures, and the like will help improve their perceived legitimacy. On this point, they are convincing that a lack of transparency would harm a forum’s perceived legitimacy. It is less clear whether these forums will ever have the legitimacy of longer standing institutions even with increased transparency.

In reading, I was often reminded of the Supreme Court which, in a sense, is an elite deliberative forum with very little transparency. Views of the Court legitimacy seem highly tied to the direction of its decision and the size of the majority (see e.g. James R. Zink, James F. Spriggs II, and John T. Scott, “Courting the Public: The influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions,” The Journal of Politics 71 [July 2009]: 909–925). I imagine a forum’s legitimacy would be evaluated in similar ways. Those who do not like the conclusions, will not think it is legitimate unless it is clear that their view is a small minority. The authors do not test this possibility.

Instead, the authors devote their empirical analyses to showing convincingly how past forums have failed to live up to standards of transparency. Most of the forums examined failed to give any indication of whether the forum proceeded as planned or whether the participants learned anything. More importantly all deliberative forums fall short in explaining their conclusions. They fail to discuss opposing views and explain how the conclusions are shaped by the participants’ values.

A must read subsection of the book is the four pages at the end of Chapter 5 on the thorny issue of interpreting a forum’s conclusions. This is a prime example of what this book does well. It is a carefully considered discussion of the complexities of evaluating any expression of public opinion. For example, imagine a large majority favors a policy prior to deliberation and a smaller majority favors the same policy after deliberation. How should one interpret this result? The authors note that summarizing public opinion is different from understanding the reasons behind public opinion; and the reasons are everything.

They conclude with practical recommendations for running a forum: The book stops just short of a step-by-step plan for how to run a deliberative forum. Rather, it provides a guide that needs to be crafted to the particular context—just like a one-size-fits-all cap needs to be adjusted to fit each individual wearer. For example, the authors believe giving voice to the disempowered is an important aspect of deliberative democracy, but who is “disempowered?” They note the disempowered will typically be those lower on the socioeconomic ladder, but an educated wealthy woman might also be disempowered depending on the context. Also, they are discussing deliberative forums using a broad definition that will encapsulate many civic gatherings; hence, the recommendations they make for running a forum are similarly broad and need to be crafted to fit particular circumstances.

This will become the bible for evaluating the success of a deliberative forum and it will be an important guide for designing them. The authors have spent time considering different perspectives and have joined theoretical ideals with empirical realities. Skeptics of deliberative forums (and I am one) will remain skeptical—the authors really never set out to convince skeptics. Still, even skeptics must agree that the authors’ suggestions will lead to more perfect forums and, perhaps, a more perfect democracy.