Deliberation Day. By Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288p. $30.00.

Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government. By Ethan J. Leib. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 156p. $27.50.

Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. By Henry S. Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 328p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Compelling theories of politics invite us to see the world differently. But once we see political life in different terms, what will we be moved to do? Redesign our political institutions? Or revise our reasons for supporting those that currently exist? As the authors of the three books reviewed here illustrate, those who have taken up deliberative theories of democracy are moved to engage in profoundly different kinds of projects, marked either by redesign or revision. Bruce Ackerman, James Fishkin, and Ethan Leib believe their commitments to theories of deliberative democracy require them to focus on drafting extensive plans for institutional redesign. By contrast, Henry Richardson, while endorsing institutional reforms, ranging from changing electoral law to opening administrative rule making to greater citizen participation (pp. 200–202, 219–22), devotes the majority of his book to showing how the ideals of his theory of deliberative democracy can make better and more complete sense of political life as it is. The deep contrast between how these authors understand what one ought to do with a commitment to deliberative democracy prompts us to consider whether they are simply committed to different things or are striking out on different paths from substantially similar starting points instead.