Democratic Decision-Making: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives contains eight essays by political scientists addressing various aspects of the democratic decision-making process. The book is divided into four parts: democratic statesmanship, the extent to which limitations of the democratic principle of majority rule are desirable, the contemporary doctrine of “deliberative democracy,” and informal modes of democratic decision-making. Under these four headings, the contributors discuss a wide variety of issues, including the practice of “political opportunism” by such statesmen as Hamilton and Madison; the historical development of legal restraints on democracy in America ranging from judicial review (during the colonial period) to the filibuster; the operation of classical Athenian democracy, the defects of which may have been exaggerated by the American Founders; the significance of the reflections of Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt for the development of the American party system; the relation of deliberative-democracy theory to the thought of Rousseau; and the means by which cooperative land-use agreements have been arrived at in California, eliciting the voluntary consent of the affected parties instead of relying on judicial or bureaucratic dictates. The book is well-suited for use in courses on American political thought, democratic theory, American political development, and related subjects.

Table of Contents:
Editor’s Introduction Part One: Democratic Statesmanship Chapter 1: Democratic Leadership William Galston Chapter 2: The Political Morality of Constitutional Opportunism Peter McNamara Part Two: How Far Does Democracy Require Limits? Chapter 3: American Innovations in Democratic Decision-Making Leslie Friedman Goldstein Chapter 4: In Defense of Democracy: Anti-Democratic Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation from Ancient Athens to the American Founding Dustin A. Gish Part Three: “Deliberative” Democracy? Chapter 5: “Deliberative Democracy”: The Transformation of a Political Concept David Lewis Schaefer Chapter 6: Democracy by Constraint: The Ideal of Deliberative Democracy in the Light of Rousseau Daniel Cullen Part Four: Informal Modes of Democratic Decision-Making Chapter 7: “This Is an Awful Serious Proposition”: George Washington Plunkitt in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Party Nationalization Daniel Klinghard Chapter 8: Habitat Conservation Plans: Redesigning Development Through Collaborative Negotiations Nancy Jimeno About the Contributors Index