Jürg Steiner is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at both the University of Bern and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Deliberative Politics in Action (Cambridge University Press, 2005, with André Bächtiger, Markus Spörndli and Marco R. Steenbergen) and the textbook European Democracies (8th edition 2012, with Markus Crepaz).

• Introduction; 1. Citizen participation in deliberation; 2. Rationality and stories in deliberative justification; 3. Common good and self-interest in deliberative justification; 4. Respect in deliberation; 5. Public openness of deliberation; 6. Force of better argument in deliberation; 7. Truthfulness in deliberation; 8. Deliberation in the media and the Internet; 9. Favorable conditions for deliberation; 10. Favorable consequences of deliberation; 11. The praxis of deliberation; Appendix: newest version of Discourse Quality Index (DQI).

'This book reports on some of the most exciting work in democracy today. Its innovations will have an impact both on the profession and on practice. It is rare to find such a combination of normative sophistication, empirical innovation, and research organization … the work on storytelling is exceptional.' Jane J. Mansbridge, Harvard University