Review Essay: Deliberating Rhetoric

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Notes

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Press Release,” January 7, 2008, http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/release/view/?id=5065/.

2. Karl Rove, “Why Hillary Won,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2008.

3. Peter Applebome, “Is eloquence overrated?” New York Times, January 13, 2008.

4. For a good review of and challenge to these arguments, see Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins, and Michael X. Delli Carpini, A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

5. On leadership, see Joseph S. Nye Jr., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, eds., Why People Don't Trust Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On media, see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); and Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamison, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

6. Stephen Macedo et al., Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 168–69.

7. John Edwards, “One Democracy Initiative: Returning Washington to Regular People,” John Edwards for President, http://www.johnedwards.com/issues/govt-reform/.

8. James Fishkin and Cynthia Farrar, “Deliberative Polling: From Experiment to Community Resource,” in The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, ed. John Gastil and Peter Levine (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 71.

9. For a review of this argument as it derives from the work of Habermas, see Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

10. Here I refer to the abundance of deliberative democracy texts that have appeared in the past decade, which are far too many to name here. Two recent examples of representative edited scholarship are Gastil and Levine, Deliberative Democracy Handbook; and James Fishkin and Peter Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003). In practice, organizations advocating deliberation include AmericaSpeaks, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, and the Deliberating in a Democracy initiative funded by the US Department of Education.

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Notes on contributors

Jay P. Childers

Jay P. Childers is Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Kansas