Deliberation and democracy

Deliberation is the process of gathering and assessing reasons that ground the preference for some course of action over others. In its political specification, the process is aimed at drafting and issuing collectively binding authoritative decisions. After its initial conceptualization in classical Greece, in the republican Rome, and the fixation of its canons in the Middle Ages, the role of deliberation as a politico-theoretical tool has progressively lost its centrality due to the growing interest modern scholars have developed in democratic representation within large-scale societies. It was not until the 1980s that political theorists restarted discussing the virtues of deliberation in democracy. The idea of democratic deliberation nowadays plays a crucial role in the definition of political legitimacy.