Choice Review

Recently, a variety of commentators have expressed worry about the health of existing representative democracies. Urbinati's Democracy Disfigured offers a unique version of this concern. Urbinati (Columbia Univ.) defends a form of proceduralism, in which representative democracy operates as a diarchy between opinion and decision: citizens participate in decisions by voting for representatives, but they also influence representatives' decisions through communicative processes of opinion formation. In Urbinati's rendering, the normative value of this diarchy is that it guarantees equal political freedoms and that it makes decisions revisable. Using this conception, Urbinati diagnoses three main "disfigurations" occurring in representative government in the present: epistemic efforts to replace political opinion with truth, populism, and plebiscitary democracy. Democracy Disfigured is well researched, though occasionally awkwardly written. It also gives the empirical diagnosis of the disfigurations short shrift; her critiques of epistemic, populist, and plebiscitary democracy all focus on their theoretical expressions, and there is not enough effort to show how they operate in existing representative democracies. Nevertheless, Urbinati's argument is conceptually innovative and makes a valuable contribution to current debates in democratic theory. --Glenn D. Mackin, Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester