Abstract
Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of deliberation for democratic politics generally and legislative politics specifically. Yet there are a number of conceptual and empirical problems with the way deliberative decision making processes have been characterized. In this paper the author addresses a number of these issues, drawing on a case study of the Rhode Island state legislature's deliberation about automobile insurance reform. In particular, he argues that inadequate attention has been paid to the quality of deliberation, and provide a method of assessing deliberation quality. He also contends that a favorable set of circumstances may be required to obtain the beneficial consequences often claimed on behalf of deliberative processes.