This book is about changes that need to be made to improve modern democracy and specifically democratic decision-making. It sets out to answer the following questions: Why do we need democratic decision-making? What type of democratic decision-making do we need? What institutions do we need to make this type of decision-making feasible? Such a discussion is essential because it is thought that the structures of liberal democracy are facing a crisis of legitimacy (Habermas 1975; Hirst 1996; Fung and Wright 2001; Fung 2003a; Newman et al. 2004), and that this is reflected in the fact that citizens of liberal democracies are becoming increasingly disillusioned, dissatisfied and disenfranchised by the dominant political institutions and decision-making processes in these polities (Galbraith 1993; Stoker 2006). The general cure for these symptoms is thought to be a deepening of democracy. It is in this context – of a perceived crisis for liberal democracy and the reciprocal need for a deepening of democracy – that deliberative democracy has, over the last twenty years, become an increasingly dominant strand of democratic theory and practice, with experiments in deliberatively democratic public administration increasing throughout the UK, Europe, the USA, Australia, South East Asia and South America. Similarly, there has been an increasing focus on engaging civil society as a further solution to the problems of democracy, often termed ‘neo-tocquevillianism’ or the ‘second wave of civil society’, of which associational democracy is a dominant strand and one that seeks to transfer many functions of governance traditionally fulfilled by the state to democratic, and secondary, associations.