In a recent theoretical tome examining the relationship between law and democracy, Jürgen Habermas (1998) suggests that it is possible to evaluate the quality of a democracy on the basis of the extent to which formal institutions of deliberation and decision making (such as the parliament and ministries) are open to input from informal public spheres. For Habermas (1998: 359), the political public sphere is an important discursive component of civil society that acts as a “sounding board for problems that must be processed by the political System because they cannot be solved elsewhere.” While Nancy Fraser (1992: 110) has described the public sphere as “a theater… in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk,” Habermas (1998: 359) reminds us that, as a discursive realm, the public sphere should not just amplify the pressure of problems in society, but must also “convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible Solutions and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes” (italics in the original; underlining added). In Habermas's view (1998: 373), the concepts of the “political public sphere” and “civil society” are not mere normative postulates; they have empirical relevance.