The behavioral sciences are playing an increasingly important role in the design and implementation of public policy worldwide. While there have been several important critiques of the latest policy revolution linking the behavioral sciences and the state in the pursuit of human behavioral change, few scholars have investigated the potential costs of “nudging” for democratic citizenship and the deliberative capacities upon which democratic self-governance relies. A central purpose here is to consider the possible civic consequences of nudging within the pursuit of otherwise desirable social outcomes (like improved public health, energy conservation, or higher rates of financial saving). Through a critical investigation of the governing philosophy of the “nudging state” and drawing on the policy feedback literature, I argue that the recent behavioral turn in public policy risks overlooking or bypassing the personal capacities and institutional conditions necessary for the meaningful exercise of democratic citizenship. Evidence from the empirical assessment of deliberative democracy shows how liberal societies can fruitfully address bounded rationality while facilitating civic virtues like public practical reason without violating liberty or constraining pluralism.

Elusive Togetherness: Church Group's Trying to Bridge America's Divisions. By Paul Lichterman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 331p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 391p. $29.95.

Robert Wuthnow's latest book is a wide-ranging and insightful study into how Americans are responding to dramatic increases in religious and cultural diversity. Wuthnow gives particular attention here to the ways in which Christians are addressing (or ignoring) the growing populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other followers of non-Western religions in America. His aim is not only to understand the current terms by which American Christians are negotiating an increasingly complex and diverse religious setting but also to pointedly ask how pluralistic Americans are willing to be. The answers that are revealed throughout this book, drawing from hundreds of in-depth interviews and a large cross-national survey, offer plenty of room for deep worry as well as guarded optimism. Moving beyond these caged responses, Wuthnow pulls together the ambivalent stands of America's present attitudes toward religious differences and offers suggestive ideas about how Americans might begin to move beyond their currently shallow responses to diversity and embrace a more active, self-conscious form of pluralism, what he calls “reflective pluralism” (p. 289).