ABSTRACT
This essential chapter critically examines “Doing Democracy” in all phases of policy analysis and suggests democracy is the key ethical issue in policy analysis. It explores arguments that citizens are too apathetic/uneducated to participate meaningfully or helpfully, but provides specific examples showing that democracy can work and can be structured to overcome cynicism, apathy, and ignorance. A new fifth step, civic engagement, is introduced and discussed thoroughly. We also examine voting rules, grounding, and monologic communication. Our discussion of the ambiguous nature of democracy and the difficult questions its practice raises is rooted in public policy analysis literature, while using postpositivism, postmodernism, communitarianism, and philosophy to deepen the reader’s understanding. We again offer three practical tools of analysis: facilitating discourse, futuring, and conflict resolution. A mini-case set in Nepal and the Big-Mart case (previously in Chapter 1) tie together not only ideas from Chapter 8, but 1–7 as well.
