Deliberative democratic theory, the third and most recent wave of contemporary demo- cratic theory, is centered on inclusive politi- cal judgment. From this perspective, the stan- dard account of representative democracy is suspect for its thin understanding of political will formation. The standard account, with its emphasis on elections, pressure groups, and political parties, suggested that politi- cal judgments are, in effect, aggregated pref- erences. Deliberative theories of democracy were spearheaded by Habermas in the mid- 1980s and rapidly followed by parallel theories focused on judgment: Gutmann & Thompson (1996), Pettit (1999a), the later Rawls (2005), Richardson (2003), and others turned their at- tention to the formation of public opinion and judgment, the institutionalization of deliber- ation, and the relationship between inclusion and deliberation. Problems of representation,
however, were bypassed by several strains of deliberative democratic theory, either because deliberation was conceived within a participa- tory framework (Cohen 1996) or because it was conceived within already established in- stitutions (Rawls 2005).