Mending Democracy: Democratic Repair in Disconnected Times. By Carolyn M Hendriks, Selen A. Ercan, and John Boswell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 187p. $85.00 cloth.

The condition of democracies around the world is a concern for many. Citizens, journalists, and academics lament their poor health, pointing to a decline of trust, lessening participation, deteriorating institutions, and increasing polarization. In Mending Democracy, Carolyn Hendricks, Selen Ercan, and John Boswell join the ranks of normative political theorists seeking to address this dysfunction. The result is an illuminating and hopeful book that mines theory and practice to tell us what is broken in modern democracies, where to look for solutions, and what these might be. Simultaneously, it also makes an intervention into discussions about the current course of deliberative democratic theory. The democratic defect the authors identify is a lack of connectivity between the institutions and practices of political participation. Mending Democracy focuses on three communicative disconnects, summarized in Chapter 1: the representative disconnect between citizens and their elected representatives, the public disconnect between citizens within an increasingly fragmented public sphere, and the governance disconnect between citizens and the policy-making process. These are problematic, for they produce subtle forms of exclusion; restrict the movement of ideas, arguments, and opinion between the public and decision makers; and make achieving legitimacy at a large-scale difficult. In Chapter 2, the authors ground their work within deliberative systems theory, a branch of deliberative democratic theory that holds that norms of deliberation can be “distributed across a diversity of communicative settings within a broad ‘deliberative system’” (p. 21). However, they incisively criticize its several types for relying on communicative miracles, i.e. assuming that the disconnects do not occur, thereby deemphasizing key concepts such as inclusion and agency and generating the wrong remedies for today’s democratic ailments. Specifically, the authors fault deliberative theorists and reformers for relying upon ill-fitting theory-driven and top-down institutional or procedural design efforts such as mini-publics. Rather, attention should be shifted to the small incremental steps local actors already take to mend connections in their democratic environments. The authors thus put forward a methodological recommendation, urging an embrace of what they call “abductive inquiry,” which involves the “specific observations of ‘real-life’ events, trends, or social processes” from which researchers “progress analytically to broader abstractions and theories that help to understand observed cases” (p. 32). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 form the heart of the book, demonstrating abduction and the authors’ insistence that the solutions to connectivity deficits lay in existing homegrown repair work. Chapter 3 looks at how disaffected constituents in the Division of Indi in Victoria, Australia overcame their representative disconnect, manifested by a neglectful representative and an overall sense of democratic ennui, through small-scale meetings at kitchen tables and larger yet personal community organizing. This led to the election of a new independent representative in 2013 and a revitalized populace. Chapter 4 focuses on the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG). This group of “grannies” and their supporters knit in public, distribute leaflets, and organize petitions to protest coal seam mining in Australia. By leveraging the nanny stereotype to generate conversation among diverse groups and using colorful art and humor to sustain widespread community attention, KNAG epitomizes an effective means of repairing the fractured public sphere that characterizes public disconnects. Chapter 5 explores four agencies involved in British health policy that tried to overcome the governance disconnect. Mending Democracy shows how administrators within these agencies, whose missions range from ensuring food standard compliance to setting guidelines for health spending prioritization, worked with civil society actors to enable greater public input in and examination of the traditionally hidden world of policy making. Chapter 6 frames the case studies as instances of connective practices—individual and collective local efforts to fix tears in the political fabric—and highlights five characteristics common to successful democratic mending. Fruitful connective practices are relational, with actors drawing upon their existing social relationships, and creative, helping to foster solidarity and drive nontraditional political actors into repair efforts. They are also adaptive, working within the social and political context and formal institutions to strengthen existing connections and organically establish new ones, as well as constituted, meaning that both sides of a disconnect must be willing and able to work together. Finally, connective practices are not oneoff but iterative efforts, involving constant activity and experimentation. Chapter 7 continues the discussion in Chapter 2 of the weaknesses in contemporary deliberative systems theory. The authors argue that attention to connective practices and themore mundane world of everyday politics can ease reliance on communicative miracles. They also advocate for a “connective turn” in deliberative theory. This could “potentially move the field from