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As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century–representative democracy plus technobureaucratic administration–seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century.“Democracy” as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices. Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and imple-menting public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal …