Deliberative Democracy, Its Alternatives and Challenges Democracy: from a Political Category to a Cultural Matter

This article would be a theoretical and comparative research in filed of two approaches concerning democracy. The main challenge of this article is to find the major differences between the reflective-democratic approach as well as the liberal democracy through the analysis of the reflective democracy as well as the social grounds of its genesis. The researcher believes that the re-identification of this approach would be beneficial to the Iranian society for different reasons. The research would initiate with a general- revolutionary explanation related to democratic theories. A revolution named (deliberative turn) would be defined out of formal- political institutes i.e. culture, and the routine life of people through the change of focus of democracy from the government and policy.To put the other way, the deliberative turn would be a cultural turn in policy. It means that the policy is comprehended as a phenomenon present in all social experiences, in the reconstruction of identities as well as the routine social life. To explain this revolution, it would be considered the historical-political ground of theoretic turn and the political changes which caused the inefficiency of the classical definition of liberal democracy and some of its changes.After that, it would be mentioned the definitions and the principles of deliberative democracy along with the comparison of this approach with the most important theory of alternative, “liberal democracy” as well as their similarities and differences.Following the comparative study of the two models of democracy, the differences of deliberative democracy would be divided into four major domains of institutes, activists, social powers, trends and the domain of fulfillment and finally it would be considered the challenges of deliberative democracy in terms of rival approaches and response to some of them.