Simone Chambers is professor of political science at the University of California Irvine. She has written and published on such topics as deliberative democracy, referendums, constitutional politics, the public sphere, secularism, rhetoric, civility, and the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. She is working on two book projects, The State of Contemporary Democratic Theory, a critical survey of new developments in democratic theory, and a book of collected essays: Deliberation and the Future of Democracy: A realistic but not realist political theory.