The contributors to Critical Perspectives on Democracy suggest that there are ways of looking at democracy that go beyond the registration of preference among the existing available options for the governance of a society. They all begin by taking seriously the defining property of democracy, self-governance, and the rules and institutional forms required to effectuate democracy. They collectively enjoin the perspective that democratic theorists need to inform their empirical enterprise with elaborations of the normative bases—equal concern and respect for persons, the values of community and citizenship, the satisfaction of human interests—of democratic politics.