Deliberative democratic evaluation is an approach to evaluation that uses concepts and procedures from democracy to arrive at justifiable evaluative conclusions. It aspires to arrive at unbiased conclusions by considering all relevant interests, values, and perspectives; by engaging in extended dialogue with major stakeholders; and by promoting extensive deliberation about the study's conclusions—in addition to employing traditional evaluation methodologies. Deliberative democratic evaluation aspires to studies that are unbiased (impartial) regarding fact and value claims. Of course, biases can never be fully eliminated, but there are ways of reducing them.

The justification is that evaluation is a societal institution vital to the realization of democratic societies beyond the conduct of studies by individual evaluators. Amid the claims of the mass media, public relations, and advertising, evaluation can ...