 An alternative, though largely neglected, basis for public reason appeals to the importance of a particular conception of political community or civic friendship (Ebels-Duggan 2010; Leland 2019; Leland and van Wietmarschen, 2017; Lister 2013). On this account, the practice of public reason is a constitutive part of a valuable relationship. This relationship might be characterized in several ways. The relationship might have the same structure as other communitarian relationships. In the same way relationships between co-nationals might be intrinsically valuable, and constituted by particular social practices (e.g. shared language and cultural traditions), membership in a pluralistic political community might be valuable, and constituted, in part, by a practice of public reasoning amongst citizens with regard to political rules and institutions. Only when our political community is regulated by laws that can be justified to each of us, despite our diverse perspectives, do we stand in the appropriate sort of valuable communal relationship with our fellow citizens (Lister 2013, ch. 5). A related, but slightly different view, appeals to a conception of reciprocity that obtains when people are willing to propose and abide by fair principles of cooperation acceptable to others, provided those others are likewise willing (Rawls 1996, 49–50). Rawls suggests that one role for this criterion of reciprocity ‘as expressed in public reason…is to specify the nature of the political relationship in a constitutional democratic regime as one of civic friendship’ (Rawls 1996, li. Also see Leland and van Wietmarschen, 2017). Rawls has presented public reason as part of the idea of democracy itself, especially the relationship in a democratic society between free and equal citizens (Rawls 1996, 213; Rawls 1999b, 573). On this view, “the idea of public reason specifies at the deepest level the basic moral and political values that are to determine a constitutional democratic government’s relationship to its citizens and their relation to one another. In short, it concerns how the political relation [of free and equal citizens] is to be understood” (Rawls 1999b, 574). The value of this relationship might thus provide at least part of the moral basis for public reason.