James Fishkin, Professor of International Communication, Stanford University
This paper explores strategies for achieving and/or inserting, the considered and representative judgments of the people into more conventional democratic processes. It first explores the impediments to voicing those judgments in ordinary democratic processes either at the elite level or with the mass public. These impediments include electoral incentives, party discipline, efforts to manipulate public opinion in campaign and policy advocacy, incentives for rational ignorance and selective exposure with the mass public and others. In this environment, how can the considered representative judgments of the public be made both credible and consequential?
Deliberative Polling and the criteria it attempts to satisfy will be taken as an illustration with projects in various locales (California, Bulgaria, Brazil, Macau, Japan, Mongolia). Prescriptions for success and for institutionalization will be discussed. The paper will focus on three phases—before, during and after decision processes made by the institutions of competitive democracy. Agenda setting before an initiative or referendum (as in the recent California project), consultation with a decision making body during a decision process (as in Texas with public utility decisions) or models for consultation after (as with a proposal for a modern version of the nomothetai (or ancient Athenian legislative commissions selected randomly, which served as a final filter on new laws passed by the Assembly). The merits and limitations of various institutional scenarios will be considered.
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy. His work focuses on deliberative democracy and democratic theory in books such as When the People Speak (2009), Deliberation Day (2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (1991). He originated Deliberative Polling as a method of public consultation in 1988. He began to apply it in collaboration with Robert C. Luskin in 1994 and has since spread it, various collaborators, to projects in 23 countries. For more on Deliberative Polling see cdd.stanford.edu. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.