Deliberative democracy: Sounds boring — but it just might save us

For more than 30 years, Stanford political scientist James Fishkin has been exploring and demonstrating the capacity of small, representative "mini-publics" to make thoughtful meaningful political decisions. The results of those explorations, and their potential for the future, are presented in his new book,"Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?"

When Fishkin began his work around the end of the Cold War, most people in academics and the general public still believed that democracy was working well. Francis Fukuyama’s influential bestseller "The End of History and the Last Man" even argued that we had reached “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." There certainly were academic debates about democracy’s flaws, both practical and theoretical, but Fishkin’s interests seemed marginal to most of them.

Things have changed dramatically since then. Partisan polarization and voter alienation are key symptoms of worldwide democratic backsliding. Those are symptoms of mass dissatisfaction with democracy’s effects on people’s everyday lives, and Fishkin’s work speaks directly to ways we might remedy the situation, and combat the dramatic rise of corrosive disinformation. 

While Fishkin’s book takes account of the major issues in political philosophy and political science that have been debated in recent decades, what’s most compelling about it are his empirical results. Those results suggest that ordinary citizens, in small groups composed of representative samples, can make sound, fact-based decisions — at the same public-spirited level that James Madison sought to ensure in his design of the U.S. Constitution. 

Fishkin draws on the deliberative aspects of Madison’s design, along with the Athenian model of democracy — which involved multiple deliberative bodies fulfilling different functions — as inspirational guideposts. But the model developed in his own work over the last 30 years, along with collaborators around the world, provides the strongest argument. 

He clarifies what it means for democratic government to reflect the will of the people, specifying four criteria: Inclusion on an equal basis, meaningful choice, consequential deliberation, and impact on policy. And he demonstrates, through a diverse range of examples, that properly designed deliberation can vindicate the promise of democracy, even at a moment when global faith in that promise seems to be fading to nothing. 

In my recent conversation with Fishkin, I focused mainly on his results rather than on the underlying academic arguments — which are addressed at length in his book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The title of your book poses a question: Can deliberation cure the ills of democracy? But that in itself raises questions. Here’s the first one: What do you mean by deliberation?

By deliberation, I mean when people weigh the trade-offs for competing reasons for collective action for policy proposals. When they actually consider arguments for and against and discuss them in a civil manner, in an evidence-based environment, with fellow citizens.

The core idea of deliberation, even the root of the word, goes back to the idea of weighing. But we have found that only when people discuss in moderated forums with diverse others do they actually consider the competing arguments. If you tell them an argument that’s different from the position they already have, it may backfire. But if you engage them in a discussion with other citizens in a civil, evidence-based environment, magical things happen. 

We have a particular design for this deliberation, which has now worked in 160 cases on every inhabited continent around the world. It does a lot of quite surprising things in this era of disinformation and polarization.

Could you say something about some of those 160 cases, to give a flavor of what they look like? 

There are a lot of cases in the book. We've done these things all over the world and have a track record. So, when President Moon Jae-in of South Korea came into office [in 2017] he had an anti-nuclear position. That is, his party did. But he had a couple of nuclear reactors that were half built and had to make the difficult choice: Does he continue building the nuclear reactors? If he doesn't, then not only are there sunk costs, but there's the problem of importing fossil fuels, and he's concerned about climate.

We had done a number of projects with South Korean collaborators. So he announced that he would appoint a scientific committee and they would do a national deliberative poll to decide whether or not to build the reactors. Public opinion moved sharply in favor of building them, and they're now built.

You also had another energy-focused deliberative poll, here in the U.S. 

Years ago, when I first started, we did a number of projects in Texas about how the state was going to get its energy, because it was growing very fast. The Public Utilities Commission sanctioned these projects with each of the eight utility companies in the state, and the result was a big surprise. 

We had an independent advisory group, we had good samples of each of the areas of Texas the utilities served and we had all the options for providing electricity: coal, natural gas, conservation — meaning cutting the need for energy — and renewable energy, especially wind power. The big surprise in all eight areas was that when people were asked if they would pay more on their monthly bill — and remember, these are representative samples, in some areas involving quite poor people — they were willing to pay more for wind power, because it was clean. 

The percentage willing to pay more went from 52% to 84%, averaged over the eight projects. This led the commission to sanction big investments in wind power, and the state went from being the dead last among the 50 states in the amount of wind power to be first by 2007, surpassing California. There's been no looking back. It's still the leader in the United States in the amount of wind power, and has also made big investments in conservation. 

I developed this process in order to assess the will of the people, because everybody's trying to persuade, manipulate and distort public opinion for their own interests. So what the people really think is the fundamental question facing democracy, because democracy has got to make a connection with the will of the people, and that's almost impossible to measure with all this noise and disinformation and misinformation. I developed this for that purpose, and it served it well, as I say, in 160 cases, on all kinds of topics, around the world. 

But while you’ve been doing this, democracy on a global scale has been struggling.

We have extreme partisan polarization. This puts democracy at risk because it creates deadlock and a perception that democracies can't get anything done. So we need to deal with the polarization. So when we did this America in One Room project ...

Which Salon covered ...

I was very surprised that the deliberations produced dramatic depolarization between Republicans and Democrats on the most contested issues — and the most extreme people where the ones to change the most. I think that's probably because they were in their filter bubbles and had been the least exposed to the other side of the political divide and the arguments that were motivating them. 

We found on immigration, for example, that before deliberation, about 80% of the Republicans wanted to send all undocumented immigrants back to their home countries. After deliberation, that dropped to 40% and we had similar movements of opinion on all the other immigration topics among the Republicans. And we had some big movements among Democrats on the most expensive redistributive proposals. So both sides moved dramatically closer together. 

Talk about the one-year follow-up.

We went back to those people year later to see how they voted in the election in 2020. We had a large control group, and they got the election almost perfectly right. The people who deliberated moved in dramatically different ways, according to their considered judgments on the issues, and it happened to lead them to support Biden over Trump. 

We sorted this out in an article in the American Public Science Review, which is informally summarized in the book, where we found that the people who deliberated became more civically engaged. They continued to spend a lot more time and attention on the campaign. They kept learning more. They developed a greater sense of political efficacy. They thought they had opinions worth listening to. And when it came to voting, they made a coherent connection between what they thought about the issues and how they voted. 

My political science colleagues — some of them have said that the only thing that explains voting is party loyalty. It's all tribalism, there's nothing else. If you find a deliberative voter, that's about as common as finding a unicorn. Well, the deliberative process created unicorns a year later. 

You followed that with an online project using AI. How did that work?

We did the same thing on climate change. We had 1,000 deliberators,  and we have developed an AI-assisted platform with computer scientists here at Stanford, so we don't need the moderators. We divided that 1,000 people into 100 small groups of 10. The platform controls the queue for discussion and makes sure that everybody speaks. It invites those who haven't volunteered to speak: Everybody gets 45 seconds, then you move to the next person. People begin to get the rhythm of that. It intervenes if people are uncivil to each other, and it guides people in coming up with the key questions that they want to ask panels of competing experts who represent different points of view. 

There's an hour and a half in small groups, and an hour and a half of plenary sessions where they asked the questions. The experts don't give speeches, they just respond to people's questions. Then another hour and a half in small groups and another hour and a half of plenary sessions. It goes on for an entire weekend. 

The platform works just as well as face to face, and people like it as much, but it's much cheaper. You don't have to fly people in, and you can expand to any number without training hundreds or thousands of moderators. We developed it with the idea that eventually we can spread this to very large numbers. But for deliberative polling, we have representative samples so we can show what the public would think. If we can spread the model, we could show what the public will think after the deliberative process. 

So what were the results?

We had depolarization. Republicans changed very dramatically on climate change. For example, instead of about 35% of the Republicans thinking there was anything to climate change, it went to 55% pretty consistently, and both Republicans and Democrats moved closer to supporting most of the 68 or so specific proposals for what to do about climate change. 

We went back to them a year later, before the midterm elections, and we found that deliberators voted according to climate change as a preference, but the control group voted on all the other issues you'd expect — you know, immigration, crime, things like that. So we got a big difference. 

Looking at the big picture, how would you summarize your findings? 

We have a process which, every time we use it, produces surprises. The first surprise is that people change their views. The second surprise is that they change their views in a way that's depolarizing. A lot of political scientists have been saying that our divisions are not only polarized, they're calcified, meaning they're immovable. No, they're not immovable. If you have a condition where people actually learn to listen to each other in a civil way, they move in surprising ways. Then their voting is not just tribalism and party loyalty. When people actually have the experience of thinking about the issues, it has a lasting effect even a year later. 

So we think that if this kind of process became routine and it spread, it would cure the partisan divisions, it would cure the ambiguity about what on earth the will of the people could mean. Instead of people considering just an impression or soundbites or headlines, or not having any real opinion at all and just deferring to their parties or answering questions almost at random, we’ve shown that everybody is capable of informed judgment and deliberation on a reasoned basis. 

We've done this, as the book describes, all over the world, even in countries where literacy levels were low.  Everywhere we go, we find that the public's actually very smart if you give them a chance to think about the issues and you make it easy and inviting for them to do so. 

As I mentioned, we covered America In One Room, which I thought was a great example. But the media as a whole ignored it. What can be done to make this research more impactful, to actually change how democracy works? 

In some countries we've had more success. I'll give you an exotic example. I'm just back from Mongolia, a competitive democracy in between Russia on one hand and China on the other. We had a big celebration of 10 years of deliberative polling. In Mongolia, before they can change the constitution they have to do a national deliberative poll, with an independently elected advisory committee supervising and vetting suggestions for constitutional amendments from the public. 

More than 700 people gathered from all over the country for face-to-face deliberations in the parliament building. They evaluate all the proposals and the results are sent by the advisory committee to the parliament. If the parliament approves an amendment by two-thirds majority, it’s passed.

That has now happened twice. Most recently, because the public thought they had two big parties that were at loggerheads and in deadlock. The people thought there ought to be additional parties, and proposed an amendment which would add additional members of parliament. You know how hard it is to get the public to pay for additional politicians? You can imagine, right?  

But the additional members would be elected by proportional representation, on the argument that would bring in additional parties. That passed by two-thirds vote, they had an election and, sure enough, more third parties were elected. That speaks to a profound problem that countries around the world face: How can they combine the thinking of the public and the thinking of the elected representatives in a coherent process? This combines the thinking of the public in the deliberative poll with the representatives in the parliament, and so they changed the constitution. 

That’s a dramatic institutional change. But it’s more common that you have examples responding to policy problems that are politically difficult, if not outright crises. 

We have done this a bunch in Japan. In particular, one happened when the government was about to privatize the pension system, because the Japanese population is aging and the ratio between the workers and retired people is worsening. They wanted private accounts, and in polls about 70% of the public was in support. But my colleagues in Japan at Keio University, working with us, created a deliberative poll. It turned out that when people actually understood that they would have to take responsibility for their private accounts and invest them in the stock market, they didn't want the risk. They wanted something guaranteed and they were willing to pay more taxes, particularly a consumption tax they thought could be raised to finance the pension system. 

So support for privatization went from 70% to 35%, it was cut in half. The government killed the proposal for privatization and adopted the proposal of raising the consumption tax instead. They actually implemented the results of the deliberative poll and were, in fact, impressed by the thoughtful considerations of the public. There are lots of cases like that in different countries. 

Your book also features a variety of other examples and impacts that could enhance democracy. Tell us about some of those.

We found such lasting effects from deliberation. Once people do this, they have greater respect for what I would call the guardrails of democracy, for protecting the voting process and everybody's access to it. We did another project like that, America in One Room, and we think that should be a form of civic education that can spread in the schools. On our website, if you search for “deliberation in the schools” you'll see that we've been doing projects in schools all over the United States.

We think it should be spread in the schools, and we think it could be used to create ballot propositions. We did that once in California. There ought to be a process where these deliberations give rise to ballot propositions, instead of very wealthy individuals funding signature collection drives. It's $3 million or more to get something on the ballot there, even before you get to a campaign. There ought to be a way of getting public interest propositions on the ballot, and then you ought to have deliberation about the merits of the ballot proposition, and that's on the ballot as a recommendation.

I think that deliberation, whether spread broadly in the schools or spread broadly before national elections, before referendums, before initiatives, could become part of everyday life. If it did, we would end up with more deliberative voters, more mutual respect, less extreme polarization. We would cure some of the things that are crippling our democracy. 

There are other forms of public deliberation out there that you distinguish from yours, such as the citizens’ assemblies that have been used in Europe. Can you explain how your model differs from those, and what some of the problems are that your model avoids? 

The first thing is, if you're going to have a random sample of people deliberating, you need to have a good random sample. You need to know where the people in the sample start and whether they are representative. So in the French citizens’ convention or the Irish citizens’ assemblies — those are the most prominent examples — there was no measure of public opinion at the beginning. By law they couldn't collect it in Ireland, and the French didn't collect it. 

The French recruited their sample for their national citizens’ convention on climate by sending out 400,000 text messages. They ended up with 150 people, and they never measured whether the people who were recruited were especially interested in climate or not. But of course they were — they were being recruited to deliberate for a whole year, and it ended up being two years. Who's going to give up a year or two of their life unless they are actually interested in the issue? 

Right. Your process is very different.

When we recruit people, we don't tell them what the issue is. But before we invite them, they've taken a questionnaire and we find out their attitudes. Then we have a control group that doesn't deliberate and answers another questionnaire at the end of the whole process. So we can compare the deliberative group's views with the control group, and if it's a high-quality poll we know whether it's representative. It seems to me that the first question is, “Why should other people pay attention?” The reason is that they should if the people who deliberate are representative of the country. If they are, and then they change their views for coherent reasons, it's worth listening to those coherent reasons and understanding why they change. That's the basic logic of the deliberative poll, but not the citizens’ assembly. 

But it's not the only difference.

The other problem is that a citizens’ assembly has to come to an agreed consensus, sort of like a jury verdict. All the criticisms of deliberation come out of jury literature. Juries do a fairly good job of deciding certain questions of fact — is somebody guilty or not? — but they are dominated by the more educated people, the more advantaged. Jury foremen are almost always educated white males. So they are dominated by certain groups and then, as Cass Sunstein has shown, they move to more extreme positions as people go along with the rest of the crowd, because of the social pressure of reaching a verdict. 

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We collect our opinions in confidential questionnaires. People never have to say how they finally come out. Rather, they engage in a discussion. Sometimes they play devil’s advocate. They think about the issues and then take a private questionnaire at the end. So we insulate the considered views from the social pressure to go along. That's very important, because we don't get the movement towards extremity that you get in jury experiments, we don't get dominant action by the more advantaged people, and we have samples large enough to be statistically representative of the country and for the opinion changes to be evaluated statistically. So we know what's a significant change and what is not. 

That's why our model is different. We want to protect the integrity of the individual opinions before and after, and we want to understand the opinion changes.  So these other versions are not based in social science in the same way. I think we have to use social science to protect our credibility. I am interested in showing what people would really think, what the will of the people is on a given issue. 

As a byproduct, it has all these wonderful effects: People become more tolerant of each other, more respectful, more engaged in the public dialogue. They vote according to their considered judgments about what should be done, not necessarily just in terms of party loyalty. 

Finally, what's the most important question I didn’t ask? And what's the answer? 

Well, why do I have a question mark at the end of the title of the book? I have a question mark because it's a question of collective political will. You don't need to change the Constitution to spread deliberation. You just need the political will to do it. 

It's very much like Benjamin Franklin's famous response to the question, "Are we going to have a republic or monarchy?" He said, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, you could have a deliberative system, a more deliberative society, if you had the political will to implement it. I have a whole list of things in the back, most of which we have tried and shown to be viable with important results. We've test-driven the process in all kinds of contexts. and if we could just get the attention of the public and had all kinds of venues to spread it, we could cure the ills of democracy.

So the question mark is for us, not for me. It's for us. By employing technology we can make it more practical, but it's still the question of: Do we want to do things the way we’ve been doing them, where democracy is under threat because people have a perception that it doesn't get anything done? Or do we want change?