Polls and Politics: The Dilemmas of Democracy

8. Deliberative Polling, Public Opinion, and Democratic Theory

8 Deliberative Polling, Public Opinion, and Democratic Theory James S. Fishkin Democratic theory has struggled with how to combine two basic values—deliberation and political equality. Deliberation has long been thought to require a social context of small group, face-to-face communication , but political equality requires that everyone’s views be counted equally. As a result, when political equality is applied to the large-scale nation-state, it has led to mass consultation of millions of persons, many of whom are barely paying attention. Hence there has long seemed to be a conflict between the aspiration for deliberation and the application of political equality. The value of deliberation was clearly articulated by the Founding Fathers. They wanted institutions that would give expression not just to any public views, but also to those opinions that had been “filtered” so as to produce “the deliberative sense of the community.” Representatives , the Founding Fathers believed, serve to “refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through a chosen body of citizens,” as Madison argued in Federalist No. 10.“The public voice” pronounced by representatives under such a regulation “will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves convened for the purpose.”1 Small deliberative bodies, such as the U.S. Senate or a constitutional convention, allow representatives to better determine the public good than just by bringing the people together and asking them. There is a difference, in other words, between the deliberative or thoughtful public opinion one can find in representative institutions, at least at their best, and the uninformed and unreflective preferences commonly found in the mass public. 145 The problem is how to reconcile this aspiration for thoughtful and informed preferences with political equality—with the aspiration for counting everyone’s preferences equally. Deliberative bodies may represent highly informed and competent preferences, but only an elite often shares those preferences. Direct consultation of mass preferences will typically involve counting uninformed preferences, often simply reflecting the public’s impressions of sound bites and headlines. Hence, the hard choice between politically equal but unreflective mass preferences and politically unequal but relatively more reflective elite views. In other words, we seem to face a forced choice between elected and presumably well informed elites and uninformed masses. But there are institutional experiments with deliberation among representative microcosms of the mass public. These experiments, ranging from so-called citizens’ juries to deliberative opinion polls, take random samples of the public and subject them to situations where they are effectively motivated to get good information, hear balanced accounts of competing arguments, and come to a considered judgment. These experiments show that ordinary citizens are capable of becoming informed and dealing with complex policy matters. And it is possible to get an input to policymaking that is representative of the mass public while, at the same time, embodying deliberation. There is also a sense in which, through random sampling, a notion of political equality is realized. Every citizen has (at least theoretically) an equal chance of being chosen through random sampling and an equal chance, once chosen, to have his or her preferences counted. Hence, random sampling embodies a form of political equality or equal consideration, just as would a system in which everyone participated. This solution to the problem of combining political equality and deliberation was devised in ancient Athens, where deliberative microcosms of several hundred chosen by lot made many key decisions. However, this process was lost in the dust of history with the demise of Athenian democracy. When random sampling was revived for informal political consultation, it was employed, without deliberation, via public opinion polls. But the potential to combine random sampling with deliberation for the large-scale nation-state remained.The research program I will outline here, Deliberative Polling, is an attempt to build on this ancient insight. It is worth noting that the initial launch of the public opinion poll actually combined scientific sampling with aspirations for deliberation . After the early triumph of the scientific public opinion poll, when Gallup correctly predicted the winner of the 1936 U.S. presidential 146 James S. Fishkin election (while an inferior method, the self-selected Literary Digest poll, had predicted a landslide for Alf Landon over Franklin Roosevelt ), Gallup reflected on the aims of the poll, which he then considered such a serious instrument of democratic reform that he called it the “sampling referendum.” He...