AI and Deliberative Democracy

 From Helene Landemore at the International Monetary Fund:

We now have the chance to scale and improve such deliberative processes exponentially so that citizens’ voices, in all their richness and diversity, can make a difference. Taiwan Province of China exemplifies this transition.

Following the 2014 Sunflower Revolution there, which brought tech-savvy politicians to power, an online open-source platform called pol.is was introduced. This platform allows people to express elaborate opinions about any topic, from Uber regulation to COVID policies, and vote on the opinions submitted by others. It also uses these votes to map the opinion landscape, helping contributors understand which proposals would garner consensus while clearly identifying minority and dissenting opinions and even groups of lobbyists with an obvious party line. This helps people understand each other better and reduces polarization. Politicians then use the resulting information to shape public policy responses that take into account all viewpoints.

Over the past few months pol.is has evolved to integrate machine learning with some of its functions to render the experience of the platform more deliberative. Contributors to the platform can now engage with a large language model, or LLM (a type of AI), that speaks on behalf of different opinion clusters and helps individuals figure out the position of their allies, opponents, and everyone in between. This makes the experience on the platform more truly deliberative and further helps depolarization. Today, this tool is frequently used to consult with residents, engaging 12 million people, or nearly half the population.

Corporations, which face their own governance challenges, also see the potential of large-scale AI-augmented consultations. After launching its more classically technocratic Oversight Board, staffed with lawyers and experts to make decisions on content, Meta (formerly Facebook) began experimenting in 2022 with Meta Community Forums—where randomly selected groups of users from several countries could deliberate on climate content regulation. An even more ambitious effort, in December 2022, involved 6,000 users from 32 countries in 19 languages to discuss cyberbullying in the metaverse over several days. Deliberations in the Meta experiment were facilitated on a proprietary Stanford University platform by (still basic) AI, which assigned speaking times, helped the group decide on topics, and advised on when to put them aside.

For now there is no evidence that AI facilitators do a better job than humans, but that may soon change. And when it does, the AI facilitators will have the distinct advantage of being much cheaper, which matters if we are ever to scale deep deliberative processes among humans (rather than between humans and LLM impersonators, as in the Taiwanese experience) from 6,000 to millions of people.

Media and Deliberation

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

Geoffrey Baym at JSTOR Daily:

For proponents of deliberative democracy, the challenge therefore is twofold. On one hand, some have recognized the need to design deliberative processes specifically for and within the ecosystem of social media, processes structured to encourage inclusion and reasonableness. On the other, deliberation itself is a learned skill. Educators, particularly at the secondary school level, are exploring strategies of deliberative pedagogy, of requiring and in so doing teaching face-to-face discussion of polarizing political issues. The bottom line here is that democracy ultimately depends on our ability to talk with one-another, and that our media—both mass and social—could do vastly better in helping us to do so.

A Civility Test

 At The Conversation, Robert B. Talisse offers a three-part test for civility:

• First, take one of your strongest political views, and then try to figure out what your smartest partisan opponent might say about it.
• Second, identify a political idea that is key to your opponent and then develop a lucid argument that supports it.
• Third, identify a major policy favored by the other side that you could regard as permissible for government – despite your opposition.

If you struggle to perform those tasks, that means one has a feeble grasp on the range of responsible political opinion. When we cannot even imagine a cogent political perspective that stands in opposition to our own, we can’t engage civilly with our fellow citizens.

Quiet Quitting the House

 Sam Brodey at The Daily Beast:

Since January, 370 members of Congress, roughly 83 percent of the chamber, have cast a remote vote. Combined, those members have voted remotely 23,154 times—greatly surpassing the 17,263 remote votes that were cast in 2021. A sizable minority of the House has voted remotely on a regular basis. Seventy-sevenlawmakers—overwhelmingly Democrats—have voted remotely on 100 or more of the year’s 420 recorded roll call votes. That means roughly one in every six lawmakers has not been present in the U.S. Capitol for at least 25 percent of the roll call votes taken in the House this year. Among a small handful of members, remote voting is the rule, not the exception. Rep. Albio Sires (D-NJ), for example, has voted remotely 398 times, or 94 percent of all votes, making him the undisputed champion of remote voting. Together, the 10 lawmakers who have used proxy voting the most have taken advantage of the privilege for a combined 2,353 votes. The year’s proxy voting numbers are “stark,” said Josh Chafetz, a professor of law at Georgetown University who studies the workings of the U.S. House. “It’s obviously not great for the institution to have so many members not around,” he said

 

While a few of the most frequent absentee voters have legitimate COVID-related reasons to stay clear of Capitol Hill, many do not. Since 2020, members have voted by proxy in order to free up their schedules for everything from hitting the campaign trail and doing interviews to pursuing side hustles in commercial aviation and making unauthorized trips to Afghanistan.  A policy that was originally intended as a way to keep members of Congress working in a pandemic has, ironically, turned into a way for them to avoid showing up in Washington for work.

 

With a recent Gallup survey finding that more than half of the U.S. workforce is “quiet quitting”—barely meeting the minimum expectations for a job while psychologically detaching from their work—it appears the House may not be immune.

...

“In general, it’s really bad for the institution,” said Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute [and who teaches in the CMC Washington Program]. Proxy voting, he said, takes members out of the policymaking process. “If you aren’t there for votes, who the hell wants to do the committee work?” Glassman said. “It’s bad for the output of Congress, and it’s bad for the institution of Congress."

Deliberative Democracy and Citizen Assemblies

Claudia Chwalisz at Noema:

Since the 1980s, a wave of such citizens’ assemblies has been building, and it has been gaining momentum since 2010. Over the past four decades, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have received invitations from heads of state, ministers, mayors and other public authorities to serve as members of over 500 citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative processes to inform policy making. Important decisions have been shaped by everyday people about 10-year, $5 billion strategic plans, 30-year infrastructure investment strategies, tackling online hate speech and harassment, taking preventative action against increased flood risks, improving air quality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and many other issues.

...

While the Parisian Citizens’ Assembly stands out for the extent of its competencies, it is not the only example of citizen representation and deliberation being institutionalized. In my recent OECD policy paper, I have outlined eight models of institutionalization, with examples spanning the globe and levels of government, from Bogotá to Toronto, Oregon to Brussels, Vorarlberg to New South Wales, Victoria, and more. Reflections in more places are taking place.

...

Other models including standing citizens’ advisory panels, such as the two-year Toronto Planning Review Panel, where residents are chosen by lot to provide input on planning issues after an initial series of learning sessions. In Brussels, the Austrian state of Vorarlberg and in numerous Polish cities, regulations give citizens the right to trigger the establishment of a citizens’ assembly if a petition collects enough signatures. The Australian state of Victoria has taken yet another path by embedding representative deliberative processes in local strategic planning through its Local Government Act 2020.

Public Consultation

From the Program for Public Consultation:

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, an in-depth survey finds that large bipartisan majorities of voters favor Members of Congress using new tools for consulting representative samples of their constituents on policy decisions, and to take the recommendations of their constituents – as a whole – into account when voting. More than four-in-ten are even ready to cross party lines to vote for candidates who make this commitment–even when an incumbent of their own party is named.

The survey of 4,309 voters, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, finds widespread dissatisfaction with the current relationship between Members of Congress and the public. Eighty-three percent believe that there is not currently “an adequate system in place for the voice of the American people to be heard in Congress.”

Demand for an alternative approach is strong. Respondents were presented with a hypothetical candidate who commits to a new approach for consulting representative samples of their constituents. A university program working online would select a representative sample of citizens, give them a briefing on current proposals in Congress, have them evaluate competing arguments, reviewed by experts on different sides, and then make their recommendations. The hypothetical candidate committed to take the constituents’ recommendations into account and give them a higher priority than the views of their party leadership.

Substantial bipartisan majorities expressed positive views of such a candidate and readiness to vote for them.

For respondents who have an open seat in an upcoming Congressional race, seven-in-ten said they would likely vote for a candidate who makes this commitment. Most striking, 79% of Democrats said they would likely cross party lines and vote for a Republican who made such a commitment, while 64% of Republicans said they would likely vote for a Democratic candidate who did so.

A separate sample in states with a Senate incumbent likely to run in the upcoming election were also asked how they would respond to such a hypothetical candidate challenging their Senator listed by name. Over six-in-ten said they would likely vote for the challenger. The willingness to cross party lines to vote for a Senate candidate who commits to consulting their constituents is resilient: 44% of Democrats said they would likely vote for a Republican challenger and 41% of Republicans said they would likely vote for a Democratic challenger.

“Americans do not think that the will of the people is reflected in actions of elected officials and it is fueling distrust in government,” commented Steven Kull, director of PPC. “The demand for Congressional representatives who will genuinely consult their constituents can even override partisan loyalties–enough to swing many elections.”

Support for candidates who commit to consulting their constituents is strikingly resilient to attacks. Presented four strongly worded critiques, in all cases less than half (29-48%) found them convincing. All of the rebuttals were found convincing by overwhelming majorities. After evaluating both, the percentage saying that they would likely vote for the candidate committed to public consultation increased by several percentage points.

Contrary to the view that Americans are overwhelmingly partisan, a bipartisan three-in-four said that Members of Congress should be “responsive” to the views of “all their constituents as a whole” (Republicans 73%, Democrats 77%) rather than the views of “the people who voted for them” (26%). Similarly, a large bipartisan majority of 71% said that the majority of the public as a whole is most likely to show the greatest wisdom on questions of what the government should do (Republicans 69%, Democrats 67%), rather than just the majority of Republicans (13%) or Democrats (15%).

An overwhelming bipartisan majority (88%) said that if MoCs were more influenced by “the people” than they are now, they would be more likely to find common ground, (Republicans 92%, Democrats 87%, independents 81%). An analysis of surveys using the public consultation method found that majorities of Republicans and Democrats do agree on 172 positions on issues that have generated Congressional gridlock.

A key question is whether support for consulting the public will be sustained when people encounter majority-supported positions they do not like. In the survey, respondents were presented with some of the public’s 172 bipartisan common ground positions, told these were majority-supported positions and asked whether they agreed with them. Even among those who disagreed with half of the positions they were presented, a majority said they would nonetheless likely vote for a candidate committed to public consultation (56%), and that these positions should have influence on policy decisions in Congress (64%).

The survey was conducted between July 13 – September 15, 2021, and the margin of error was +/-1.5% for questions that were asked to the entire sample. For questions that went to partial samples the margin of error varied from +/- 2.1% to as high as +/-9.2%. All surveys were conducted online with a sample provided by Nielsen Scarborough from its larger probability-based panel recruited by telephone and mail. Report: The Demand for Public ConsultationWebsite: https://publicconsultation.org/demand-public-consultation/
PDF: https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Demand_for_Public_Consultation_Report_0722.pdf Survey Questionnaire: https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/GBP_Quaire_0921.pdf

Local Deliberation

Jonathan E. Collins and Julian Bessinger have a Brookings article titled " The case for participatory democracy during educational crisis."

In 2010, an organization called Everyday Democracy (ED) organized the Strong Start for Children (SSFC) citizens’ deliberation to identify policies and practices that could be used to strengthen the quality of early childhood education. ED partnered with local community organizations, which recruited 290 community members from across Albuquerque to participate in small group deliberations called “dialogue circles.” Through these deliberations, they shared ideas with representatives who then raised the ideas at the 2011 SSFC Policy Forum in Santa Fe. The policy forum itself featured small group deliberations with community members and policymakers. As a result of SSFC, the University of New Mexico Family Development Program created an early childhood development and education resource directory. There was even healthy spillover, as the New Mexico state legislature went on to pass a tribal-language preservation bill.

Gene Editing and Deliberative Polling

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

A release from the Hastings Center:

- A new report released by The Hastings Center, a leading ethics research institute, finds that the complex issues raised by releasing gene-edited species into the wild demand deep and broad public engagement. The report, Gene Editing in the Wild: Shaping Decisions Through Broad Public Deliberation, provides a path forward to move decision-making from the realm of experts to a more inclusive, values-based approach using the technique of public deliberation – or deliberative democracy.

The goals of gene editing in the wild efforts are wide-ranging, and the benefits potentially transformative--such as preventing mosquitoes from spreading disease. But this work poses major trade-offs that require the public’s consideration.

The report’s twelve essays take up fundamental questions: how should public deliberation be designed? Who should participate? How should deliberation be linked to policy?

The introductory essay, “Public Deliberation About Gene Editing in the Wild,” summarizes the key design elements that can improve broad public deliberations about gene editing in the wild: Framing the question and deciding when to hold broad public deliberation, choosing participants, addressing power, and accounting for and capturing perspectives that are hard to express. The introduction was written by the special report editors: Michael K. Gusmano, Gregory E. Kaebnick, Karen J. Maschke, Carolyn P. Neuhaus, and Ben Curran Wills.

“Regulating Gene Editing in the Wild: Building Regulatory Capacity to Incorporate Deliberative Democracy,” by Karen J. Maschke and Michael K. Gusmano, says that there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. The authors argue that, while federal agencies may have capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so.

“Deliberative Public Consultation via Deliberative Polling: Criteria and Methods,” by James S. Fishkin, makes the case that Deliberative Polling, an approach developed by the author, can be usefully employed to engage representative samples to deliberate in depth in controlled experiments so as to yield a picture of the public’s considered judgments. Another it can be cost-effectively conducted online.

“The Decision Phases Framework for Public Engagement: Engaging Stakeholders about Gene Editing in the Wild,” by S. Kathleen Barnhill-Dilling, Adam Kokotovich, and Jason A. Delborne, puts forth a framework for shaping public engagement that tackles when and whom to engage on genetic engineering questions.

“Empowering Indigenous Knowledge in Deliberations on Gene Editing in the Wild,” by Riley Taitingfong and Anika Ullah, identifies Indigenous peoples as key stakeholders in decisions about gene-editing in the wild and argues that engagement activities need not only include Indigenous peoples but also should be designed, conducted, and analyzed in ways that confront longstanding power imbalances that dismiss Indigenous expertise.

The special report grew out of a Hastings Center project funded by the National Science Foundation, The complete report is available for download here.

For more information, contact:

Susan Gilbert or Mark Cardwell
communications@thehastingscenter.org
845-424-4040, ext. 244

 

Campus Free Speech

The Bipartisan Policy Center has a new report titled “Campus Free Expression: A New Roadmap.” From the executive summary:

• First, colleges and universities must address the perceived tension that pits academic freedom and freedom of expression against diversity, equity, and inclusion in creating a respectful learning environment for all. While not ignoring that there may be expression that is hurtful, we believe profoundly that free expression is an essential means to an inclusive campus in addition to being essential to higher education’s academic and civic missions.
• Second, colleges and universities should take steps to encourage more viewpoint diversity on campus. Exposing students to a wide range of perspectives and methods of confronting issues is essential for both a well-rounded education and as preparation for the rigors of citizenship in a diverse society.
• Third, colleges and universities should adopt strong policies for the protection of free expression for students and faculty, to forestall hasty or ad hoc responses to controversial expression, and to defend the expression of unorthodox and controversial views.
• Fourth, colleges and universities should elevate the skills and dispositions necessary to academic and civic discourse as a deliberate aim of the collegiate experience. Formal protections for free expression are necessary but insufficient to create a culture of free expression, open inquiry, and respectful, productive debate on campus and in our country. We have a national civic skills deficit, which colleges and universities have an essential role in remedying. Matriculating students typically need coaching and instruction in these skills and habits of mind, and our aim should be to graduate students who raise the bar for national discourse

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

Lori S. White, president of DePauw University and a member of the task force that met for a year to write the report, said during a panel discussion Tuesday about the report's release that she recently navigated her own campus speech controversy: she said that after a professor used the N-word in a classroom context, DePauw faced calls to ban the use of the N-word on campus.

White, who is Black, responded to these calls in a campus memo at once condemning the N-word as a “despicable and hateful word that has been used throughout history to dehumanize people who look like me.” At the same time, she wrote, banning the word “raises questions as to whether books such as John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ or Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ which I read as an English major, could still be assigned or whether a film class could watch a Dick Gregory film that I have watched many times or whether a music critique course or a student listening to music in their residence hall could listen to certain rap music artists.”

Robby Soave at Reason:

While most students think their professors adequately encourage diverse viewpoints in the classroom, don't want speakers disinvited from campus, and are comfortable sharing controversial opinions, 85 percent of liberals think professors who say something offensive should be reported to the university.

That's according to a new survey of student attitudes conducted by North Dakota State University's Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth. Many of the results were positive: Most students—both liberals and conservatives—said their professors create environments that allow for many different viewpoints to be shared. Large majorities also opposed the rejection of controversial speakers from campus.

In general, conservative respondents were more supportive of free speech norms—and also more fearful that they would be punished for speaking up—than liberal students. But on many questions, majorities of both groups responded the way a free speech supporter would.

Probably the most concerning result was that 70 percent of students—85 percent of liberals, 41 percent of conservatives, and 65 percent of those classified as "independent/apolitical"—wanted professors reported to the administration for making offensive statements. Most students also felt this way about other students who said offensive things.

Ranked-Choice Voting

 Gary Schmitt at AEI:

Another idea for reforming the candidate selection system is ranked-choice voting, in which primary voters rank their candidate choices from most to least favorite. If no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated; his or her voters’ second choices are distributed among the remaining candidates. This process continues until one candidate gets a majority.

This means that no candidate can be the winner just by getting more votes than any of the other guys. It also means that to win a majority, a candidate will have to appeal to a broader range of eligible voters instead of single-mindedly pursuing a narrow, polarizing block of the voting public. In fact, there is some evidence that in Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial primary this year, ranked-choice voting produced a candidate, Glenn Youngkin, who—while decidedly conservative—showed himself to have enough broad appeal to succeed in a purple, blue-trending state.

No single system is guaranteed to produce candidates who are both popular and fit for office. No selection system can, by itself, fix the current state of our political parties. But an advantage of ranked-choice voting is that it provides a potential corrective to problematic populist campaigning by installing a selection system that can be said to be as democratic as, or even more democratic than, the system currently in place.

Stay Out of Silos

 From Professor Robert George of Princeton:

In recent days, our divisions have been stoked by high profile criminal cases. Viewed from the silos, the meanings of these cases seem obvious, and anyone who sees them differently must be an “ignoramus,” a “bigot,” an “out-of-touch elitist,” a “liar,” a “manipulator”—in short, a fool or a fraud. An example is the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. Was it a travesty of justice, which seems obvious to some Americans? Or was it the essence of justice itself, which seems equally obvious to others? Was Rittenhouse a “vigilante” and a “white supremacist”? Or was he a hero who placed himself at risk to defend the lives and property of innocent people from rioters and vandals? 

Or could it be that the situation is not quite as black and white, as open and shut, as people in either camp suppose?

 I have my own opinions on these matters. But it is not my role as Director of the James Madison Program or as a professor at Princeton University to try to persuade you that my opinions are the ones you should adopt. It is not the job of any professor, or of any unit of the University, or the University itself to tell you what to think. Our role in your lives is to encourage and empower you to think deeply, to think critically, and to think for yourselves about important issues, such as those dividing our nation today. 

On the major issues we face, reasonable people of goodwill are not all of one mind. To decide where you should stand, I urge you to avoid the silos and listen attentively to what intelligent voices on the competing sides are saying. To make up one’s mind, however tentatively, one needs to seek out and thoughtfully consider the most reliable information and the best arguments offered in support of the various positions. To allow oneself to be constantly reinforced in what one already believes is to court becoming a mere partisan, a dogmatist, an ideologue. 

So please stay out of the silos. Even in personal relationships, make sure you are not surrounding yourself with people who can be counted on to tell you you’re right. If you don’t have a friend who sees things differently than you do, please try to make one. 

This is not to discourage you from being people of conviction—people who stand up for their beliefs, who condemn what they believe is wrong and defend what they think is right. It is rather to encourage you genuinely to think for yourself and to engage others in a truth-seeking spirit, one that does not presuppose one’s own infallibility. There is no incompatibility between being a person of conviction and practicing the virtue of intellectual humility. Even people of conviction can acknowledge that they may have things to learn from people with whom they disagree. And no one ever learned from someone while shouting at him or shunning her.

Public Meetings and Deliberation

 At APSR, Jonathan E. Collins has an article titled "Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings." The abstract:

Would public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? I addressed this question by conducting an original survey with an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey featured a randomized experiment in which each study participant was shown a short clip of an actual school board meeting that was (1) a standard meeting with no public participation, (2) a meeting with public participation, or (3) a meeting with deliberation (public participation followed by a reasoned response from the school board). The experience of viewing the more participatory and deliberative school board meetings led to increased trust in local officials and a stronger willingness to attend school board meetings in the future. This study has significant implications for civic engagement, local politics, and public school governance.

From the article:

Public meetings are a critical component of American democracy. Of the most used types of political participation, attending a public meeting is the only one that allows for citizens to have direct contact with policy makers in real time. As Brian Adams (2004, 43) states, public meetings “can facilitate citizen participation and the development of good policy by assisting citizens in achieving their political goals.” Public meetings create proverbial windows of transparency, which allow for citizen oversight of the legislative behavior of political elites. Despite the utility of these meetings to American democracy, public meeting attendance as a form of political participation is underutilized. Since 2000, in each year that the American National Election Study (ANES) has been administered, only 20% to 30% of Americans report having attended at least one meeting over the course of previous the year (see Figure 11). This means that, in a given year, over 70% of Americans never attend a public meeting at all. If federal elections experienced such consistently low levels of participation, we would consider American democracy.

The threat that low and uneven public meeting attendance creates for American democracy has long been a concern for political scientists. “The town meeting has certainly lost a great deal of the power it once had, and attendance has declined,” writes Jane Mansbridge (1980, 127). As such, the findings of this study have implications for how public meetings can generate more participation and help deepen trust in local institutions, especially school boards. The evidence presented above indicates that exposing individuals to public meetings that feature direct citizen participation and public deliberation, respectively, directly leads to increased trust in local officials and an increased willingness to attend public meetings in the future. The upshot here is that vibrant, engaging meetings can beget active, well-attended meetings.

A Discussion of Deliberative Democracy

 

Across Talk is a new monthly video series hosted by Lincoln Zaleski, a disinformation specialist at Renew America Together. In our fifth episode, Lincoln chats with Selene Swanson, a Research Fellow at the Project on International Peace and Security. Selene describes her research regarding combating social polarization in the US through deliberative democratic forums. Renew America Together is a 501 (c)(3) organization designed to promote and achieve greater common ground in America by reducing partisan division and gridlock. Our mission is to revitalize public and political discourse by teaching and promoting civics, citizenship and civility. 

• Read Selene's white paper here: https://www.wm.edu/offices/global-res... 
• Check out PIPS: https://www.wm.edu/offices/global-res... 
• Visit our website: https://renewamericatogether.org/

Remote Voting in the House: A Problem for Deliberation

Don Wolfsenberger at The Hill:

Just before adjournment on Monday, the House Clerk read a letter from the Sergeant-at-Arms declaring, after consultation with the Attending Physician, that the pandemic health emergency remains in effect, thereby extending to mid-August special rules allowing remote floor voting and virtual committee proceedings

…

It’s not unusual for the House to adopt special rules to address special circumstances, and the pandemic shutdown has certainly been a special circumstance. But, once the crisis has mostly passed, members decide they liked the convenience of not having to fly in and out of Washington each week. They are much more comfortable staying at home, working their districts, helping their constituents with case work, looking after those special federal projects, and laying the groundwork for the crucial mid-term elections just around the corner in 2022. Never mind that members already have one or two district offices fully staffed with folks to do that work.

Yesterday’s emergency mandates become today’s convenient necessities (pardon the oxymoron). It might have some appeal to the more fiscally conservative citizens: think of all the taxpayer dollars being saved on roundtrip plane flights each week Congress is in session. I suspect, however, that most voters would like to know their representatives are actually earning their pay by being physically present in their committees and floor sessions in Washington. Isn’t the essence of deliberative democracy, after all, face-to-face deliberations between proponents and opponents of a particular bill or amendment?

An Exercise in Deliberative Democracy

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

 A release from Stanford University:

As polarization continues to deepen in America, over 600 young adults from across the country did something that feels impossible in these divisive times: They came together for a discussion on policy proposals ranging from Electoral College reform to President Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps, regional minimum wage, universal basic income and the implementation of a new wealth tax. Some of the participants even changed their minds after talking through these ideas with their peers, according to data compiled by Stanford students.

Over 600 young adults from across America logged on to a customized online platform to participate in the largest Deliberative Polling experiment with young people to date, thanks to the organizational efforts of Stanford students and others. (Image credit: Center for Deliberative Democracy)

Helping organize the event, called Shaping Our Future, was a team of students enrolled in Deliberative Democracy Practicum: Applying Deliberative Polling, a hands-on course developed by the Center for Deliberative Democracy (CDD) and the Haas Center for Public Service to give students an opportunity to learn quantitative and qualitative research methods by working on a Deliberative Polling project.

The Deliberative Polling method was developed by Stanford scholar James Fishkin and involves putting people together for an informed discussion about issues that the public has said matters to them. Fishkin, along with other scholars affiliated with the CDD, have found that this technique can lead to a depolarized and more democratic society.

“I think that it’s really easy to get caught up with what you believe in and have that echoed back at you through social media or through conversations with friends or social networks where you find yourselves spending most of your time,” said Tara Hein, ’23, a political science major who took the course. “Even if you do want to engage in conversations with people who might have different views, finding those spaces can be really challenging.”

Over the spring quarter, Hein and other students enrolled in the course brainstormed topics for discussion, prepared the pre- and post-event surveys that asked participants about those topics, analyzed the data and wrote a report with their key findings that was released June 21.

Stanford worked in collaboration with a think tank, the Berggruen Institute, and the nonprofit organization Equal Citizens, as well as some 35 campuses from across the country, to recruit a random sample of participants aged between 18 and 29. The research firm Generation Lab also helped.

These collaborative efforts culminated in the largest Deliberative Polling event for that age group to date. 

Power of deliberation

Over a weekend in May, participants logged on to a customized online platform the CDD designed in collaboration with the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team to facilitate a structured and equitable conversation with more opportunities for participants to speak up. In addition to attending small group discussions, participants also sat in on two plenary sessions with balanced panels of experts.

In attendance were some 617 young adults. Nearly 70 percent were enrolled in either a community college, a public or private university, a Hispanic-serving institution or a historically Black college or university. Some 19 percent had already completed a higher education degree and 12 percent had neither enrolled nor completed a post-secondary education. About 60 percent identified as Democrat, 25 percent as Independent and 7 percent as Republican. Participants came from 38 states as well as Washington, D.C., with a majority – 81 percent – living in urban or suburban areas. About 56 percent identified themselves as female, 38 percent as male.

While the sample was not nationally representative, it did provide the research team with some surprising insight into the power of deliberation, particularly as a way to lead to more informed opinions, said Alice Siu, CDD’s associate director and a co-instructor of the practicum course.

For example, the percentage of people who said they had no opinion on some of the policy proposals decreased after the event. Some 8.1 percent of participants said they had no opinion on universal basic income (UBI). At the end of the weekend, it dropped to only 1.3 percent. Several other policy areas also saw a decrease in “no opinion” responses after the event: On Biden’s idea of a Civilian Climate Corps, 34.4 percent of participants said they had no opinion but after deliberation it changed to 4.7 percent. Ranked choice voting shifted from 14.3 percent to 3.7 percent, and the fractional proportional method of awarding electoral votes decreased from 17.3 percent to 5.3 percent.

“This is a huge feat for democracy, because we want people to be able to formulate their own opinions, thoughts and views on these issues. So having a large number of people forming their own views on these issues over a weekend’s deliberation is a really important finding for us,” Siu said.

For some participants, these conversations also changed their positions, particularly around topics related to UBI and the minimum wage. Prior to the event, 81.6 percent agreed that a minimum wage should reflect differences in the cost of living across the United States. Following deliberation, support dropped to 61.6 percent: People were concerned that businesses might relocate to places with lower wages. Others pointed out that even with a regional minimum wage, disparities still exist within the state itself.

Deliberative democracy – informed and moderated discussion that transcends partisan identities – can lead to a depolarized and more democratic society, according to Stanford research.


In a 2019 Sophomore College course, students traveled to Dallas, Texas, where they helped staff a landmark experiment that brought together more than 500 registered voters who represent the political, cultural and demographic diversity of America in one room.

Megha Parwani has been selected as a 2021-22 Newman Civic Fellow by Campus Compact for her work to strengthen civil dialogue, civic engagement and democracy-building, particularly among young people.

Enthusiasm also waned after discussions about UBI. For example, some 60 percent of participants said the federal government should give cash grants of $1,000. Following deliberation, it dropped to 57 percent. “Drawing from my experience on campus, I certainly did not expect support for UBI and the regional minimum wage to decrease,” said Thay Graciano, ’23. “In observing the conversations in real time, I noticed people were bringing up valid points about why they did not believe that something could be implemented in a way that they thought was fair.”

For example, some participants pointed out that $1,000 is not worth the same across different regions of the United States. Questions were raised about how to fund the program and if wealthier Americans needed the money.

“Despite the left tilt of the sample, participants didn’t just move to their ideological corners, even on key liberal priorities like the minimum wage and UBI,” said Luke Terra, associate director and director of community-engaged learning and research at Haas and co-instructor of the course. “The drop in support for the regional minimum wage proposal in particular shows the value of exposing people to diverse perspectives on complex policy choices.”

For Aden Beyene, ’24, what made Shaping Our Future effective was the opportunity to hear how people’s backgrounds shape what they believe in.

“For a lot of participants, when they articulated their views, their statements had a similar format. They would begin with ‘I believe such and such, because such and such.’ I think the most salient part of the discussion was the ‘because’ element,” Beyene said. “These participants were speaking from their own experience, their own lived opinions on the subject.”

View the full report on the CDD website.

Deliberative Democracy and Citzen Assemblies

 At The Harvard Gazette, Liz Mineo talks to Jane Mansbridge:

GAZETTE: How might we get citizens who are so polarized to listen to one another?

MANSBRIDGE: One proven practice is the technique of citizens’ assemblies or deliberative polls. These are groups of citizens drawn randomly, through a democratic lottery, from a particular population. It could be an entire country, a state, a city, or even a neighborhood, from which you bring together a group of citizens to talk about an issue that is of concern to their community. For this technique to be successful, the group has to be random, meaning that you have to have good representation from everyone, not just the white retirees who don’t have much to do and would love to come to this sort of thing. To get a random group, you ought to able to pay the participants because you want to be able to get the poor, the less educated, and people who, for one reason or another, would not give up a weekend otherwise to come together with other citizens to deliberate about some major issue.

GAZETTE: How do we know these assemblies foster civil dialogue?

MANSBRIDGE: Let’s take the deliberative polling organized by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford that I’ve worked with, in informal ways, for a couple of decades. If you look at those gatherings, one important way to get citizens to listen to one another comes from their design, in which they alternate small groups of 12 or so people, randomly drawn from the random selection, with larger assemblies, in which the citizens ask questions to experts. One of the tasks they have in their small group is not only to deliberate about the issues, but to design questions they want to ask the experts. As it happens, the project of asking a common question becomes a task that binds citizens together across the lines of difference.

GAZETTE: Have you participated in a citizens’ assembly? What was it like?

MANSBRIDGE: I attended the deliberative polling “America in One Room” in September 2019. In our group of 12, we had some very right-wing Trump supporters and very left-wing folks from the East Coast. But the process of coming together to work on a question allowed each group to build a sense of a common purpose. I remember that people in my group were almost doing high fives as they were agreeing on the questions and the wordings. Another thing that happens in a small group is that you can speak from personal experience in a way that is direct, unpretentious, and not preachy or ideological, which can be a very powerful way to break down barriers. The third thing that happens is that sometimes people begin to change their minds publicly in the group. This has ripple effects because when people see others open to change, they too become more willing to be more open to taking in new arguments. The fourth thing is that because everyone is working with the same background materials, they come to agree on the same facts. Those background materials are very important because they’re balanced and provide far more information to people than what they might have gotten through their own networks or news bubbles. That’s a big intellectual breakthrough in the polarization dynamic. Agreeing on the same facts is rare on some issues today. The process of citizens’ assemblies gives people a common basis of facts to work from. And the last thing is that people are just registering their opinion; they’re not voting, as in a town meeting.

It’s extremely impressive to go to a citizens’ assembly and interact with people you would never have bumped into in the course of your everyday life. You get an emotional sense of effective democracy. Everybody gets the feeling that they’re doing something somewhat historic, extremely unusual, and worthy because it’s very expensive to conduct, both in time and money. The seriousness of the endeavor opens people’s minds and allows them to think differently from the way they think in their normal, dismissive, everyday way.

Encouraging Dellberation

Richard M. Perloff at Cleveland.com:

Pollyannaish as it may sound, three lines of social science research show that treating adversaries in positive, respectful ways can overcome resistance, replacing it with, if not agreement, mutual understanding.

First, research has documented that when researchers affirm people’s sense of self – for example, by inducing them to feel good about a strong personal value – they validate their worth as human beings. This global validation of their personal self-worth, unlike a verbal attack which provokes resistance, warms people’s hearts, opens their psychological pores and actually increases their receptivity to considering alternative views.

Second, a strategy called motivational interviewing eschews hard-ball efforts to “get” someone to change an entrenched social attitude, recognizing this will only cause people to dig in their heels. Instead, change agents help people “find their own intrinsic motivation to change …. by interviewing them — asking open-ended questions and listening carefully — and holding up a mirror so they can see their own thoughts more clearly,” as organizational psychologist Adam Grant observed in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year. The strategy in some cases has actually decreased prejudice toward illegal immigrants.

Thirdly, in deliberative polling, pioneered by political scientist James Fishkin, a representative sample of citizens gather together for a weekend, talking among themselves about controversial political issues. Seeing each other as fellow human beings, rather than as polarized liberal or conservative caricatures, as occurs over social media, participants nod their heads, listen, change their opinions to reflect what they heard, and grow more tolerant.

Science, Policy, and Deliberation

M. Anthony Mills at AEI:

Scientific evidence is indeed vital to public policy. The pandemic has made this undeniable, if it was not already obvious enough. But science does not offer a repository of neutral evidence that arrives, ready-made, onto the political scene. On the contrary, scientific knowledge is an achievement, the result of a complex process in which the judgment of scientific experts — call it expert judgment — plays a decisive role. Utilizing such knowledge to make policy decisions is even more complex, requiring not only expert judgment but also the judgment of those non-experts — call it non-expert judgment — whose experience, knowledge, or know-how is also needed to deliberate well about the best course of action. It follows that judgment and deliberation are not secondary, lesser processes, that we must rely on when integrating scientific evidence into the policymaking process. Rather, judgment and deliberation are essential to this process, in part because they are essential to science itself. Failure to appreciate this fact risks engendering unrealistic expectations about what scientific knowledge can accomplish in practical decision-making, thus inviting not only disappointment, distrust, and skepticism, but also bad policy.

In what follows, I will make a case for this alternative account of scientific knowledge by examining the role that expert judgment plays in scientific reasoning. I will then consider what implications this account has for how we understand practical decision-making informed by scientific knowledge. I conclude by suggesting that integrating scientific evidence into public policy is by nature deliberative, a reciprocal process in which both expert and non-expert judgments must play roles, and which requires that both experts and non-experts act with prudence.

 Full paper here: "The Role of Judgment and Deliberation in Science-Based Policy," by M. Anthony Mills CSAS Working Paper 21-16

Deliberation and the Value of Viewpoint Diversity

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

 Daniel Cox at FiveThirtyEight:

The irony here is that by studiously avoiding political disagreement, the potential for political conflict often becomes much worse. We become less able to understand our political opponents or empathize with their positions. Instead, we are more inclined to believe their ideas are not just wrong-headed but dangerous. This is bad for our democracy, creating an environment where many Americans are primed to accept misinformation and conspiracy theories.

There is hope, though. In a novel experiment, a group of researchers working with NORC at the University of Chicago, recruited over 500 registered voters from diverse backgrounds to discuss politics with one another over a four-day period. The researchers found that political discussions yielded a profound change in views about American democracy. A New York Times account of the experiment reported that “the share of participants who said they thought American democracy worked well doubled, to 60 percent.” And after just a few days of talking to people with different political beliefs, participants expressed considerably more favorable views about their political opponents as well. But despite these promising results, scaling up this experiment would be difficult, and it’s unclear how lasting these changes will prove to be.

At the very least, availing ourselves of diverse political viewpoints may reaffirm our trust in democratic institutions and processes, even if we don’t like the outcomes. Our survey showed that when our social circles include a more diverse mix of political beliefs, we are more open to argument and less ideologically extreme. And, arguably, the best way to get to this point is to discuss — and disagree about — politics more.

Race and Online Deliberation

Ken Broda-Bahm at JD Supra;

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on and intensifies, courts around the country are moving toward reopening in fits and starts, with distancing, temperature checks, masks, and hand sanitizer. Some courts are also exploring distanced alternatives, including in some cases trial by Zoom, or by other web-conferencing tools that allow jurors to stay home. Including jury deliberations is “the final yard” in this transition, with some courts using the technology only for jury selection, while others are exploring deliberations as part of demonstrations or actual online trials.
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If courts continue to move in this direction, what differences can we expect in deliberations? Will the medium of communication — in person or online — lead to differences in who participates? Discussions of online jury representativeness have focused on access to technology and to internet connections, and how they can be addressed (for example, by providing technology access in private rooms of courthouses or libraries). But what if the medium itself also causes differences in access? A large scale research project comparing in-person to online deliberations (Showers, Tindall, & Davies, 2015) was conducted five years ago, but now has new relevance. A team of Stanford researchers looked for demographic differences in comparing quality of participation across the deliberation styles, and while they found no significant differences based on gender, age or education, they did see a difference based on race. Online deliberation led to reduced black participation and increased white participation.

Showers, E., Tindall, N., & Davies, T. (2015, August). Equality of participation online versus face to face: condensed analysis of the community forum deliberative methods demonstration. In International Conference on Electronic Participation (pp. 53-67). Springer, Cham.