Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world. The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?
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), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on Deliberative Polling, a process of deliberative public consultation that has been conducted more than 150 times around the world. He is the author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP) and other books.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
This conversation comes at an interesting moment where we're witnessing a huge change in the political order and perhaps the world order. Your new book can deliberation cure the ills of democracy. I found it so compelling and timely, exploring how deliberative democracy can address the polarization, misinformation, and disengagement plaguing modern democratic systems around the world, not just in the U.S. Your argument, for those who have not read it because it's just coming out, is that structured, informed discussion among diverse groups of citizens can lead to better policy decisions and a more engaged electorate.
On the other hand, it seems like it might be idealistic, but it's also pragmatic as you write about it. In the book, you don't just theorize about better democracy; you present real-world examples where deliberative processes have led to more informed and consensus-driven decisions. This has been your life's work–challenging the assumption that citizens are too uninformed or indifferent to meaningfully contribute to policy decisions outside the usual rage to engage and fractured connections with silos and bubbles.
I have so many questions for you, but let's just start off with the core of your book. How can deliberation cure the ills of democracy? How can we scale it and teach the public to participate in a more deliberative society? Is AI part of bringing deliberative democracy to the masses?
JAMES FISHKIN
The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades, and through maybe 160 elaborate projects all over the world, are the following:
First, democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it? The public is subjected to misinformation and disinformation. Our public sphere has decomposed into two bubbles or enclaves where people hear like-minded voices because they find them congenial.
Algorithms of social media make it even more convenient to get information that way. So, finding the will of the people is the first problem. The second problem is that the way our political communication systems have evolved leads to more and more extreme partisan polarization. These divisions have mostly emerged by party, but sometimes by other factors, and have become seemingly intractable. Those divisions lead to deadlock and a perception that democracies cannot get anything done, which opens the door to various forms of authoritarianism or causes people to lose faith in democracy.
That's the second big problem. The third big problem is that for democracy to function, citizens need to make a connection between their considered judgments about what needs to be done and what the parties are offering in elections. However, our voting patterns have become more and more tribalistic based on identity. Political parties mobilize people who will support their party, right or wrong, without critical thought. Most independents are leaners one way or the other; party identity is decisive. We need more deliberative voters—voters who will think about issues and exercise their choices based on those issues rather than mere party loyalty.
This has been argued to be a kind of folk theory of democracy that, while idealistic, has never fully materialized. It's as rare as a unicorn. Yet, we have shown.
Through applications of deliberative polling in controlled experiments—some of them at the national level, some quite visible and televised, and others featured in major media like the New York Times—all of these deliberative designs solve the three main issues mentioned.
So then the question arises: what do you do with that? Is there some way of scaling it? I would say first, there are many occasions when deliberative polls, representing the public, have been used to solve major public problems at both the national and local levels in various parts of the world. These developments are quite interesting because many of them were unexpected.
Secondly, there's no reason why the deliberative process could not be scaled. You don't need a constitutional amendment for it, as that is almost impossible to achieve in the U.S. It's a question of collective political will. If we wish to scale it, there are lasting effects.
I want to spread deliberation in schools and for certain important occasions, such as national elections. There could be mass deliberation, and we've created a platform working with Stanford colleagues in engineering. This AI-assisted platform has now been used in about 60 countries around the world, in various languages, and even for global deliberation. It has proven to be very effective and cost-effective, accomplishing the same goals as human moderators.
We have found that the supposedly intractable divisions between our political parties considerably diminish when people learn to listen to each other and understand each other's concerns. If you confront them with a different point of view, it may backfire. However, in a civil discussion where people learn to listen over time, they open up and begin to consider the opposing point of view.
Thirdly, we've found that even a year later, after one of these experiments, people vote according to the considered judgments they've arrived at. We published this in the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics. Those conclusions are featured in my book. It's not a myth that voters can do this.
You might say voters are ill-informed, and yes, they often are due to rational ignorance. If I have one vote in millions, why should I pay much attention, especially if I know everyone is trying to sell me something or manipulate me? Most of us are too busy; we have to earn a living and provide for our families. The complexities of public policies mean it's rational not to devote extensive time to them.
However, if you engage them to focus on the issues, they can competently handle challenges facing their communities and countries. That’s the difference. It’s not about being informed; it’s about having a voice in a small group of ten, within a larger sample divided into small groups. Your voice matters in that small group, and you feel engaged to listen and think about the issues, especially with a good digest of the pros and cons and an opportunity to answer questions from competing experts.
So that's an outline. The hardest part is scaling this, which is why we've developed technology and tested it around the world. However, even if we don't end up scaling it, we could do a great deal of good clarifying what people really think. The book concludes with multiple applications for deliberative processes.
Here's the trick: each of those applications is justifiable. If you could implement all of them, you would end up with a more deliberative society and change the way people relate to each other across differences, creating habits of citizenship that lead to better public decisions. We had about 70 policies addressing climate issues, and Republicans moved on those.
The idea that people are intractable in their views is misleading; if they keep consulting the same sources and talking to the same individuals, their views will not change. But if you place them in a civil dialogue where they re-examine their views and have their questions answered, they will reconsider and often shift significantly, which helps depolarize our differences.
If this approach were more widespread and people developed habits of self-critical thinking about issues, and had more opportunities to engage civilly with differing viewpoints, we could indeed achieve a more deliberative society. My colleague, Alice Hsu, has been leading efforts to bring deliberation to schools and universities both in the country and abroad.
Many of these projects are on our AI-assisted platform, allowing students from different regions to deliberate in the same small groups or sometimes within a given school system. We've had success in this area, working with the Close Up Foundation in Washington, D.C. We brought a national sample of young people to Washington to consider how they were going to vote last summer, before the election.
I must say, their enthusiasm was remarkable. They fully consumed the briefing document. We also have a video version of this document to enhance clarity and accessibility, though they hardly needed it. They were already well-prepared, engaging intensively for the trip to Washington, D.C. They changed their opinions on many issues similarly to adults in the original American One Room four years earlier.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Just to talk a moment about the Trump presidency, Elon Musk has been brought in to take out the fat from the budget, which I'm not against in principle. There are a lot of areas where money is being misspent, but I would much rather know you have these tools for deliberative democracy created. The average American struggles to get by, and they would look at the US budget and find genuine areas, but I find it's a little bit much say with Elon Musk, on the one hand, trimming the fat out of the budget, on the other hand, being a government contractor or benefiting from government contracts and other perks. I would much, much rather have that in the hands of the people. For me, military spending is too much, and I'd rather be spending on mitigating climate change, making healthcare accessible to all, education, and investments in the future. How could even deliberative democracy platforms be more involved in that decision-making process? I would just love a more participatory, deliberative democracy where we could vote with common sense, eliminating the bloat and the administrative overspending.
FISHKIN
The decisions of the people are usually quite smart, even in places where the level of literacy is low. Indeed, we think we had an effect on child marriage, on the education of girls, and public health. In Ghana, they were using untreated wastewater for gardening because there was a water shortage in Northern Ghana and the city of Tamale, where we were working, so instead they found other ways of finding water, rainwater harvesting and being more efficient with the use of water. So, and to prevent disease, people, if given collective choices and options, will make sound, not only sound decisions, but they will have reasons for those decisions. Now, we need that everywhere.
We need that everywhere. So, deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world. Before things tightened up in China, we were even doing projects in China with local governments, one of which was featured in Time magazine, and we published the results in major journals. So I think that in all these cases, I think we've done good. So, these examples are instructive, but in order to save democracy, people have to believe in it. When they deliberate, they tend to believe in democracy more and believe more optimistically that democracy can be made to work. And so I'm sort of like a Johnny Appleseed spreading this message around the globe of when the opportunities arise.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You've spoken about the different projects you've done around the world, and I'm wondering how it works in large populations such as China, America, and India. People have had reservations about deliberative democracy being able to represent such large populations. Now, in the instance of China, you have a very strong, successful capitalism with endless growth for the last 30 years, coupled with state-controlled socialism. How might deliberative democracy models or platforms help efforts to be more representative? I know their model is one of policy elites, and it works well for a large population. How could it be used to create a more nuanced representation of the average person?
FISHKIN
I'm going to Mongolia in May for a celebration of 10 years of deliberative polling in Mongolia. And it's the only place in the world that actually has a law requiring that they do it to change the Constitution. And the last change in the Constitution brought in a change in the electoral system. Mongolia is a relatively recent democracy that has actually led the way in instituting deliberative deliberative polling.
So it can help change our institutions. I'm not one of those people who think that these methods should replace the democracy of elections. People have died for the opportunity to vote in elections, but we can make our elections more thoughtful, and we can make our constitutional processes more thoughtful, and that's what deliberative democracy is for.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I’m very interested in deliberative democracy, and I wanted to ask about the role of agreement or consensus in your model of deliberation. Especially since, as some critics note, emphasizing agreement can lead to problems like manipulation and coercion in discourse or even lead to undermining the political agency that minorities draw from solitary groups. So, with that in mind, how do you frame agreement in your model, and how do you reconcile the pursuit of consensus with the need to avoid these issues?
FISHKIN
Well, there are two models of deliberative democracy. One is consensus-driven, where the product of the deliberation is an agreed statement, like a jury verdict or a written statement. That's what the citizens’ assemblies do, including the Citizens Convention on the Climate that was in France.
We don't do that because all the critiques of deliberative democracy come out of the jury literature. The jury is one of the most studied deliberative institutions in the world. And the social pressure to get a verdict or a consensus distorts the process. So, we get our results in confidential questionnaires before and after. People don't ever have to say how they come out on the issue. There's no show of hands. They register their final opinions in confidential questionnaires. So, if a group has views that are different from the others, they're perfectly free and should feel perfectly free to express those in the confidential questionnaires.
And so we get the exact state of opinion before deliberation and after, and we can study the changes. Statistically, because we have large enough samples that we can study it in a statistically meaningful way, as opposed to citizens’ juries or even the so-called citizens’ assemblies, which often have a hundred or maybe a hundred and fifty.
We use larger numbers, and we also have control groups so that we can compare. The people who never have to make the effort to spend a weekend deliberating or make a trip to the site, whether it's Washington, D.C. or the capital city of Mongolia or whatever. The control group just has to answer the questionnaire before and after.
So, in that case, we leave room for dissensus, but if there is a consensus, it comes out in the results, it comes out in the data, and very often there is, but it's not a forced consensus with the social pressure of people feeling they have to go along with the rest of the group.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You grew up in a different time with its own set of problems, but the recent experiences young Americans and young people around the world are confronting are an unprecedented range of challenges, from gun violence to climate change. What it means to be a young person at the cusp of adulthood, I think it's more challenging than it is to be a young person at many other times in history. So if you were a young adult today, what tools and skills would you be seeking out to help you navigate your journey?
FISHKIN
Oh, well, I don't know if I can offer general advice, except think for yourself. Be self-critical, and keep learning, and question the news sources that you get exposed to willy-nilly by algorithms. Question the sources, and if you're interested in a topic, do some of your own research. But do it with some validation. Check the major newspapers have fact checks in their databases of claims, that they've fact-checked. And there's so much misinformation and disinformation that you can get exposed to and diverted so that well-meaning people can turn into conspiracy theorists if they're not careful.
So you have to be self-critical, and the habits of thinking for yourself are very, very hard to develop currently, but that's what we need of all citizens.
