James S. Fishkin
In my book, I review the evidence from a series of national “America in One Room” projects we conducted with a great survey partner, NORC [National Opinion Research Center] at the University of Chicago, which included control groups. We found clear evidence of considered judgments, depolarization, and lasting effects. We published these findings in the American Political Science Review.
We also did a climate change project using an online deliberation platform developed here at Stanford. It works in any language, and it doesn’t require a human moderator — which opens the door to large-scale applications. We’ve already deployed it in about sixty countries, and we’re currently in serious discussions about expanding it further.
In the last chapter of my book, I speculate about how we could create a more deliberative society. These dialogues create lasting effects: they create greater mutual trust, dramatically reduce depolarization, and generate more informed judgments about what should be done. They also create the kind of thoughtful voter that many of my colleagues in political science dismiss as rare as a unicorn. And that’s exactly the kind of voters we need to solve our public problems.
In a healthy democracy, politics shouldn’t just be a contest of strength between parties — it should be a battle of ideas. People need to hear the best arguments on either side and decide for themselves what they really prefer, for the good of their communities.
So, how would we scale it? In the last part of the book, I outline a range of venues and opportunities — many of which we have already piloted. The book begins with the Athenians, which is a personal avocation of mine — to study both the Athenians and the American founding and the values at stake in both cases. In Athens, Aristotle talked about the rotation method among…
Auteur: James S. Fishkin
