Deliberative opinion poll
Encyclopedia
The deliberative opinion poll is a form of opinion poll
that incorporates the principles of deliberative democracy
and sortition
.
The concept was described by James S. Fishkin
in his 1991 book "Democracy and Deliberation". Dr. Fishkin's method, has been copyrighted as "The Deliberative Poll".
Deliberative polling combines random sampling of public opinion
on a specific issue with small-group discussions. Rather than simply determining existing public opinion, a deliberative poll aims to understand what public opinion would be if the public were well-informed and had carefully discussed a particular issue. Citizens are invited by modern random sampling techniques to participate, so that a large enough sampling group will provide a relatively accurate representation of public opinion.
describes its process as follows:
has worked with Fishkin via the By the People Program on several deliberative opinion polls, including in 2004 when it sponsored several regional deliberative polls around topics related to the 2004 national elections. In June 2011 PBS joined him in hosting What's Next California poll, with the results intend to inform a future California ballot initiative
.
A group at Carnegie Mellon University
has been working on the creation of tools for online deliberative polls. Their first tool is an Adobe Connect-based discussion tool called PICOLA.
Fishkin and Yale Law
Professor Bruce Ackerman
have proposed a national holiday called Deliberation Day to allow voters to gather in large and small groups to discuss political issues.
Recently, PASOK
held a deliberative poll to elect the party's candidate for the municipality of Amaroussion.
Issues Deliberation Australia/America
, a political psychology think-tank, has worked with the Australian government to use deliberative polling for several important local and national issues, including the referendum on becoming a republic in 1999.
Deliberative polls have been held in China for over five years. The coastal township of Zeguo in Wenling
city has a population of 120,000. Fishkin's team selects 175 people who are representative of the general population. Deliberative polling takes place over a 3-day period, and the local government utilizes the priorities of the group. The experiment worked so well that the topic expanded from a single issue the first year (prioritizing public works projects) to the entire budget, and the Chinese are considering the process in other municipalities.
Between 1996 and 2007, Fishkin managed deliberative opinion polls for a syndicate of Texas utilities. The group's recommendations shifted their focus toward wind power, and the vast majority of customers agreed that it was worth the higher cost.
article, Joe Klein
questioned whether regular citizens were capable of making sound decisions on complex and technical issues. Fishkin responded:
The Hawaii Televote method was the first university-based model of deliberative polling in the world and succeeded in attracting highly representative samples of the public to participate. There were 12 Hawaii Televotes conducted from 1978-85. Ten were in Hawaii, one in New Zealand (1981) and one sponsored by SCAG (The Southern California Association of Governments) in 1983, prior to the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games in 1984. The complex method and extensive results have been reported in two books.
Fishkin, James S.: Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform, ISBN 0300051611, Yale University Press, 1991
Slaton Christa.: Televote. New York: Praeger 1992
Becker, Ted and Christa Daryl Slaton. The Future of Teledemocracy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000
Opinion poll
An opinion poll, sometimes simply referred to as a poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence...
that incorporates the principles of deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...
and sortition
Sortition
In politics, sortition is the selection of decision makers by lottery. The decision-makers are chosen as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates....
.
The concept was described by James S. Fishkin
James S. Fishkin
James S. Fishkin is a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Fishkin is a widely cited scholar on his work on Deliberative democracy. Along with Robert Luskin , he has pioneered a model of polling called the Deliberative Poll.-Career:Fishkin received his BA degree and...
in his 1991 book "Democracy and Deliberation". Dr. Fishkin's method, has been copyrighted as "The Deliberative Poll".
Deliberative polling combines random sampling of public opinion
Public opinion
Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views....
on a specific issue with small-group discussions. Rather than simply determining existing public opinion, a deliberative poll aims to understand what public opinion would be if the public were well-informed and had carefully discussed a particular issue. Citizens are invited by modern random sampling techniques to participate, so that a large enough sampling group will provide a relatively accurate representation of public opinion.
Process
The Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford UniversityStanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
describes its process as follows:
"A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll, members of the sample are invited to gather at a single place for a weekend in order to discuss the issues. Carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the participants and are also made publicly available. The participants engage in dialogue with competing experts and political leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions with trained moderators. Parts of the weekend events are broadcast on television, either live or in taped and edited form. After the deliberations, the sample is again asked the original questions. The resulting changes in opinion represent the conclusions the public would reach, if people had opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues."
Applications
PBSPublic Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
has worked with Fishkin via the By the People Program on several deliberative opinion polls, including in 2004 when it sponsored several regional deliberative polls around topics related to the 2004 national elections. In June 2011 PBS joined him in hosting What's Next California poll, with the results intend to inform a future California ballot initiative
Initiative
In political science, an initiative is a means by which a petition signed by a certain minimum number of registered voters can force a public vote...
.
A group at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
has been working on the creation of tools for online deliberative polls. Their first tool is an Adobe Connect-based discussion tool called PICOLA.
Fishkin and Yale Law
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
Professor Bruce Ackerman
Bruce Ackerman
Bruce Arnold Ackerman is an American constitutional law scholar. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School and one of the most frequently cited legal academics in the United States....
have proposed a national holiday called Deliberation Day to allow voters to gather in large and small groups to discuss political issues.
Recently, PASOK
Panhellenic Socialist Movement
The Panhellenic Socialist Movement , known mostly by its acronym PASOK , is one of the two major political parties in Greece. Founded on 3 September 1974 by Andreas Papandreou, in 1981 PASOK became Greece's first social democratic party to win a majority in parliament.The party is a socialist party...
held a deliberative poll to elect the party's candidate for the municipality of Amaroussion.
Issues Deliberation Australia/America
Issues Deliberation Australia/America
Issues Deliberation Australia/America is an internationalnonpartisan public policy and political psychology think tank co-based in Adelaide, Australia and Austin, Texas...
, a political psychology think-tank, has worked with the Australian government to use deliberative polling for several important local and national issues, including the referendum on becoming a republic in 1999.
Deliberative polls have been held in China for over five years. The coastal township of Zeguo in Wenling
Wenling
Wenling is a coastal county-level city in the municipal region of Taizhou, in southeastern Zhejiang province, China. It borders Luqiao and Huangyan to the north, Yuhuan to the south, Yueqing to the west, looks out to the East China Sea to the east...
city has a population of 120,000. Fishkin's team selects 175 people who are representative of the general population. Deliberative polling takes place over a 3-day period, and the local government utilizes the priorities of the group. The experiment worked so well that the topic expanded from a single issue the first year (prioritizing public works projects) to the entire budget, and the Chinese are considering the process in other municipalities.
Between 1996 and 2007, Fishkin managed deliberative opinion polls for a syndicate of Texas utilities. The group's recommendations shifted their focus toward wind power, and the vast majority of customers agreed that it was worth the higher cost.
Effectiveness
In a September 2010 Time magazineTime (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
article, Joe Klein
Joe Klein
Joe Klein is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, known for his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim...
questioned whether regular citizens were capable of making sound decisions on complex and technical issues. Fishkin responded:
"The public is very smart if you give it a chance. If people think their voice actually matters, they'll do the hard work, really study their briefing books, ask the experts smart questions and then make tough decisions. When they hear the experts disagreeing, they're forced to think for themselves. About 70% change their minds in the process."
Hawaii Televote as precedent
The Hawaii Televote was a form of polling that did not incorporate moderated face-to-face sessions among the citizens selected. It was invented by Ted Becker and Christa Daryl Slaton at the University of Hawaii in 1978. It was incorporated into the Hawaii State Constitutional Convention in 1978. The first two issues were whether to adopt citizens initiatives into the Hawaii Constitution and the second was whether to select Hawaii judges by election, not gubernatorial appointment.The Hawaii Televote method was the first university-based model of deliberative polling in the world and succeeded in attracting highly representative samples of the public to participate. There were 12 Hawaii Televotes conducted from 1978-85. Ten were in Hawaii, one in New Zealand (1981) and one sponsored by SCAG (The Southern California Association of Governments) in 1983, prior to the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games in 1984. The complex method and extensive results have been reported in two books.
See also
- DeliberationDeliberationDeliberation is a process of thoughtfully weighing options, usually prior to voting. In legal settings a jury famously uses deliberation because it is given specific options, like guilty or not guilty, along with information and arguments to evaluate. Deliberation emphasizes the use of logic and...
- Deliberative assemblyDeliberative assemblyA deliberative assembly is an organization comprising members who use parliamentary procedure to make decisions. In a speech to the electorate at Bristol in 1774, Edmund Burke described the English Parliament as a "deliberative assembly," and the expression became the basic term for a body of...
- Deliberative democracyDeliberative democracyDeliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...
- Online deliberationOnline deliberationOnline deliberation is a term associated with an emerging body of practice, research, and software dedicated to fostering serious, purposive discussion over the Internet...
- Opinion pollOpinion pollAn opinion poll, sometimes simply referred to as a poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence...
- Public spherePublic sphereThe public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action...
- Voting systemVoting systemA voting system or electoral system is a method by which voters make a choice between options, often in an election or on a policy referendum....
- UrtakUrtakUrtak is a free collaborative public opinion website founded in 2008. An urtak survey can be created by any individual for his or her community. The users of an urtak survey can add questions of their own to the survey, as well as answer questions that have been asked by other users...
Additional reading
Becker, Ted. "Teledemocracy," The Futurist, December 1981Fishkin, James S.: Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform, ISBN 0300051611, Yale University Press, 1991
Slaton Christa.: Televote. New York: Praeger 1992
Becker, Ted and Christa Daryl Slaton. The Future of Teledemocracy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000
External links
- Center for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University
- By the People Program, Public Broadcasting System
- Tomorrow's Europe, the first Europe wide deliberative Poll