Trust in the Demos Isn’t Naive — It’s Empirical

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 citizens — that each person, each citizen, would rule and be ruled in turn.

Now that’s been dismissed as an idea suitable only for a small-scale society. The Athenians used a machine for choosing citizen panels of five hundred or more who made important public decisions. In a small society, everybody had a chance to serve. But could something like that work in a large society?

Once I began cataloging all the possible venues for deliberation — many of which we’ve already tried, I think yes, it could be applied on a large scale. Most obviously it could be applied in schools and in universities as a form of civic education. That would reach very large numbers of people.

We’ve already been experimenting with that, as I document in my book and on our website, the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford. Eventually, I’d like to build up to doing something like what Bruce Ackerman and I argued in a book a long time ago: Deliberation Day. The idea is that, before national or state elections, everybody has an opportunity to deliberate. And the platform provides a good opportunity for that because it lowers the cost.

When Ackerman and I first proposed the idea, it was treated as utopian because it was very expensive — but doing it online is not expensive. And we have now shown demonstrably that the results of our online platform are very similar to the results of face-to-face deliberation. We saw this in a project we ran with our colleagues in Finland. One-third of the participants deliberated face-to-face in Helsinki (I was there observing), one-third participated via Zoom — small groups with human moderators — and one-third used our online platform. The results were basically identical. We view that as proof of concept.

We’ve also identified all kinds of other contexts where deliberation could be embedded — like ballot proposition evaluation. In a large state like California, getting a proposition on the ballot requires millions of dollars, meaning the agenda can often be shaped by moneyed interests. That distorts the democratic intent behind these direct-democracy mechanisms. Deliberative democracy methods can be used both to help create ballot propositions and to evaluate them for the voters.