In my original post, I raised questions about the transparency and effectiveness of deliberative mechanisms such as Deliberative Polls (DP). Jim Fishkin and Professor Luskin have made several claims in their response that deserve additional attention. In sum, deliberation can sometimes do great things, it can sometimes cause huge problems, and it can often have no lasting effect at all. Everyone who has a stake in Tomorrow’s Europe has a right to ask direct questions about what a Deliberative Poll can -- and cannot -- accomplish. 1. Jim and Professor Luskin begin by questioning my motives rather than dealing in facts. It is odd for an advocate of deliberation to defend his claims by questioning others’ motives. It is well known within the deliberative democracy community, that this kind of maneuver does more to impede successful deliberation rather than facilitate open conversation. It is better for participants in an open conversation to focus on the truth values of propositions and factual claims. To deal with the facts of his claim, I have published a number of articles and books focuses on the conditions under which citizens can successfully use various pieces of information to make quality decisions. I show that sometimes citizens can be successful when skeptics and pundits do not expect it. In other cases, citizens are not as successful. This is all very well documented -- as Fishkin knows. I invite you to have a look at my website (http://www.umich.edu/~lupia) and draw your own conclusion. 2. I was invited by the editors of this blog, to offer greater clarity in what deliberative democracy can and cannot do. To this end, the main conclusion of an expansive set of scientific research (almost none of which is by me) is that if you want to propose credible means for helping citizens be more effective, it is important to understand the conditions under which citizens can -- and cannot -- use information effectively. The questions I and others have raised about deliberation come from a disconnect between claims about the effects of deliberation (such as some made by Jim) and heavily researched findings about learning and decision making that emerge from experiments and related scientific work in fields such as psychology, sociology, political science, and the neurosciences. In this case, the science-Fishkin disconnect does not automatically imply that Jim is wrong when he makes claims about DPs, but it does mean that there is a legitimate basis for asking whether he is right. 3. In science, a common way to handle such matters is to facilitate replication. This often entails sharing data from which key claims are made. Later in their response, Fishkin and Luskin admit that they have "been slow about making our data more widely available." Slow is right. Their website refers to dozens of studies costing many millions of dollars including some that are over a decade old. But even as of today, there does not appear to be a single dataset that is publicly available. They then claim that, "We have been the victims of our own success in entrepreneuring a continuing stream of Deliberative Polls, which has retarded our efforts to write up the results for scholarly publication." This response does not hold water in the scientific community. That they have been "too busy" over the last decade to post data on which they seek to base scientifically validated claims is not a credible response. Today, it takes only a few minutes to post a dataset on the web. If Jim is serious about obtaining the legitimacy for DPs that comes from transparency, then he should make his data, particularly from his older and higher profile studies, available without delay.