James S Fishkin

James S Fishkin is director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy in the department of communication, Stanford University. He is a pioneer of "deliberative polling" - a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Among his books are The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (Yale University Press, 1995) and (with Bruce Ackerman) Deliberation Day (Yale University Press, 2004).

Deliberative polling: distilling the crowd’s wisdom

James Surowiecki's acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds offers a good overview of cases in which decentralised group processes lead to excellent collective judgments, sometimes better than those

By James S Fishkin

/ 12 Oct 2007