The day before the Tomorrow's Europe deliberative poll kicks off, materminds Professor James Fishkin and Professor Robert Luskin give a few more details about the practicalities:
A basic sampling issue is whether to try to represent the population of every individual member state or the population of Europe as a whole.
Tomorrow's Europe begins with an interview sample of 3,500. Its participant sample is effectively capped at 400, given the availability of only 20 rooms equipped with full translation facilities for the small group discussions (15 in the Parliament itself and 5 more in the Social and Economic Committee) and our experience that the quality of the discussion suffers in groups of more than 20.
These samples are more than adequate to estimate pre-deliberation European public opinion, the differences between participants and nonparticipants, and the changes of opinion and knowledge gains induced by deliberation.
In addition, normally the DP participants are assigned randomly to the small groups. In Tomorrow's Europe, however, the large number of languages and the need for simultaneous translation precludes that. Instead, we have worked out a complex plan to assign a manageable variety of languages to each small group, while still maximizing diversity within that constraint.
In order to break down the results of the Tomorrow's Europe poll to allow the analysis of individual countries, the first approach would require 27 adequately sized national samples. If a sample of size X (a few hundred) is adequate to represent all Europe, samples totaling 27 times X would be necessary to represent all the member states individually.
In this case, that would mean 10,800 participants in the deliberation, all assigned to small groups with moderators and translators provided, not to mention the logistics of travel arrangements, accommodation, and the provision of equal access to balanced briefing materials and a range of experts.
In this light, it is clear that the only practical choice for a DP is to try to represent the EU as a whole - albeit stratified by country, with weights roughly proportional to the country's representation in the European Parliament.
