I am taking this opportunity to weigh in on the exchange between Arthur Lupia (and part 2), Jim Fishkin (and part 2), and others concerned with the Tomorrow's Europe Deliberative Poll. I come neither to praise nor bury this effort, but rather to simply offer some perspective.
The Deliberative Poll is but one of many practices created to enhance the quality of public deliberation. Before looking at its details, it's important to recognize that it shares common features with Citizen Juries, Planning Cells, Consensus Conferences, and other deliberative processes that have been developed over the past thirty years. These key features include:
1 - inclusion of a diverse cross-section of citizens in face-to-face discussion on public issues
2 - providing experts and partisans a role to express their views and share information with citizens
3 - a fair amount of semi-structured, professionally moderated discussion of (and reflection on) all that is heard during the process
4 - and a metric for faithfully recording the citizens' views after their deliberation
Only when held against an unreachable standard of perfection does the Deliberative Poll - or its peer processes - fail to achieve these four aims.
Compared to conventional public hearings, town halls, or other public discussions, the Deliberative Poll brings together a remarkably diverse set of participants. There are always opportunities to hear from qualified experts and, when appropriate, strong-willed partisans. There is time for deliberation (though more on this in a second), and the poll provides a nice before-and-after snapshot of opinion shift.
On a finer-grained analysis, the Deliberative Poll is superior to other methods in some regards - in particular, its combination of representative sampling, sample size, and detailed post-deliberation assessment. But these advantages come with liabilities that other processes better address.
The Deliberative Poll, in my view, does not provide enough time for face-to-face deliberation. Citizens need time to work through the nuances of issues and adequately hear each other's views.
When a full week - or longer - is set aside to study an issue and work through conflicting perspectives, a deeper analysis occurs. Thus, the typical week-long Citizen Jury can produce a detailed set of policy recommendations, with the participants arriving at a more complete consideration of the issues at hand. The Citizen Assembly, using a larger body of participants over a period of months, can arrive at a robust consensus on a concise policy position, suitable for public ratification. By contrast, the Deliberative Poll taps only the impact of a brief period of education, discussion, and reflection.
In addition, the Deliberative Poll would benefit from a more structured process, both when citizens meet with each other and when they interact with experts and partisans.
When hearing testimony, it is ideal if experts and partisans can cross-examine one another and be subject to dogged questioning by the citizens themselves. This happens at times in Deliberative Polls, but other processes are designed to make certain that this occurs. This helps ensure that when an expert makes a specious claim, it withers under their critics' cross-examination, and when a partisan gives a non-answer with vague platitudes or an unwelcome topic-shift, the unyielding follow-ups either reveal their inability to reply or force them to say what they truly believe, whatever the cost may be. In iterative processes with the luxury of more time, better use is made of outside opinions and information.
Within the citizen discussion groups, there is also considerable variation in the quality of moderation at Deliberative Polls. It is important to stress that simply having a moderator in the room with a written set of ground rules goes a long way toward removing the status-inequalities that critics see in mock juries. (Though a recent study colleagues and I conducted on real juries found high-quality deliberation to be the norm - PDF.)
My quibble with Deliberative Polls is that they spend too much of their deliberation time orienting citizen discussion toward generating questions for experts and partisans to answer. What is needed is more time after the questions-and-answers to work through citizens' views. The Poll does not seek a group decision, as other processes do, but it would speak with a stronger and clearer voice if there was more sifting before filling out the final post-deliberation ballot. Time, plus a structured deliberation format, would help achieve that result.
At the end of the day, I think it's fair to say that the Tomorrow's Europe Deliberative Poll is an important symbolic step toward a more deliberative European Union. Hopefully, it sets the stage for the deployment of a variety of deliberative tools and norms, among citizens and even among public officials in their own ostensibly deliberative bodies. A mature democracy will find times when a Deliberative Poll can help move the debate forward, and other times, it will see where a Citizen Assembly, Citizen Jury, or other process would work best. In tandem with mass deliberation through high-quality (and often interactive) media and old fashioned conversations, these processes can create a high-functioning deliberative democratic society.
