Following the first of Professor Lupia's posts on the problems of deliberative polls, the two masterminds of the deliberative polling method, Professor James Fishkin of Stanford and Professor Robert Luskin of the University of Texas, respond to his accusations on the issue of transparency:
Skip Lupia has staked a good part of his career on the view that, by and large, ordinary citizens successfully use cognitive short cuts and simple cues to reach the same policy views and electoral choices they would reach if they knew and thought a lot more about them - and that deliberation should therefore make little difference. The evidence from Deliberative Polling challenges a great deal of his past work.
The claims in our Deliberative Polling research are supported by at least 21 scientific papers, some already published and the rest presented at scientific conferences and on the CDD web site. These papers are of course subject to peer review as they go through the publication process.
At the moment, together with varying collaborators, we have five papers with revise-and-resubmit verdicts from top political science journals. A number of other scholars have independently analyzed some of our data, writing scholarly papers and, in one case, a book from them.
We have admittedly been slow about making our data more widely available. 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. When Lupia raised the issue of access to Deliberative Polling data at a recent symposium at Stanford, we replied that we would be happy to send him some. We never got a request but should still be happy to do so.
As noted, however, five manuscripts are currently at the revise and resubmit stage, and as these and other manuscripts are accepted, more data sets will be made available. We have put countless hours into creating and implementing these projects and simply want to have first crack at the data from them.
Finally, It is worth noting that we are at this moment (September 27-29) conducting a "Deliberative Polling Training Institute" at Stanford to train researchers from 16 universities around the country to conduct their own Deliberative Polls, producing their own data and, we hope and expect, leading to their own independent social science publications, testing our and many other claims.
(The full, unedited reply can be found here - JCM)
