James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, Thoughtful Thursday

James S. Fishkin is of course known for his work in deliberative poling. His book, Democracy and Deliberation, of course discusses this; but more important is his work on classifying democratic thought and the references to different political thought and critics of democracy.

We should compare this quadrant system and set of two axis to that of Dr. Hibbing and Dr. E. Theiss-Morse. They hypothesized an axis where American's were asked how much direct democracy they wanted and on the other direction, the familiar left-right dichotomy. They pointed that there was a bell-curve with a centrist opinion of people's opinions in both axis. But in America, we have no direct democracy but the government is right in the middle on the conventional left and right political spectrum.

Aemrican Constitutional evolution has been pushing the direction of quadrant four. Obvious examples are the ammendments to the constitution:

1. Ammendment Seventeen that provides for the people to elect the Senators.
2. Ammendment Ninteen provided for women sufferage
3. Ammendment twenty-four disallowed the poll tax
4. Ammendment twenty-six allows eighteen years old to vote.

He points out that president and legislatures pay more attention to public opinions. This was termed the "plebiscitary President" Our electoral College simply votes as the individuals who selectd a slate for a particular party wanted them to. Similarly, delegates to political convetions vote for whom they want. (This was a shift to quadrant four.)

And now all States use primaries and the officials and elders in political parties have little power to select the individuals running for high office. Dr. Fishkin points that we have not had a series of ballots in a Presidential party convention since 1952 and the primaries started in the 1920's. And he despairs about the horse-race mentality, one lamented specifically by Dr. Krugman in the health care debate. Dr. Fishkin cites that sixty percent of presidential campaign coverage was to "horse race convention."

Yet our system is representative. On the federal level, there has never been a national referendum on any topic. We may write to our legislator about our opinions on a health care reform; we may threaten to vote the ... out of office, but ultimately, we are powerless to control what the reform will be.

But systems can vary in the amount of dleiberation they allow. Dr. Fishkin hypothesized a system like QUBE. This was the system that first had Pay-per-view and video-on-demand. It allowed the system to collect answers to a multiple choice question with five answers Dr. Fishkin hypothesized that the remote coudl be used for voting. But he despaired that people would quickly make a click on an important national issue without thinking about the consequences. And of course demagougery is an issue that Dr. Fishkin mentions and I discussed when I reviewed Paul Woodruff's book on Athenian democracy. Dr. Fishkin cites the famous argument in Federalist Number Ten that "was designed to show how impediments tto majorities could prevent tyranny" and also to find "representatives" that will protect the true good of the nation that puts us in quadrant one.

Dr. Fishkin, of course, studied deliberative polling. The goal is to get the same percentage results that would be gotten if the entire population could be forced to deliberate and think about an issue before voting or answering a poll. A group is selected randomly, as they would for conventional polling. However, they are given briefing materials and then meet, often telievised. They meet for a weekend and discuss the issues with experts and with trained moderators. Parts are televised As an experiment, they look at the opinions of the participants before and after the deliberative polling exercise and the Center for Delibrative Democracy reports on these differences. The Intelligence Squared Debate system has the audience give their opinion before and after the debate and reports the difference in the votes.

As one would expect, Dr. Fishkin talks about first democracy. And he mention the "graphe paranomon" It was literally a trial of a person who made an illegal proposal before the main assembly. It was 500 people. But it mentions two things I raised earlier in this blog: that the committee had little or no guidelines as to what to consider and they considered the whole life of the person.

Again, I look forward to chasing all the wonderful references in the back of the book which provide a good guide to political theory relevant to this blog.

Sortition, Stealth Democracy and Particapatory Democracy

Dr. Hibbing and E. Theiss-Morse wrote a book about American's views of the mechanism of Democracy. Do we accept Republicanism and representative democracy as a feasible substitute for an ideal of truly democratic and participatory democracy(1)? They show a figure showing that Americans prefer a system midway between pure representative democracy (which is what we have on a federal level) and the fully democratic system that I advocate. The bell curve of beliefs is pretty similar to that of the bell curve between right-wing and left-wing beliefs. The majority of Americans are in the middle on the left-right scale and most Americans are not extreme in ideological spectrum.

Would Americans prefer that government be run by impartial empathetic experts and not have to be bothered by participating in democracy? These authors would say yes. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence has not advanced to that level yet, one might argue that this is the wrong question. Thus, the question might better phrased, if we could reform campaign contributinos and the like, and given the innate limitations of all humans, would you prefer a participatory democracy or a republican democracy?

Drs. Saebo and Nilsen in Norway had discussion boards on democracy models and compared four main themes:

1. Passivity
2. A combination of representative and technocrats running things--which is what Americans and the rest of the " first world" have
3. Expanding citizen involvement using cybermedia which he terms "neo-republicanism." With some of the web ideas such as recovery.gov of the Obama administration, Electronic town halls seems to be what is what American democracy is moving towards.
4. And lastly, Cyber-democracy.

Drs. Saebo and Nilsen report the discussion group did not support that, but they expressed cautious optimism that support might increase when citizens are given the opportunity to try cyberdemocracy. (Which is what I aim to do in my new research project.)

Muhlenberger did a study of on-line deliberation and found that after participating, Americans were more likely to suport cyber-optimistic ideas.

Sortition refers to the random selection of individuals to make decisions in government. Currently, in the united States, only juries and grand juries exemplifies this. Brian Martin is one person who advocates replacing representative democracies by series of juries that would deal with various issues which he terms demarchy. He points out the problems with referendums, the voters can simply give a yes or no.

Brian Martin points out in a community that there would be sortition juries chosen to handle art, transportation, etc. Athenians used this for many purpose, but not exclusvively. Later when I talk about parametric constitutions, we can discuss John Zube's Panarchy where several systems can be used. And he has several links to attempts to try this out. Paul Woodruff talks about democracy in ancient democracy, the importance of randomly selected legislatures to avoid the power of wealth in elections, and things that we take for granted in democracy but Dr Woodruff refers to as "doubles" for democracy.

Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips advocate the House of Representatives being chosen by lot. But one could have a parametric method. For example, there could be three houses, one chosen by sortition, one chosen as represenatives by district as we do now, and the Senate chosen by election from the states. In addition to voting for the second two houses, we could vote for the percentage of each house that is needed to pass legislation. Thus, at a particular time, 40% of the Senante, 60% of the Sortition House, and 37% of our House of Representatives. (There has to be a hysteresis, so that voting on this is not used to influence specific legislation. Thus, the vote might not take effect for fifteen years. Or there could be a rule that the percentages do not change more than five percent year regardless of the votes.) Obviously, the Senate and House are designed to reflect the paradigm between a strict system proportional to the number of voters and giving power on a state-by-state basis. One could average the votes for the percentages when accumulated on a per-state basis and on a vote. (I also will talk later about the min-max principle in voting to deal with this kind of divide.)

Wally Smith talks about Direct Democracies, and argues for having proxies. Everyone gets to either participate or nominate someone who they consider better qualified themselves, allowing the chain to go up by four levels. He also observes a back-of-the-envelope system that all the legislation which is less than one hundred thousand pages, could be voted on in ten page chunks with ten thousand people voting on each chunk. I proposed some mechanisms and (students here at Western Illinois are starting to implement in computer code for the Web )on how to combine decisions better than this.

But such a discussion would not be complete without mentioning Deliberative Polling and the work of Peter Fishkin. In deliberative democracy, individuals are chosen randomly. They are given "briefing material" which is "balanced" and an opportunity to question experts.

Here he implemented several nationally televised polls in Australia, Britain and the United States. And people's opinions did change. Most of the results he cited are on the order of fifteen percent, but there were dramatic changes in some cases, particularly a deliberative polling exercise done on sources of energy for several Texas utility companies where there were thirty percent changes. These changes are comparable to the changes in people's opinion after a debate on whether "Global warming is a crisis" that I heard on National Public Radio. They are also comparable to logical discrepancies in polling results. Wally Smith has several examples of these. 61% of Americans say that abortion should not be permitted after fetal brainwaves are detected. 58% say that abortion should not be permitted after fetal heartbeat detected. These occur at the sixth week of pregnancy and 18 to 21 days. On the other hand, 64% of Americans are in favor of letting Roe vs. Wade stand which permits abortion after three months, which was stated the indirect. And similarly sixty percent say abortion should be "left up to the women and her doctor." These results differ by twenty percent, about the same rate of change we saw in many of the deliberative polling exercises.

Opinion Leader Research and the Institute for Public Policy Reserch and others in Britain have tried out citizen juries to get input on a wide of usually specialized topics such as handling the rehabilitation of a specific site, or the types of medical care that should be provided for back pain. They were surprised on the level of suport for osteopaths and chiropractic. And this is a good source of links and definititons for what are termed citizen deliberative councils.

References

1. J. R. Hibbing and E. Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy: American's Beliefs About How Government Should Work Cambridge University Press, Cambridge U. K. New York, 2002.
2. Woodruff, Paul, First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, Oxford University Press, 2005.
3. Oystein Saebo and Hallgeir Nilsen, "The Support for Different Democracy Models by the Use of a Web-Based Discussion Board" Electronic Governemnt, Third International Conference, EGOV 2004, Zaragoza Spain, August 30 - September 2004, Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3183.