The deliberative cure

Posted on September 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In an article in The Boston Globe, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond recount the story, a rather familiar and standard one, of how the participants in a deliberative body became “depolarized” and more democratic.

When our nationally representative sample of 600 (selected by NORC at the University of Chicago) deliberated for a weekend about these issues, Republicans often moved significantly toward initially Democrat positions and Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions. The changes were all consonant with basic democratic values, such as that everyone’s vote should count and that our elections need to be administered in a nonpartisan way.

The novelty of Fishkin and Diamond’s latest deliberative workshop is that it was done on the cheap. The participants met online, saving travel and real-estate costs as well as reducing the commitment required of the participants, and where previously moderators had to be hired, moderation was now taken care of by AI magic:
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »