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:

More remarkable is that these discussions took place virtually, in small groups of 10, using a video-based online platform. Participants met for an entire weekend in June (or the equivalent in weeknight discussions). The AI-assisted platform moderated the discussions, ensured equality of participation, intervened if there was any incivility, and helped the participants identify their key questions for panels of competing experts in shared online plenary sessions.

Such a setup would allow, Fishkin and Diamond argue, to scale up the experience so that it becomes a mass participation institution with highly beneficial educational effects.

After this intense experience of listening to their fellow citizens and thinking about our collective problems together, the participants seemed to grasp that our polarizing divisions can be bridged through reasoned and mutually respectful deliberation with their fellow citizens.

If this kind of deliberation can be progressively scaled to the broader society (perhaps with the kind of technology we employed), we could take some of the polarizing fever out of our campaigns and foster citizens who will think about the merits of the big issues we face.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition |

7 Responses

Nicholas Gruen, on September 9, 2023 at 2:37 pm said:

Thanks Yoram

Any chance of including more in your extract. The first quote talks about “these issues” without saying what they are or more about how the process worked.

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Ahmed R. Teleb, on September 10, 2023 at 11:56 am said:

Ridiculous. Brexit & Trump broke the brains of the managerial class. Western journalists & intellectuals lost about 20 iQ points each after each blow to their ability to control the masses. When COVID & Ukraine war came our “smart” people had no brain cels left. Now every time they open their mouths it sounds like their trolling their own populations. This must have been how it was at the end of the Soviet era in the USSR. But this is much funnier & more ironic because of the illusion of a “free” press.

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Ahmed R. Teleb, on September 10, 2023 at 11:57 am said:

The best answer I’ll get to this provaoccarjo will be some “smart” policeman of conformity correcting my autocorrect spelling errors.

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Iain Walker, on September 10, 2023 at 11:47 pm said:

I’ve participated in 2 projects and about 12 online sessions using this automated moderation tool (project names deliberately omitted).

Automated moderation has a long, long way to go and is *extremely* frustrating in its current form. It cuts people off without context or warning after 45 seconds (in these cases) and there’s no effort to find common ground (Delib Polls being an aggregation of individualised responses), nor easy links to information sources that are key to moving people beyond raw opinion into considered judgment. It uses very simple keywords to determine if people are being constructive or antagonistic, so is quickly defeated by irony and sarcasm,

Its hard to see how this could be scaled to a live public decision, but we exist to see new things tried so that will be an interesting step to watch.

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Nicholas Gruen, on September 11, 2023 at 1:24 am said:

Sounds awful.

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Yoram Gat, on September 11, 2023 at 7:03 am said:

Beyond the technical issues, the entire notion of mass deliberation seems suspect. It is one thing to take part in some impactful decision making process and another to sit in educational gatherings were you are supposed to talk to strangers about some abstract matters for no specific reason.

As Ahmed notes, rather than being a democratic device, this seem like an attempt by the responsible elites to make the masses see sense.

In terms of promoting a rational national conversation, I think that a more democratic and more effective idea would be for the well-meaning elites to set up a high-visibility newspaper where normal (i.e., allotted) people get to write about things they see as important. I would be much more inclined to read such a newspaper than to spend hours with a dozen strangers and trying to get to an agreement with them on arbitrary topics with no impact expected. It seems like a lot of effort for no good reason. The notion that this is “good citizenship” seems manipulative.

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Sortition in 2023 | Equality by lot, on December 22, 2023 at 6:49 am said:

[…] included some fairly high profile pieces, with the most notable one being an op-ed in the New York Times. Among the most high profile […]

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