Ep 338 - Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? with James Fishkin

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, we've had a number of guests come on that have dipped their toe in the water of deliberative democracy, of sortition.We had Mike McCarthy, who did the Master's Tools come on, and we hit on this ever so slightly. We just sort of brushed up against it, and it really, really piqued my interest.And then when I had my friend Erald Kolasi come on and we discussed the physics of capital. He talked about sortition in his concept of the cosmopole. And this was extremely interesting to me. It really got me going.And then my good friend, and this is the shout out for helping me get together with our guest, Charles Hayden, longtime MMT friend going back more than a decade, reached out to our current guest, Professor James Fishkin, who holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University.He is also, and this is the really exciting part, he also focuses on deliberative polling and runs a deliberative democracy organization that works around the world to create a practice field, if you will, an opportunity to see this stuff in action. And so deliberative democracy is what we're going to be talking about today with my guest, indeed, James Fishkin. Welcome to the show, sir.Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

James Fishkin: 00:02:02

: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:04

: Well, as you heard in the intro, this subject has been near and dear to my heart. I'm excited because I've been very vocal in my scathing critique that we don't have a democracy in this country.And I hearken back to, guys, really, a lot of the authors, in fact, you know, the people's history [of the United States] with Howard Zinn and some of the stuff he points out to the founding documents being really for the wealthy white landowners. And the documents were really about protecting private property.And so a lot of our government was really set up in the beginning, at least the way I understand it, to favor and support and protect elites and their private property. And at the time, I mean, blacks weren't even considered a full human being by those standards.So our founding documents, if you will, for this colonial project we call the United States has left a lot to be desired. And as we get further and further down the runway, our organization has been peppered with lots of questions like, "so what's your plan?""What do you think? What are we going to do?" And we're like, "well, gosh, man, I wish I knew." I mean, like, I believe that we need to build dual power.I believe that we need to create organizational connectivity outside of the electoral process.I believe we need to build parallel systems like mutual aid networks and legal aid networks, and finding a way to build housing, you know, whether by collectivization through sharing or other means.But bottom line is in order to make the kind of statement we need to make to get this country to listen to the people, there's got to be something other than pop up electoral. Every two years you break up, break down, break up, break down.And you listen to politicians who are trying to get elected and they're just saying things, it's not necessarily true things either. And so the how and the why of getting anything out of this has been deeply perplexing.It's a very complicated issue and we are struggling as working class people to find our voice, to find agency within this and your book, and let me just tell you folks, the book is called Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? by my guest, James S. Fishkin. Highly recommend getting this book and checking out other interviews you might find online with him. They're really, really, really incredible.But with that in mind, you are and have made your career around this concept of deliberative democracy and deliberation in general. And I would like you, if you wouldn't mind, to kind of give us the background of this.Let's put the bones together so we can have a conversation and everybody can kind of be aware of what we're talking about.

James Fishkin: 00:04:46

: Okay, well, if we step back and look at the big picture, the key point about democracy in my view is that it needs to make a connection between the will of the people and what's actually done.So the first problem is everyone's trying to manipulate public opinion, propagandize it, spread it with half truths, persuasion and products of the persuasion industry and misinformation and even disinformation, even crazy made up stuff that spreads virally even in our current system of political communication and that clouds our very ability to assess the will of the people and for the will of the people even to form, because people are flooded with this stuff.And so I invented something that I call deliberative polling, which is a social science based method of convening, let's say at the national level, a national level stratified random sample, a good sample that then deliberates in depth. What do I mean by deliberate?The root of the word deliberation is weighing, weighing the trade offs, the pros and cons of things that might actually be done, but it needs to be done in an evidence based environment with reasonably good information and in a civil dialogue so that people aren't just shouting at each other. Now is that possible in our current environment? It is for a microcosm.So we will prepare briefing materials that are vetted by a responsible advisory group that represents different political perspectives, different points of view, but that is willing to engage in an evidence based discussion about what the real facts are, what the best account of the facts are. And if something is contested, it labels those points as contested.And so there's a briefing book, there's a series of proposals that are worth discussing, proposals that represent different points of view, but are in the air as something that could be done.Then we do a video version of the briefing materials for those who don't like looking at an elaborate document just to make it easy for everybody to get into the dialogue.So we go out and we recruit a sample and you take the America in One Room projects which the book relies on because those are national controlled experiments with basically the best survey organization in the United States, it's an academic survey organization at the University of Chicago called NORC, National Opinion Research Center. And they go to elaborate lengths to get a representative sample.So we convene 500 people who deliberate in depth, and we also convene a separate control group who do not deliberate, but are representative of the public. And they just take the survey at the beginning, at the time of recruitment, and then many weeks later at the end of the process.And normally they don't change much, if at all. But that's so that we know that people aren't changing because of some big event in the world as opposed to the deliberations.So then these people are convened that we do this either face-to-face, which on a national basis is fairly expensive because we have to bring all the people in, pay them something also for their time, because the travel for a long weekend and then on arrival they are divided into randomly assigned to small groups with moderators. That's if we do it face-to-face.We also have an online process, believe it or not, that eliminates the moderators, but that in which people see each other as on a zoom, but it actually, with AI assistance, it allows the groups to moderate themselves and take responsibility for how fast they move through the agenda. And people only get 45 seconds at a time in small groups of 10. We did climate change that way in the United States, got very interesting results.And we've tested that against face-to-face convenings, and we get essentially the same results.Okay, so whether it's face-to-face or online, the people are divided into these small groups, and the weekend consists of alternating small groups and plenary sessions. The small groups are moderated.Let's say they spend an hour and a half in a small group working through part of the agenda, considering these proposals, and then they come up with key questions at the end of the process that are directed in plenary sessions to a panel of competing experts who don't give a speech. They only answer the people's questions.In fact, what they do in short responses is they correct each other so that we really get to the bottom of what the facts are. So we alternate the small groups and plenary sessions for an entire weekend until we work through the whole agenda.Then at the end, they take the same confidential questionnaire that they took on first contact before they even knew they were going to be invited to an event. They thought it was just a survey. So we often see rather remarkable changes of opinion.The conventional wisdom among my political science colleagues is that not only are we deeply divided, which is obviously true, but that the divisions are, to use a word being used now, calcified. That implies that they are intractable. But no, we get very dramatic changes of opinion.And those changes actually, in our currently polarized environment offer a second surprise to me. I mean, the first surprise was whether we could get good samples there and actually have them deliberate in a civil way, which we can.The second surprise was that when people do this, they often dramatically depolarize, and they depolarize the most on the most contentious issues.And one of the projects described in the book, the first of four America In One Room Projects, we did immigration, and we also did economic issues, we did health care, we did a lot of issues.But let's say the New York Times featured the changes on immigration, because before deliberation, 80% of the Republicans wanted to send the undocumented immigrants back to their home countries. But after deliberation, only 40% did. That's a drop of 40 points. That's an earthquake in public opinion.And similarly for support for DACA increased dramatically. Support for visas for unskilled workers increased dramatically. Support for visas for skilled workers increased dramatically, et cetera.And we're talking about large changes of opinion. Democrats changed dramatically, too. In fact, some of the changes were just as large, particularly on expensive social programs.Cory Booker at the time, that was 2019. Cory Booker at the time had a proposal for baby bonds, where each child would get a bond of $1,000 at the time of birth, and then it would grow until that person was 18, I believe, and then they could use it for either education or down payment on our house or something to get a start in life. And it's an inventive proposal. He's not the only one who's proposed it.But support for that dropped 40 points also because people didn't think we could afford the investment to do that for everybody. Similarly for Universal Basic Income and some other proposals. So the Democrats dropped significantly and moved closer to the middle.The Republicans dropped significantly and also moved closer to the middle. At least the two parties moved closer together, and those who took the most extreme positions moved reliably the most. And why could that be?Well, I think because they're stuck in their filter bubbles, their enclaves, and they never actually consider the other side.And indeed, if you expose them for information or begin a dialogue with them, with people from the other side, and I'm talking about both parties, you'll trigger a negative reaction, a hostility.But if you engage them in an environment of civil discussion over a period of time, and it turns out a weekend is long enough, after a while, they learn to listen to the other side and at least on some issues, to empathize with the other side.So CNN did a video, which is on my website, about that immigration discussion in one group, where they were yelling at each other at the beginning, and the people who took the strongest positions on either side were actually hugging each other at the end. So that happens. Deliberation sort of cools the venom that's poisoning our system. And this is no surprise.There's a lot of social psychology I can describe as to why this happens, but the speculation about this goes back to [Fourth US President James] Madison, who thought that deliberation would cure the mischiefs of faction, factions being groups that were animated by passions or interests adverse to the rights of others. But he thought that political elites would be the ones who deliberate. The Senate was supposed to be a deliberative institution, for example.When's the last time that you heard somebody refer to the US Senate as the world's greatest deliberative body?

Steve Grumbine: 00:14:08

: I'm 56, not my lifetime.

James Fishkin: 00:14:10

: Yeah, but it used to be the common description. [Yes] What happened is that, well, when Madison sketched out the design, he did not envision political parties.I mean, nobody knew what would happen in this republic. They were even afraid to use the word democracy because they were afraid that it connoted mob rule.After all, the people had killed Socrates and they had lived through Shay's Rebellion. So they didn't want the mob, they wanted thoughtful self government. So they thought that the elites would do it.But my research program from the very beginning is about whether the people can do it.And there's a lot of skepticism that I faced among social scientists, political science colleagues, and other related disciplines, because the conventional wisdom is that people only vote according to party loyalties, according to tribalism, and they don't stop to consider, under most circumstances, the merits of the issue. They have a vague impression of sound bites and headlines, but when it comes to voting, it's party loyalty all the way down.And if you find voters who actually consider the issues, you're about as likely to find that as to find a unicorn. The deliberative process routinely creates unicorns because we've come back to the deliberators a year later and found out how they vote.And they vote their convictions. They're considered judgments regardless of party.The control group, who we go back to at the same time votes just like everybody else, whether it's crime or immigration or whatever the issue is.But the people who deliberated over time become more engaged, they keep becoming more informed, they have a greater sense of efficacy, that is, they think they have opinions worth listening to, they become more involved, they vote at higher levels, and they vote according to their convictions, which is what we really need in a democracy, people to consider the issues and vote accordingly.That's the only way elections can really assert popular control, rather than there being just a tug of war between two sides and a battle to see how you can, with negative advertising, maybe gin up your turnout, but even discourage other people from showing up, because why should they? Their individual vote won't matter very much, but we find voters with a sense of efficacy who will assert their views.So I think that deliberation can unlock the deadlock in our democracy, but also give expression to the will of the people. Because the will of the people, for that we need not just what people conclude, but why they concluded.And we've found many contexts, particularly for difficult choices in countries around the world, where these projects with the microcosm of deliberators have the effect of changing policy.So this works for the microcosm, particularly for difficult choices because there are many cases where policymakers have found that if they convene or support the convening of a deliberative process that is really representative and thoughtful, they can share responsibility for difficult choices with the public. I can give you some examples, but there's a further aspiration that I have that we have.When I say we, it's all the network of collaborators we've fostered around the world.

Steve Grumbine: 00:17:44

: Sure.

James Fishkin: 00:17:45

: Now in 160 projects, that further aspiration is also very important for the long term solution, as I see it, which is that we need to scale the deliberative process in order to create a more deliberative society.And if we did that, some of the byproducts of deliberation: Increases in mutual trust, mutual understanding, a greater sense of internal political efficacy, that is people thinking they have opinions worth listening to, people participating, the depolarization so that they don't demonize the opposition, the lessening of what's called affective polarization. We not only have polarization on the substance of the issues, but members of the two parties tend not to like each other.The mutual vitriol leads to emotions that are very destructive in the sense that people think if the other guys win the election, that could be the end of the system. And these allegations are on both sides.And so it's a big problem to just try to get people to discuss the issues, come up with their own evaluations in a weekend. We don't have them produce a consensus document or anything like that. We have the confidential questionnaires.And the reason why we don't have them produce a consensus document is we want to protect the individual opinions from the social pressure of going along with the crowd. Sort of like a jury verdict. There's a lot of social pressure to agree with the rest of the jury. Juries do a pretty good job on questions of fact.There's studies going back to the famous American jury study where the judges ended up agreeing with the juries most of the time on the same cases. But the juries also tend to be dominated by the more advantaged and they also tend to move to extremes.Cass Sunstein at Harvard has this law of group polarization where the discussion moves people to extremes.But that law does not apply to deliberative polling, as we have demonstrated and as he has admitted, because there's so many elements of balance and because we don't push people to have to go along with the crowd in a consensus statement.If there's a consensus, we find it in the data. That is if there's a movement of opinion where there's overwhelming support or overwhelming opposition to something, we have it in the data. And the data, it starts out as representative of what the country thinks to the extent it's thinking about the issue.And it ends up representing what the public would think. And in my view, that's a good measure of the will of the people.So I mean, public opinion polls of the conventional sort will not address that problem.Even though when George Gallup effectively launched the political version of the public opinion poll back in the 1936 election, he thought that it would bring the democracy of the New England town meeting to the large scale nation state.Because he said that radio and newspapers, there wasn't television or the Internet in those days, would send out the views of political leaders and others who would represent different points of view and then they would be reflected back by the public. But a lot of people were not paying attention. And just being exposed to information doesn't actually affect opinion that much.What we have shown in controlled experiments is that what affects opinion is people discussing, actively discussing the issues and bringing them to light, because they're people from different points of view who are discussing together.So it's the discussion and the moderated discussion with the diverse others is the way to bring to life the deliberative process where people weigh the trade offs, the arguments for and against the competing value laden goals at issue, and any difficult choice. So our entry point in many countries has been some difficult choice where there's an openness to consulting the public before a decision is made.And once this is done in a high visibility way, there's a lot of pressure to go along with implementing the results. And then if we could scale the deliberative process.In the back of my book, I've got a whole bunch of examples of many different entry points for deliberation, many of which we piloted in one place or another, or we've conducted one or more instances of it. But we've also talked about bringing deliberation to the schools because it's a wonderful form of civic education.And we've got a lot of projects in schools around the country and in universities around the country. But in the high schools we've been doing it and then we can reach even more people. Then the deliberative process has a lasting effect on people.I mean, I was astonished that we got effects a year later on how people voted, because most interventions in an election are just before an election, but a year earlier, how is that possible? And of course our intervention is not trying to persuade people of anything.We try to be balanced and we don't have an agenda of how the proposals should fare. We only have an agenda to facilitate people thinking about proposals that might address important problems.And those proposals represent different points of view and different approaches. And it's always unpredictable. I can never actually know how these things will come out because I often guess wrong.But it's not my guesses or my preferences that count. It's the preferences of the people, duly considered after testing their views against adverse argument.And that's what I think we need to implement more and more in democracies around the world.Otherwise we might as well try to have a benign autocracy like Singapore, where they do cost benefit analysis to try to determine an expert view of what the best outcomes might be. But they don't really engage the people at all. That's not a democracy, that's a technocracy.I think that the people who have to live with the choices need to be consulted in a way that their views will make a difference. And so that's really the aspiration of the book.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:05

: I appreciate that very, very much. I do want to come back to something. My brain is just moving way faster than I'm able to put it into words. So hopefully I can articulate this.But, you know, I'm a process guy and I guess the first step in this is trying to understand the who, what, when, why. Obviously we're talking about deliberation. This is a way of educating each other and then breaking down boundaries.But in terms of it going from, you know, a control room or from a study to actually having an impact on our democracy, is this more of an opportunity for us to just get smarter as a country about issues? Or is there some... you know, obviously it's not yet, but perhaps in a future state, would there be a tie to outcomes or would this just be more of a tell? "Hey, guys, just so you know, this has been deliberated by the people and they felt completely opposite of how this law ended up passing."Or is this something that would be part of the formal controls of a democracy, where these control groups, whether it be local or national, and I know that brings up a whole other set of problems there, but would there be any kind of, "hey, the people have spoken. This is what has to be done", or would it be kind of more like a suggestion? Because let me frame this so you understand where this is coming from.A lot of the debates that we have today are if you have 360° of possibilities. It focuses around 2°, maybe 1° of possibilities. And they stake a very hard claim at 0.2 of that degree.And then over here at 0.9 of the same one degree, they strike another hard line. But it's really debating this minuscule micro-slice of all the possibilities.So, for example, one of the things that you brought up earlier, I'm not a UBI advocate, but the concept that they would turn away from a UBI because that would cost too much, well, that's already starting from a false premise about the ability of the currency issuing nation to finance the well being of its people. It's ideological, but it's focusing on a false scarcity narrative, an austerity narrative.It's baked into the question, you see, it's baked in up front that we can't afford this. There's like this belief and it's like, well, wait a minute, where does money come from?Well, you know, if you read your Constitution, you know, Article 1, Section 8 says that Congress is the one that authorizes spending and that money comes from them. And now we have a Federal Reserve that our Treasury works with and so forth.But at the end of the day, the ideas of what is affordable, what is not presupposes people understand federal finance. And if they don't, they're baking in myths and legends into the one degree of separation that they're debating.You talked extensively in the book and some of your interviews about the misinformation. So it's kind of like GIGO, you know, garbage in, garbage out.If you're walking in there with a fake set of ideas that are coloring your perception once again, we could have some really, really bad outcomes there based on, "hey, well, the people want this" and they may want that, but you know, you never see the government begging for money when they're funding war. But the minute you talk about doing something for the people, you know, the wrist is to the forehead, "Wherever will we find the money?"It's like, well, the same place we found it for war, dude. It literally, our country creates currency when it spends. So how do you bake in there? I mean, obviously this can't fix everything.It's not pizza, right?

James Fishkin: 00:27:39

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:40

: So it's like, how do you overcome that kind of inherent false premise before we even get started deliberating?

James Fishkin: 00:27:49

: Well, look, we have to have, and we did have a discussion with competing experts about what the costs of any of the social programs were going to be. And that's a factor to be considered. And there's no stipulation as to a fixed amount that we can afford.And we should have a deliberation at some point just about the national debt and what's been done to it in the light of tax cuts, et cetera, et cetera. But let me make it a little more concrete.Let me mention two examples, one of which had dramatic results, but it's not a contentious issue so much, and one which shows a very advanced level of institutionalization. So let me talk about briefly Texas and Mongolia. In Texas years ago, you know, Texas is growing very fast, so they have to figure out how to get their electricity as they grow.And the legislature allowed the Public Utility Commission to require that the electricity companies consult the public about the integrated resource plans. That's a fancy term, the plans for how they were going to provide energy in their service territories.You can divide up the state into eight service territories. So in each service territory, the utility faced the problem. Well, how do we consult the public?The public doesn't know a lot about the trade offs between the different energy sources, yet hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. We're going to turn on how the public offered answers to this question.So they convened deliberative polls supervised by all the relevant stakeholders, which included consumer representatives, representatives of the different kinds of energy, the Environmental Defense Fund. All kinds of groups had to pass on the balance and accuracy of the briefing materials.And it was pretty obvious that if they need more electricity, you could produce it by coal, which is dirty but relatively cheap. You could produce it with natural gas, which is cleaner, variable in price. You could produce it with renewable energy, particularly wind power.Now also solar power is cost effective. Or you could invest in conservation, demand side management to lower the need. These are the basic choices.Nuclear at that point was off the table, but has come back because it was so involved in different kinds of litigation.

Intermission: 00:30:19

: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

James Fishkin: 00:30:42

: So you've got those choices. What do the people want?Now you see a discussion in my book ofnon-attitudes or phantom opinions discovered by Phil Converse at the University of Michigan, a great political scientist who helped me launch deliberative polling in the US back in 1996.And he discovered that a question about the government's role in electric power that was in the National Election Study four years in a row with the same panel and people, most people actually didn't have an opinion about it, but they didn't want to admit they didn't know. So they answered it. It was what he called a non-attitude. I call those phantom opinions.A late friend of mine, George Bishop, the University of Cincinnati, did studies of the Public Affairs Act of 1975, which the public offered answers to. But it was fictional. They couldn't have had opinions because it didn't exist.And then the Washington Post decided to celebrate the 20th non-anniversary of the non-existent Public Affairs Act of 1975 by asking people about the repeal. And the Washington Post asked, half the sample said the Republicans wanted to repeal it and half the sample the Democrats wanted to repeal it.And they got different answers depending upon that. But you can't repeal something that doesn't exist. So I knew that on electric utility issues, the public may not have any opinion at all.And I think intuitively the electricity companies knew that and the Public Utility Commission knew that.So they couldn't just do polls about that, particularly as the issues get complicated with the trade offs, because often they would get phantom opinions or just vague impressions of soundbites and headlines. So they needed something more. So what could they do?They could do focus groups, but the focus groups of eight or 10 people, they're not representative, they're suggestive, but you can't represent a large population with focus groups. So focus groups could do open meetings, sort of town meetings, but they knew they'd just get lobbyists.And why let the lobbyists determine the policy? So they adopted deliberative polling for this purpose.But I insisted the advisory group had to represent all the stakeholders who would have to approve the agenda. And of course they represent very different points of view.So there was a lot of work to get an agreed statement, not about what should be done, but about each option, what the fact based pros and cons would be that would start the discussion that people could rely on. And an interesting thing happened.In all eight projects in different parts of the state, the public was willing actually even to pay more on its monthly electricity bill in order to subsidize renewable energy, particularly wind power. Those percentages averaged over the eight projects, went from around 50% to around 85%, something like that. That's a dramatic increase.And so the Public Utility Commission was sort of amazed by this. And the companies then had to make plans to dramatically increase their investment in wind power.But in combination with natural gas, which was also very clean but flexible and variable in price, and coal went down, no matter what the advocates of coal said. Then they said clean coal is new, and clean coal might be a little better than dirty coal, but it's very noxious to health and to the environment.And so that went down. And the result was Texas implementing these results and then the legislature responding substantively to those results.Over a period of time, Texas went from being last among the 50 states in the amount of wind power to first. It surpassed California by 2007. And there's no looking back.It has even more wind power now leading the country, and in a way very important on a global basis, because there's a lot of wind in Texas that could be used. And now there's also solar power, too. So that's a way in which the formation of the public will was then made directly actionable.But let me give you an even more dramatic example, but I'm going to have to take you to Mongolia. I'm just back from Mongolia, which is discussed in the book.Mongolia is a competitive democracy located between Russia on the one side and China on the other. A tough neighborhood. But it is a democracy, has very competitive elections.The presidency and the parliament swing back and forth between two big parties, and the two big parties are in near deadlock. And so we started doing deliberative polling there at the city level, that's the capital of Ulaanbaatar, very successfully.And it migrated to the national level.And then there was so much satisfaction with the process that they passed a law which requires that in order to change the constitution, they have to conduct a deliberative poll about the proposals, a national deliberative poll. And they spelled out what that meant.They would take a sample of more than 700 deliberators recruited by the Census Bureau, the National Statistical Office, who did an excellent job recruiting the sample, and a separate control group who didn't deliberate, who were just a benchmark in terms of the attitudes and demographics. And by the way, the participation in this was extraordinary. Mongolia is a very big country.It's the same size as Western Europe, even though it has a small population.So the percentage of the people who were initially contacted, the percentage of the people who were invited to come to the capitol and deliberate in the parliament building, percentage who showed up was 85%, yielding about 700 people. And so many of the polls that you see reported in the US on politics have response rates of maybe 5 or 6%.So the 85% is very impressive as a microcosm of the people. And the law requires that the supervision by an independently elected advisory committee, and then that the results go to the Parliament.And the parliament, in its wisdom, has the option of passing a constitutional amendment if it's approved by a two thirds vote. So twice constitutional amendments have resulted.And in the second case, which was quite recent, the constitutional amendment changed the electoral system. It added a number of members of parliament who would be chosen by proportional representation.As many elections happen in Europe with proportional representation. Previously they were only chosen in electoral districts. And that's part of why they got a dominant two party system.But the people wanted other choices. They wanted third parties to get elected into the parliament. And so you know how hard it is to get the people to pay for more politicians.I mean, that's really hard. Nevertheless, the public supported these ideas in the deliberation.And most importantly then the parliament by 2/3 vote approved the new electoral system and they had an election. And sure enough, more third parties were elected. So then they had a big celebration of the process and its results.And I went back to Mongolia and they had a big symposium about my book, the book that we're discussing.And they presented me with the Mongolian edition, which they managed to translate and get published before Oxford could publish its version in English.

Steve Grumbine: 00:38:27

: Wow.

James Fishkin: 00:38:28

: And then the president awarded me their highest public honor, which was this gold medal that I received in a ceremony in the parliament for bringing deliberative democracy to Mongolia. So Mongolia may be an exotic case, but it's a real democracy.And for me, it shows a way of combining the wisdom of the people, as expressed through the deliberations, with the deliberations of the elected representatives. And that's a problem that we all face.Look, in the United States, in order to change the constitution, it's almost impossible because you need a 2/3 vote of the House and of the Senate and then three quarters of the states to ratify. And given our divisions and extreme polarization, it's virtually impossible to get a constitutional amendment through under those conditions now.But the Mongolians had lots of extreme partisan polarization. Nevertheless, they were able to implement this and require it by law for future constitutional amendments. So that's a high end case.It's an aspiration. I don't expect this to happen very often, but it's a picture of what could happen. In other countries, let me just say there are plenty of other countries that have sponsored deliberative polls to deal with a specific problem that is such a difficult problem that the people in charge want to share responsibility for which of the difficult choices the public will support. And I can give you some of those examples, that's another kind of case where we end up having some success.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:05

: You know, as we're getting later into the discussion here, I want to make sure I touch on this. How does deliberative polling connect or work with sortition? Is there a relationship?

James Fishkin: 00:40:17

: Deliberative polling is an example of a method of decision that uses sortition. Sortition just means random sampling.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:24

: Sure.

James Fishkin: 00:40:25

: So we use random sampling, but we use very high quality random sampling, stratified in terms of all the key demographics, in order to make sure we have a representative system. And the very idea of sortition, stratified random sampling goes back to ancient Athens, which I discussed in the first part of the book.That is, the Athenians made important decisions.They even had a machine called the kleroterion, K-L-E-R-O-T-E-R-I-O-N, a machine to select the random samples, because they didn't want any corruption in the selection, they wanted it as a mechanical process. And so they divided up the population in sortition, referring to ten tribes, so called.And random samples from each of the tribes were chosen to add up to 500, who would be the council of 500, who set the agenda for the assembly. And a lot of other important decisions were made by the random samples. So that's what sortition is referring to.But sortition, random samples, that's what public opinion polling is, stratified random samples. But it's sortition with the people not thinking very much. But the deliberation is the other part of it.And deliberative polling is a particular design for how we conduct the deliberation with random samples.So a lot of the sortition projects around the world that you see discussed, and they're very popular, are citizens assemblies where they have to come to a collected judgment, but where the samples are small, 50, 100 people, 150 at the most, they're relatively small. And the sampling is often not very good.I mean, the French sent out for their French National Convention on Climate Change, they sent out 300,000 text messages and ended up with 150 people. And they didn't bother to measure what the people's views about climate were at the beginning.And they said, you know, you would have to deliberate for six months and turned out to be here. Then it ended up being two years.So if you're going to give up six months or a year of your life to deliberate about climate, it's probable that you started out as more committed to climate than the rest of the population.And so my point is that we need to have samples that are representative of the public at the beginning, if we want the public and the government to listen to what they come up with at the end. That's why the sampling and the measurement of opinion are very important. And all the problems in the jury literature, I think, come out of the need for consensus that pushes people for consensus. We usually get a consensus, but we're not pushing for it. We're pushing for whatever the distribution of thoughtful opinion is at the end.That's what we want to find out. So deliberate polling is a form of sortition. I just happen to think, in all modesty, that it's the best form so far.Somebody will come up with a better one someday. But it's one that stands up to all the criticisms, and it's not dominated by the more advantaged.It doesn't routinely move people to extreme positions. It creates a picture of the will of the people, and it has a plausible picture where we get not only what they conclude, but why they concluded.And it's the why that is just as important if you want the will of the people to have an effect. And it has very good side effects on people's roles as citizens in a democracy.It empowers them.So that's the connection between the more general discussion of sortition and this particular process, my version of it, that is described in the book. 

Steve Grumbine: 00:44:16

: Okay, so let me stretch you beyond your book momentarily and just get your opinion on something. I think it's more than an opinion. I think it would play into what you're talking about in general. When I think of sortition. Just so I can clarify, when I say sortition, I'm talking about government by sortition, governing by sortition, instead of elections having some form of sortition to provide a pathway to eliminate power clustering, things like that. So a lot of my interests is in a post-US constitutional world where the people have had enough of this and you're coming at it from a radically different place, but we're still accessing the same kind of logics and that the people's voices aren't heard. And this is a way of getting there and taking people who maybe don't understand the subject or whatever and giving them an access to learn about it so that they do have an informed opinion so they don't have that phantom opinion that you spoke about earlier. But what we talk about here a lot is a federal job guarantee. And I want you to play along with me here for a minute to see if my brain is completely made of mush. So the concept of a federal job guarantee is that it's federally funded because the government is the currency issuer and it's locally administered because local governments and state governments are currency users. They don't have the ability to create currency like the federal government does. So the federal government would fund jobs at the local level to take up those people that have either been displaced by downsizing or changes in the economy or whatever. But these jobs would be public purpose jobs. They would be jobs that are not necessarily competing with private interests. They would be serving things that are not considered profitable. They would be things that would be needed for the local communities. So we had oftentimes talked about the possibility of leveraging sortition to bring people to debate and discuss what jobs each local community would like to see represented in the job guarantee, to provide them with a map to figure out what jobs could be available for people on demand and that would be paid for with federal money and have federal benefits, et cetera. This is an idea that we felt would eliminate involuntary unemployment and would once again revitalize democracy. But sortition wasn't really the plan there. But it is my mindset. I do see it as a great democracy enhancer to bring everybody in their local communities together to talk about these things. Is that a form of what you're talking about? Even though I know you're talking about polling more so, and I'm looking more from a governing perspective here. Can you tie that together for me or is it completely wet behind the ears?

James Fishkin: 00:46:59

: Well, you just mentioned an inventive proposal. And what would the people think about it?In my view, deliberate polling about it and how to apply it would give you the best measure of what the people would really think about it. So you're saying sortitions should be involved in making some of these decisions. That would be fine. But what kind of sortition?A citizens assembly, a citizen jury, a consensus conference? What kind of sortition? I think deliberative polling is the most credible form of it. But then is it advisory or does it make a final decision?These are all things that would have to be worked out.What I do resist in the latter part of the book is the idea that we should get rid of our elected institutions and just substitute sortition, as some people have advocated. Why do I say that? Because participation in elections involves everybody.It's just we need to lessen the partisanship in our elections and make them more substantive. And that's the challenge. But I don't want to get rid of elections. People died for the right to vote. [Sure.]The value of participation is one of the core democratic values.Suppose you're very concerned to protect a woman's right to choose and it's being then decided by a sortition of a small number of people whether they have the right to choose or not. And you get to participate in some other policy area, let's say, like electric utility regulation.Well, it seems to me that everybody should be able to vote on issues that are of importance to them if they're going to be decided by a democratic process. So I think sortition methods, including deliberative polling, can be an incredibly important input into those decisions.And there are coherent ways to connect the deliberations of the people and the decisions by people in elected or appointed office. Notice the differences between the Mongolia example I gave you and the electric utility commissions in Texas.Both involved a combination of the deliberations of the people and the deliberations of the official decision makers. But I don't want to get rid of elections, I want to improve them. [Sure] And there's all kinds of ways to discuss that.But your particular proposal is an inventive, important one and it could be deliberated about in a deliberative poll or could be deliberated about in some other form of sortition. I just happen to think the other ones are not as reliably representative and thoughtful as the one that I've been advocating.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:39

: Absolutely. I need to vet my own ideas with somebody who actually knows what the heck they're talking about as opposed to...What is that Dunning-Kruger moment here? You know, I don't know what I don't know. And I'm thinking I know, but I don't know, you know what I mean?So I just want to kind of vet it out a little bit because at the end of the day there are obviously real serious concerns of corruption throughout government in general. And the anti-corruption movement maybe hasn't gotten the kind of energy that it needs. But you don't have to go far.I mean, you can go back to Ferdinand Pecora, I'm probably way back to Cain and Abel, but Ferdinand Pecora, when it came to the Great Depression and the crash, the stock market crash and all, and his great speeches as he was showing the oligarchy for the parasites that they were at the time. And we don't see that kind of stuff anymore. To your point, we don't see the Senate debating.You just see them carrying out the will of the donor base of their branch of the oligarchy at this point. And so for me, I'm just trying to, I guess, be creative without necessarily a map. But I do like what you're talking about here.I need to mentally wrap my head around it more. And I do appreciate everything you've said here. And your book was fantastic.I got to listen to it on audio and I got to read through it in the physical, and I got to listen to a bunch of discussions you were having. And I'm really fascinated by it.I just want to see it have teeth, you know, I mean, like the outcomes of these things not be suggestions, but more, "hey, look, you know what? We're not a bunch of experts. And you're not going to use your experts to come write the laws like we do."It doesn't take much to see how large agricultural producers will write regulations, and they hand to politicians who then pass them, who have no understanding of the regulation they're passing, but the industry that's trying to consolidate and monopolize their space does. And they create huge barriers of entry for new entrants. And all of a sudden now you've got a situation where it looks like democracy won.Look, your elected representative just passed this bill, but people don't understand it, but the powers that be do understand it. And they knew exactly what they were doing as they carved out their monopoly. These are the things that go through my head.They may not be coherent, as I say them, but I think I know what I'm saying.

James Fishkin: 00:51:58

: They're coherent. We've had cases where the public even has had the final say, but on specific issues.For example, just to illustrate the problem, the fact that political leaders will sometimes sponsor these things to share responsibility for a solution.A few years ago, President Moon in South Korea when he was elected and his party was anti-nuclear, he found himself with two half completed nuclear reactors, Shingori 5 and 6. And since the stance of his party was anti-nuclear, that was a problem.But if they didn't complete the nuclear reactors, they'd have to import a lot of fossil fuels. And they were concerned with climate change. That was also a problem. So what was he going to do?So to my surprise, since we'd done a lot of projects with collaborators in South Korea, deliberative polling, he just announced that he was going to sponsor a deliberative poll supervised by an extensive scientific committee about whether or not the reactors should be built or not. And this was a very high visibility case, and people moved dramatically to say, finish the construction and bring them online.And that's what they did. So the people had the final say about doing it wasn't a recommendation. It was set up so that they would have the final say.So that was a case where he could share responsibility for the result with the people who really thought about it in depth, according to my design. So there's some other cases like that too, cases with teeth, as you put it. Nobody knew how they were going to come out.

Steve Grumbine: 00:53:38

: No, I appreciate it immensely. So it was kind of like a parting gift here.I think that your book is fantastic and I think everybody should get this book because I think we need to begin working on building up enough popular support in whatever fashion. And I like your approach very much.Again, just thinking outside the dots here, trying to blend what I had been thinking prior to reading your book and trying to understand where I went wrong or maybe how it might work together, how there may be some sort of overlap there. I guess because you are the expert on the subject. And by the way, it's very impressive.[Harvard professor Lawrence] Larry Lessig was somebody who, I didn't think he had a prayer of winning, but I was really excited to see him run because it was nice to see somebody focusing on elections and focusing on democracy. And so to have his kind of endorsement there, at least at that level, I thought that was impressive.So with that in mind, I'd like you to have the last word. What did we miss today? That I mean, obviously there's a million things.We don't have eight hours to talk and God knows your life's work is way more comprehensive than an hour could ever achieve.But if you had one thing that you could take away that you would want people listening to think about as it pertains to your particular style of deliberative polling. What might you want them to take away from this?

James Fishkin: 00:54:53

: Well, the most important thing about the title is something that you didn't mention, but it's implicit, is the question mark at the end of the title. Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? Question mark. And the question mark is that it rests with us, the people.It doesn't require a constitutional amendment.It requires us thinking about all the occasions and venues in life of our public life, local, regional, national, international, where we can insert deliberative processes to give clarity to the will of the people so that we can reform our democracy and our decisions.And I include all kinds of things in the last chapter, from reforming the initiative system in the Western states, both in terms of advising the people about the results, but also generating public interest propositions instead of just having very well funded groups paying for signature collection, but also corporations. We can reform corporate democracy by our shareholder democracy.I have some discussion of that and I've been looking into that, because corporate democracy, shareholder democracy doesn't work at all. But I think we should do this for national issues, we should do this for local issues.And when we are not deliberating on an organized design, we should reform civic education in the schools. But we should also think about if we're not in an environment of organized dialogue, but just in terms of our own thinking.We need to be self critical. We need to search out sources that are different from the ones we ordinarily find congenial.And we need to become self critical, thoughtful citizens who will engage in our public life and who will take seriously the views of others. And this is what actually helps us avoid being manipulated and propagandized.There are too many things that we accept uncritically, as you pointed out. So it's a broad agenda, but you know, I think the American people can do it and they don't need a constitutional amendment to do it.But I think we can accumulate the various opportunities at the large scale. I was musing about Athens in the first part. Aristotle said that the Athenians practiced a rotation method.Each person could rule and be ruled in turn because they had chances to deliberate. Well, that's been dismissed as something for tiny city states.But at the large scale, if we had enough opportunities for deliberative processes in our education, in our different policy areas, we could practice the rotation method at the large scale. Everybody could have opportunities to deliberate. And people like it. If they do, they like talking to people who are different from themselves.They may hesitate at first, but if it became part of our civic life, we could cure some of the ills of democracy. So that's my pitch.

Steve Grumbine: 00:58:05

: Thank you very much. I really, really do appreciate this.I've got so many more questions and hopefully we can maybe have you on again in the future as I grow in knowledge on this space and we can maybe bring up some other issues to really bring more of your work into light. I do appreciate and I am infinitely aware that you have done so much work that I'm just scratching the surface.I'm glad that you allowed me the opportunity to ask you the questions I did and for our audience to be able to hear from you. Wonderful, wonderful conversation. Where can we find more of your work, sir?

James Fishkin: 00:58:40

: Well, I've just set up a webpage about this book. It's called jamesfishkin.com, one word. But you can also find it on our website, deliberation.stanford.edu.Just Google me and "deliberation" and the website of the Deliberative Democracy Lab will come up. And it's got projects from all over the world and in some detail.And it's got videos, it's got press coverage, it's got everything you might want to know about the initiative. So deliberation.stanford.edu.

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:14

: Fantastic. All right, folks, that's my guest, James Fishkin. We were discussing the book Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? It's an Oxford publication.Please go out and get it. We will have links to all this in our show notes and we will, of course, have curated transcripts for this. So please do read them.Check it out, all the extras and links that will be provided and will be there for you all to dig in deeper. With that, I want to thank you, Dr. Fishkin. I really, really appreciate your work here.And for us, I want to remind you, we are a 501(c)3, not for profit, real progressives. We're just a bunch of volunteers, folks, but we live and die on your contributions. They are tax deductibles. There is that.So if you have five bucks laying around each month that you can throw at us, we'd love it. 10 bucks. And for folks that are capable of more, we'd love, really appreciate it. We live and die on your donations.So, on behalf of my guest, James Fishkin, and myself, Steve Grumbine, for the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.01:00:25 Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.