Deliberation by the People Themselves: Entry Points for the Public Voice

Deliberative democracy by the people themselves is a distinctive form of democratic practice. It can be distinguished from deliberative democracy practiced by elites or representatives as well as from other forms of democracy that do not emphasize deliberation. In this article I explore ways this kind of democracy can be realized and then inserted into our current democratic institutions. The idea is to explore possible entry points in our political system for deliberative democratic designs involving ordinary citizens. In doing so I draw on recent experiments with Deliberative Polls and other mini-publics. I focus on four entry points: a) the evaluation and/or selection of candidates in the nomination phase; b) the evaluation and/or formulation of ballot propositions; c) public input into policy and legislation; and d) public input into processes of constitutional change. In the last two decades there has been a dramatic ‘‘deliberative turn’’ in democratic theory. Even advocates of ‘‘participatory democracy’’ have admitted that deliberation has largely supplanted participation as the most commonly invoked touchstone of democratic aspiration inspiring both theory and practical reforms. But ‘‘deliberative democracy’’ is a banner with followers of very different sorts. Some focus on the general idea of deliberation with little specification of who is to James Fishkin is a professor of international communication and political science at Stanford University in Stanford, CA. This article was prepared for a conference on ‘‘The Law of Deliberative Democracy’’ at New York University (NYU) Law School on April 5–6, 2013. My thanks to all the conference participants as well as to Bruce Ackerman and Joey Fishkin for helpful discussions, especially on the last sections. This phrase was borrowed from: John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), James Bohman says that by raising ‘‘problems of justification, institutionalization and empirical obstacles, deliberative democracy.has ‘come of age’ as a complete theory of democracy rather than simply an ideal of legitimacy.’’ All of these issues are being confronted and contested in what is now a large body of literature. See James Bohman, ‘‘The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,’’ Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 6, no. 4, (1998): 400–425. For a systematic critic of the turn to deliberative democracy, see Lynn Sanders, ‘‘Against Deliberation,’’ Political Theory vol. 25, no. 3, ( June 1997): 347–76. For a more recent statement that the Deliberative Polling model avoids her critique, see Lynn M. Sanders, ‘‘Making Deliberation Cooler,’’ The Good Society, vol. 19, no. 1, (2010): 41–47. Carole Pateman, ‘‘Participatory Democracy Revisited’’ Perspectives on Politics, vol. 10, no. 1, (March 2012): 7–19. For some collections that gather the most influential of these discussions regarding deliberative democracy from various perspectives, see James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 12, Number 4, 2013 # Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2013.0200