Making Deliberative Democracy Practical: Public Consultation and Dispute Resolution

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

The Quest for Justice

A Review of Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry by Michel Rosenfel

Vers une démocratie délibérative : L'expérimentation d'un idéal : Extrait de Citizen competence and democratic institutions, sous la direction de Stephen L. Elkin et de Karol Edward Soltan, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, chapitre XII, p. 279-290

Le texte de Fishkin que nous publions ici montre qu'une filiation étonnamment claire l'unit à James Bryce et à George Gallup. Comme ses deux prédécesseurs, James S. Fishkin accorde un intérêt particulier aux mécanismes favorisant la manifestation des opinions, l'expression des préférences et la production des décisions collectives, dans une relation critique et distanciée avec les procédures électorales (...)

By the People: Hard Times, Hard Choices Michigan Residents Deliberate

Outlines the concept of deliberative polling and presents results from a face-to-face statewide deliberative poll on Michigan's economy and budget issues, including taxes, spending and benefits, the environment, and options for state assistance.For the first time, a scientific random sample of the people of Michigan gathered together to deliberate about the hard choices facing the state's economic future. Results of Michigan's first Deliberative Poll show what the people of the state would think if they could all become more informed and discuss the issues in depth. Highly representative in both attitudes and demographics, a sample of 314 participants deliberated for a long weekend in Lansing, with both small group discussions and questions answered by competing experts in plenary sessions. The resulting changes of opinion in the final survey offer some dramatic recommendations for both policymakers and the public

Deliberative and epistemic approaches to democracy

Deliberative and epistemic approaches to democracy are two important dimensions of contemporary democratic theory. This chapter studies these dimensions in the emerging ecosystem of civic and political participation tools, and appraises their collective value in a new distinct concept: linked democracy. Linked democracy is the distributed, technology-supported collective decision-making process, where data, information and knowledge are connected and shared by citizens online. Innovation and learning are two key elements of Athenian democracies which can be facilitated by the new digital technologies, and a cross-disciplinary research involving computational scientists and democratic theorists can lead to new theoretical insights of democracy

From Creating Spaces for Civic Discourse to Creating Resources for Action

In this paper, we investigate the role of technology to address the concerns of a civil society group carrying out community-level consultation on the allocation of £1 million of community funds. We explore issues of devolved decision-making through the evaluation of a sociodigital system designed to foster deliberative virtues. We describe the ways in which this group used our system in their consultation practices. Our findings highlight how they adopted our technology to privilege specific forms of expression, ascertain issues in their community, make use of and make sense of community data, and create resources for action within their existing practices. Based on related fieldwork we discuss the impacts of structuring and configuring tools for ‘talk-based’ consultation in order to turn attention to the potential pitfalls and prospects for designing civic technologies that create resources for action for civil society

Disaggregating deliberation's effects: an experiment within a deliberative poll

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, we examine deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The issues were airport expansion and revenue-sharing in New Haven, Connecticut and its surrounding towns. Half the participants deliberated revenue-sharing, then the airport, the other half the reverse. This split-half design enables us to distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the Deliberative Polling treatment. We find that the formal on-site deliberations accounted for much of the Deliberative Polling effect on one issue, though not the other—thus both confirming deliberation’s capacity to shape attitudes and preferences and raising the question of how its effects may depend on the kind of issue being deliberated. We suggest that deliberation’s effects are larger for less salient issues