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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2018, SPi
Democracy When the People Are Thinking

Democracy When the People

Are Thinking
Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public
Deliberation
James S. Fishkin
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© James S. Fishkin 2018
© Part III, Section 2: James S. Fishkin, Thad Kousser, Robert C. Luskin, and Alice Siu.
© Part III, Section 4: James S. Fishkin, Roy William Mayega, Lynn Atuyambe,
Nathan Tumuhamye, Julius Ssentongo, Alice Siu, and William Bazeyo.
© Part III, Section 5: James S. Fishkin, Robert C. Luskin, and Alice Siu.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
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Acknowledgments
Deliberative democracy, in theory and practice, has been my principal occu-

pation since I had the idea for Deliberative Polling in 1988. The many
examples in this book implicitly describe a journey from normative theory
to empirical work—and back again to normative theory. I have many debts to
acknowledge. Teachers—the late Robert Dahl, the late Bernard Williams,
Charles E. Lindblom, Douglas Rae. Collaborators—Robert Luskin, Bruce
Ackerman, Alice Siu, the late Peter Laslett, and Deliberative Polling collaborators
and advisors in many countries. These include Yasunori Sone, Tatsuro Sakano,
Kerry Hayes, Shanto Iyengar, Baogang He, M. P. Gombojav Zandanshatar,
Mayor Erdeniin Bat-Üül, Mark Koenig, Amarzaya Naran, Angus Cheong, Pam
Ryan, Kasper Moller Hansen, John Panaretos, Pierangelo Isernia, Lenny Men-
donca, Dennis Thomas, and the late Will Guild and all my collaborators in the
Resilience African Network (some of whom are included in Section 4, Part III, in
this volume). Other scholars who have been particularly helpful at various
points include Simone Chambers, Claus Offe, Bernard Manin, Helene Land-
emore, Ian O’Fynn, Nan and Bob Keohane, Sandy Levinson, Larry Bartels,
Henry Brady, Cristina Lafont, Gaurav Sood, Robert Goodin, Mogens Herman
Hansen, Kimmo Grönlund, André Bächtiger, Alan Ryan, and Lynn Sanders.
Norman Bradburn and the late Philip Converse were key to launching these
ideas in the United States, David Lloyd, Roger Jowell, and Andreas Whittam
Smith were key in Britain. Dan Werner from MacNeil/Lehrer Productions,
now NewsHour Productions, has been central to bringing the process to
wider audiences. He has been a key partner as Senior Advisor to the Center
for Deliberative Democracy since its inception. The late Charles E. Walker was
an invaluable ally. Jane Mansbridge has been a source of continuing wisdom.
Co-teachers at Stanford such as Jack Rakove, Larry Diamond, and Josh Ober
have taught me many things that enrich this book. In our jointly taught
classes I think I was one of the most alert students. Kathleen Giles, Manager
of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, has been a superb help. There are
many others to acknowledge on such a long journey but they are too numer-
ous to name.
My family—Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Joseph R. Fishkin, and Bobby Fishkin,
CEO of Reframe It, my brother David Fishkin, as well as my mother-in-law,
Acknowledgments
Carol Plaine Fisher, and my late father-in-law Milton Fisher, have been a
constant inspiration. My parents, the late Joseph and Fannie Fishkin, started
me on this journey and deserve more thanks than I can express.
Any mistakes are mine. This book illustrates the complexities posed by a
very simple idea, if only we try to put it into practice. My hope is that the book
will appeal to political theorists who want to think about real cases, empirical
scholars who want to think about hypothetical cases, and anyone in the
public who wants to think about democracy—its prospects and limitations,
now and in the future.
vi
Table of Contents
List of Tables ix
List of Boxes xi
Part I: Introduction 1
1. Party Competition and Its Limits 3
2. Deliberation and Reform 6
Part II: Can the People Rule? 13

1. Four Criteria for Popular Control 13
2. Four Forms of Democracy 23
3. Popular Control in Competitive Democracies 27
4. Is There Democracy for “Realists”? 31
5. Manipulation 35
6. Elite Deliberation and Popular Control: Madison’s Filter 39
7. Participatory Democracy and Democratic Control: From Town
Meetings to Referenda 45
8. Reflections on the Athenian Case 51
Part III: Making Deliberation Practical 69

1. Designing Deliberative Democracy 69
2. Deliberative Agenda-Setting: California in One Room 79
James S. Fishkin, Thad Kousser, Robert C. Luskin, and Alice Siu
3. Mongolia: Deliberative Participatory Budgeting 91
4. Applying Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Uganda’s First
Deliberative Polls 100
James S. Fishkin, Roy William Mayega, Lynn Atuyambe, Nathan
Tumuhamye, Julius Ssentongo, Alice Siu, and William Bazeyo
5. Deliberating European-Wide? 111
James S. Fishkin, Robert C. Luskin, and Alice Siu
Part IV: Reimagining Democratic Possibilities 137

1. Designs for Deliberation: Where and How? 137
2. It Works in Practice, But Does It Work in Theory? 140
3. From Thought Experiments to Real Experiments: Reflections on
Rawls and Habermas 148
Table of Contents
4. Deliberative Democracy and Candidate Selection 157

5. Texas: Connecting Public Deliberation to Policy Elites 160
6. Connecting Deliberative Designs to Participatory Democracy 163
7. Deliberating Before Ballot Propositions: Reflecting on the
“Australian Republic” 166
8. Japan: Deliberation for Hard Choices 172
9. Deliberation Day 175
10. Connecting Deliberative Democracy to Constitutional Change 180
11. Speculating on New Institutions 183
12. Mongolia Deliberates on Constitutional Change 189
13. “Deliberative Authoritarianism”? 195
14. “Deliberative Systems” and Popular Control 199
15. Toward Collective Self-Rule 208
Appendix 221
Index 251
viii
List of Tables
2.2.1 Forms of Democracy 24

3.2.1 Indirect Initiative Proposals 85
4.7.1 Deliberative Results on Referendum Question 169
4.7.2 First Choice Model 170
A3.1 What’s Next California 221
A3.2 What’s Next California Attitude Change for Policy Proposals 222
A3.3 Regression: Lengthening Assembly Terms 224
A3.4 Regression: Part-Time Legislature 224
A3.5 Inequality Analyses for What’s Next California 225
A3.6 Polarization Analyses for What’s Next California 226
A3.7 Elements of Proposition 31 227
A3.8 Ulaanbaatar: Proposed Projects, Ranked Highest to Lowest
Post-Deliberation 227
A3.9 Inequality Analyses for Ulaanbaatar 228
A3.10 Polarization Analyses for Mongolia 228
A3.11a Bududa (Uganda): Significant Policy Changes 229
A3.11b Butaleja (Uganda): Significant Policy Changes for Participants 229
A3.12 Bududa: Top Ten Priorities After Deliberation 230
A3.13 Butaleja: Top Ten Priorities After Deliberation 230
A3.14 Bududa: Illustrative Excerpts for Top Three Priorities 231
A3.15 Butaleja: Illustrative Excerpts for Top Three Priorities 232
A3.16 Small Group Polarization: Bududa 233
A3.17 Small Group Polarization: Butaleja 234
A3.18 Bududa Inequality Analysis 235
A3.19 Butaleja Inequality Analysis 237
A3.20 European Union Immigration Index 239
A3.21 European Union Climate Change Index 239
A3.22 European Union: Attitudinal Representativeness for Indices 240
List of Tables
A3.23 European Union: Knowledge Gain 240

A3.24 European Union: Inequality and Small Groups 241
A3.25 European Union: Indices Before and After Deliberation 241
A3.26 European Union: Treatment Versus Control Group by Indices
at T1 and T4 241
A3.27 European Union: Explaining the Green Vote, T1 and T3 241
A3.28 European Union: Explaining the Green Vote, T1 and T4 242
A4.1 Macau: Inequality Analyses 242
A4.2 Macau: Polarization Analyses 243
x
List of Boxes
3.3.1 Heating and Insulation 96

3.3.2 The Metro 97
®
A.3.1 Deliberative Polling Around the World 221
A.4.1 “Law on Deliberative Polling” in Mongolia 243
Part I
Introduction
Imagine a national competition between two or more “teams” testing their

skill and strategy to mobilize fans who vote for their favorites after each of
many media events. Perhaps there are athletic contests in many sports. A giant
Olympics in many states or parts of the country. Sports reporters and media
commentators offer nearly endless speculation and gossip about how the
teams are doing and who might garner support of the greatest number of
fans. Perhaps the teams also send contestants to beauty contests. Or speaking
contests trading insults. Talent shows. Magic. All of these exhibitions take place
over many months in order to select the winning teams for various prizes based
on fan tabulations in various categories and places. The prizes are political
offices at every level of government. The teams call themselves political parties.
Reformers say that this kind of competition has very little to do with the
kind of “democracy” we should aspire to achieve. Yes, there are “votes” of the
fans but what are they about? As a modest reform, the teams are encouraged to
offer “platforms,” mostly expressed in platitudes about what they would do if
they get some of the prizes. Almost no one reads the platforms but reformers
congratulate themselves on improving the system.
The political competition in this imaginary society leaves out a factor so
obvious that it hardly requires explicit statement—any meaningful opportun-
ity for public will formation. The people lack any real opportunity to think in
depth about what they really want done. Instead they have competitive
political sports and distractions. It is a kind of limited democracy with barely
the pretense of engaging the will of the people.1
Our actual democracies are different in that they do aspire to engage the public
will. They speak about it in a high-minded way and they make modest efforts.
But how different are they really? And what could actually be done to move
them more effectively in the direction desired by our imaginary reformers?
Deliberative democracy is a practical answer to a philosophical question:
What would the people think should be done if they could consider key issues
under good conditions for thinking about them? Why is that a philosophical
Part I: Introduction
question? How is it a practical answer? What might we mean by good conditions?

What does this approach add to democracy as we know it in real political
systems around the world?
The key premise of this book is that democracy, by its very meaning, should
have a discernible connection to the will of the people. The key question is
what institutions can best make that connection. The form of democracy that
is now dominant throughout the world serves many central values—freedom
of expression and association, rule of law, rotation in office, accountability.
In serving those values it can be regarded as a major human achievement in
the long history of democracy spanning 2,400 years. But where is the entry
point for any meaningful version of the public will? As democratic theorists
and practitioners have asked in some preceding generations, are there avenues
of reform through which we can better live up to democratic ideals? As the late
theorist of democracy Robert Dahl asked, can we envision institutions for an
“advanced democratic country?”2
There is a twofold problem: the conditions under which the “will of the
people” develops and the mechanisms by which that will is expressed. Why is
the first a problem? We live in a world of relentless advocacy, massive financing
of the persuasion industry, the viral spread of fake news, social media discussions
among the like-minded, and the pressures of political competition built into our
practices of democracy. Instead of taking preferences as given, in whatever way
they happen to result, aspirations for deliberative democracy look at how and
whether our views of what should be done can be developed under conditions
where evidence-based reasons and arguments can be more consequential.
Where arguments offered are answered in turn and where efforts to mislead or
manipulate the public have less effect. To some, such an idea might seem wildly
impractical. But it is even harder when connected to the second problem: who
represents or speaks for “the will of the people.” Do we trust the political elites to
speak for us? After all, they are “representatives” or other duly authorized offi-
cials. Or do we trust the people themselves? But if so how? Are there mechanisms
through which the people can thoughtfully speak for themselves? Or are we just
left with a confusing welter of self-selected voices, however mobilized or misled?
One of the most thoughtful critics of deliberative democracy, Michael
Walzer, argues that competition and mobilization are the central features of
democracy, not deliberation:
the democratic way to win is to educate, organize, mobilize . . . more people than
the other side has. ‘More’ is what makes the victory legitimate and while legitim-
acy is strengthened if good arguments can be made about the substantive issues at
stake, the victory is rarely won by making good arguments.
The very idea of a form of politics in which making the better arguments is
central to the outcome seems utopian. He asks: “who would deliberate? On
2
Party Competition and Its Limits
what issues? With reference to what facts and theories? And why would
dissatisfied citizens accept the outcomes of the deliberations?”3
These are penetrating questions. They form a challenging agenda. This book
is an effort to answer them.
Our concern is not with theory disconnected from practice. Rather, by
experimenting with how to facilitate the public will and experimenting with
venues and institutional designs where it can be brought to life and made
consequential, we can glimpse more ambitious democratic possibilities. Delib-
erative democracy is not just a matter of armchair theorizing or thought
experiments. It can be the subject of empirical work—essentially pilots for a
philosophical idea. Furthermore, it can contribute to practical reforms and
improved governance at many levels throughout the world.
We will focus on ways to connect the will of the people with what is actually
to be done. We will look at various venues and pilots, drawn from different
political contexts and systems. Initially, the idea is to find appropriate entry
points for reform, carefully defined and delimited arenas where a more delib-
erative democracy can be applied and then evaluated. Later, we will look
beyond micro projects and envision larger schemes to scale up the vision we
are discussing.
Efforts to nurture deliberative democracy, in both theory and practice, come
at a time when governance around the world is beset by a recurring dilemma—
listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely
distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public’s
concerns. Populism or technocracy? Is there a third way? Self-selected demo-
cratic mechanisms are easily captured by those who feel most strongly or have
most to gain. They represent only portions of the people, often mobilized to
shout but not to listen. They are easily vulnerable to populism. On the other
hand, elites cannot formulate policy democratically without public input.
Policy-making has to be based on choices among value-laden goals. Whose
values? Whose goals? Technocrats cannot substitute their own and serve
democracy. Technocracy divorced from the people is easily vulnerable to
mass cynicism and distrust, and for good reason: it is not democracy.
Variations of deliberative democracy can fill the gap with a voice of the
people that is representative and thoughtful—“a mild voice of reason” from
the people and not just from their leaders.4 It can provide the missing link
between public judgment and public policy.
1. Party Competition and Its Limits
Many readers simply equate democracy with competitive elections. They will
argue that if there is a problem, it is not with our model of democracy but how
3
well we apply it. We fail to live up to our own democratic values. We have
many places around the US and around the world where the model of com-
petitive elections is only weakly applied, if at all. There is vote suppression,
distortions of campaign finance, a largely uninformed public, vast sums of
money spent to mislead and manipulate public opinion, efforts to spread fake
news on social media, and a public that is increasingly likely to talk mostly to
the like-minded, and consult mostly news sources it agrees with. In addition,
we often have the theory of competitive democracy applied in gerryman-
dered districts designed so that there will be little competition. Even where
there is competition in elections, that competition can produce the least
substantive, dirtiest campaigns focused on character and personality, often
with gross distortions of personal history. If negative campaigning wins
elections, by suppressing the approval ratings and turnout for the other
side,5 then those tendencies will be enhanced by greater competition.6
Candidates and parties want to win. If voters become informed about the
complexities of serious issues that is only a by-product, and one that is rarely
achieved. So increasing competition may well worsen our elections—by mak-
ing campaigns dirtier and less substantive, by further amplifying the role of
money (including dark money), and by putting a premium on the successful
manipulation of public opinion.
On the other hand, party competition-based democracies also have many
admirable aspects. The best versions protect well-established freedoms—
freedom of the press, freedom of association, protections for individual rights,
and the rule of law. They provide for orderly transitions of power based on the
competitive struggle for the people’s vote. They are not just democracies, but
liberal democracies.7 Yet all the infirmities mentioned can apply in liberal
democracies despite these freedoms and protections. The rule of law and free
expression and association do not prevent gross inequalities of campaign
finance. Indeed, in the US, the current interpretations of the First Amendment
freedoms have become a weapon protecting inequality in campaigns.8 Money
talks, even if corporate “persons” are doing the talking. Freedom of expression
can be used to distort and manipulate public opinion as easily as it can be used
to inform.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, there were relatively few dem-
ocracies. Then, beginning about 1974, the “third wave” spread democratic
governance around the world from around 30 percent of the world’s inde-
pendent states to close to 60 percent.9 This expansion brought public input
and accountability to governance in most countries. However, since about
2007, there has been a halt to this expansion and, on some accounts, a
contraction, or a “democratic recession.”10 In some countries where there
may have been vigorous electoral competition, there is now one-sided and
perhaps only symbolic competition.11 Many regimes that are fundamentally
4
Party Competition and Its Limits
authoritarian hold elections and adopt the trappings of democracy, but

mostly for appearances. Such countries illustrate what Steven Levitsky and
Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism” where the competition is so
lopsided that the elections are a mere formality or even a sham, while the
governing elites amass decisive power.12
Even worse for democratic aspirations, there are countries with little dem-
ocracy but relatively good governance. Imagine a government that simply
uses cost–benefit analysis (and other technocratic methods) to make policy,
instead of using any form of democratic consultation. Some have argued that
Singapore, with some of the best technocrats in the world but little popular
control over governance, is fulfilling that model.13 Why should we have
democracy, one might argue, when we can have good governance (or better
governance) without it? Our most influential democratic model, competitive
elections, seems to have its own competition from apparently benevolent non-
democracies. Democracy is under siege and needs to experiment and innov-
ate. This book hopes to contribute to that dialogue.
John Stuart Mill pondered the challenge of a “benevolent despot” in his
Considerations on Representative Government. Setting aside the practical objec-
tions to securing such an enlightened ruler, he countered: “suppose the
difficulty vanished. What should we then have? One man of superhuman
mental activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people.”14
What kinds of citizens would one have if they took no responsibility and had
no involvement in their government? Our problem today is that with low
turnout, generally low participation, and low public engagement, our democ-
racies are becoming what Bernard Manin has called “audience democracy.”15
Most of the time, citizens currently have little participation except as spec-
tators. Approval ratings for almost all key democratic institutions are in
long-term declines in virtually all democratic countries. So Mill’s response
distinguishing a democracy with involved citizens from a benevolent des-
potism is less powerful today. We already have a democracy with mostly
uninvolved citizens most of the time.
One could argue that we should value democracy because it is instrumentally
necessary for the liberties we cherish (liberties of thought, expression, and
association protected by the rule of law). On this view the defense of democ-
racy rests on an empirical claim. We need democracy to protect our liberties.
But, as Isaiah Berlin noted,
Self-government may, on the whole, provide a better guarantee of the preservation

of civil liberties than other regimes . . . but there is no necessary connexion
between individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question
‘Who governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does govern-
ment interfere with me?’16
5
While granting the likelihood that democracy will, in general, serve to

protect our liberties, it is also sometimes the case that electoral competition
can incentivize crackdowns and restrictions on liberty, scapegoating minor-
ities (whether political, ethnic, or racial) for political gain.
Our strategy turns the argument around. Liberties of thought and discus-
sion are necessary for any widespread application of what we will call delibera-
tive democracy by the people themselves.17 While liberty may not imply
democracy, democracy (at least of a certain sort) requires liberty. The argu-
ment that democracy requires liberty of thought and discussion (as well as the
protections afforded by the rule of law) is not new. It is core to the theory of
the First Amendment in the US and was famously articulated by Alexander
Meiklejohn.18 But, as we will see, democracy comes in different forms, some of
which make few demands on the thinking of individual citizens. Deliberative
democracy by the people themselves, however, makes many such demands.19
Any widespread realization of deliberative democracy would provide the
strongest case for a version of Meiklejohn’s argument.
In broad terms, governments can achieve legitimacy through process and
through outcomes. Faith in the democratic process is in decline. If other
systems deliver the goods, and provide prosperity and other results people
care about, then the democratic method faces a serious challenge on the basis
of the outcomes it produces.
For deliberative democrats, the response to democracy’s legitimacy prob-
lems, whether from process or from outcomes, is to invigorate the public
capacity for thoughtful self-rule. The laws and policies which the people are
seen to impose on themselves—after full consideration and based on good
information—have a unique claim to legitimacy. The process permits the
public to take thoughtful responsibility and the outcomes should be what
the people decide they really want. This is the ideal. But there are many
questions in an age of cynicism and mass disaffection about how this ideal
can be realized.
2. Deliberation and Reform
Efforts at democratic reform have long been entangled in an apparently forced

choice between two fundamental values—political equality and deliberation.
Around the world, changes in democratic institutions, both formal and infor-
mal, have brought “power to the people” but under conditions where the
people have little reason or effective incentive to think very much about the
power they are supposed to exercise. A vast social science literature documents
that the mass public in almost every polity lacks information or even pays
much attention to political matters.20 And when it does, it tends to engage
6
Deliberation and Reform
the side of the argument it finds most congenial. The like-minded share
information, or misinformation, or even congenial but fake information,
and never engage with the thinking of those with whom they disagree. Such
a public is easily subject to manipulation by the mechanisms of one-sided
persuasion developed for advertising and for propaganda.21 In our long
journey of bringing power to the people—through mass primaries, referenda,
recall elections, direct election of senators in the US, public opinion polls, and
other forms of public consultation—we have empowered a public that gener-
ally lacks the information and attention that would be required for applying
the value of deliberation in making those choices. We reform politics in
the name of democracy, but it is a thin democracy that, even at its best, prizes
political equality without deliberation.22 Such a democracy risks substituting
the whims of the people for the will of the people and the methods of Madison
Avenue for the values of James Madison.23
Can we do better? A first step is to implement the combination of
political equality and deliberation. Political equality because equal count-
ing is at the core of the democratic idea. Deliberation because that is key
to a democracy of thoughtful self-rule. The idea is to equally count every-
one’s views under conditions where they can really think in order to give
expression to a meaningful public will. Hence, we will draw on work that
combines random sampling to help achieve political equality with condi-
tions facilitating in-depth, thoughtful discussion. Such consultations can
be done in contexts that are consequential so that the resulting opinions
provide a useful input to policy. This is a micro strategy, but it embodies—
and helps dramatize—a picture of democracy when the people are thinking.
Further, it can provide informed and representative input to policy. But such a
strategy, while critically important, is only a partial solution. Ultimately, we
need more than deliberative microcosms of the people. We need a deliberative
macrocosm—a deliberative society. How can this be done? Can deliberation
scale? Can microcosmic experiments help illuminate a vision for long-term
reform? That is our subject in the later parts of the book.
Note that if such a system were possible it would mean solving the apparent
trilemma—a dilemma with three corners—between political equality, deliber-
ation, and participation.24 Can we get all three? It has long seemed that imple-
menting any two would preclude the third. First, we can have political equality
and deliberation with a statistically representative microcosm deliberating.
But because only a microcosm, drawn by random sampling, can participate in
the deliberations, we fail to achieve the third principle: mass participation.
Alternatively, we can get mass participation and deliberation but only with
those self-selecting for a real interest in the subject. A mobilization of the
intensely interested will be unrepresentative of the rest of the population.
Such mobilizations are often key to populism but they do not speak for all
7
the people. As we will see, self-selected intense groups can achieve mass partici-
pation and even deliberation, but such strategies will violate political equality
because they will be unrepresentative.25 Lastly, we can get mass participation
and political equality in high turnout referenda, for example, but these mass
devices usually fall short on deliberation.26 Once again we fulfill two of the
principles without the third. Hence the challenge of the trilemma, a kind of
dilemma with three corners.
If we somehow had institutions that reliably delivered large-scale delibera-
tive participation with equal representation, that would fulfill all three prin-
ciples and make the thoughtful views of the people immensely consequential.
It would be the public’s considered judgments, expressing the views of all. It
would not be a microcosm representing what the people would think. Rather,
it would give expression to what they actually do think. Why would this make
such a difference?
After his famous visit to America in the 1880s James Bryce wrote in The
American Commonwealth that there was one force that was pre-eminent:
Towering over presidents and state governors, over Congress and state legislatures,
over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out, in the
United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble
before it.27
Bryce was talking of public opinion as we usually find it, with all its changeable
indeterminacies.28 Even such a version, he argued, would soon spread its influ-
ence around the world, creating what he called “government by public opin-
ion.”29 How much more powerful and consistent could we expect the influence
of public opinion to become if it were built on really solid foundations—if it
were the product of the entire society thinking about the issues and coming to
a considered judgment?
What is the mode of influence for this “great source of power”? This “key . . .
that will unlock any door.”30 That depends, of course, on the design of institu-
tions and the incentives and motivations of the various actors within it. We
return to such questions in Part IV.
I offer this still abstract but ideal picture of virtually everyone deliberating as
part of the answer to Dahl’s challenge: how to envision institutions for “an
advanced democratic country.” We can stipulate that achieving all three
principles—political equality, participation, and deliberation—would consti-
tute a full deliberative process within a given policy domain. Even more ambi-
tiously, if there is a deliberative agenda-setting process to determine what the
people are deliberating about within that policy domain, then we can say that
it is a well-ordered deliberative process.31 Further, if such processes are sufficiently
widespread, we can say it is a well-ordered deliberative system.
8
Deliberation and Reform
Is such a system possible? For the moment, we can only glimpse such
possibilities on the basis of micro experiments. We can also pose scaling as a
challenge: how to take deliberation from the microcosm to the macro scale.
The micro version provides a useful input to policy—what the people would
think under good conditions can be invoked by policy makers to improve
governance and bring it closer to the real concerns that have weight with the
people once they consider the issue in depth. The macro version has the great
advantage that it supplants the hypothetical with the public’s actual con-
sidered judgments. Can what we learn from the micro version be brought to
scale? Before confronting that difficult question, we will argue that the micro
version is eminently practical and credible in its own right. The macro version,
if achievable, would be transformative. In a world of competing visions for
democracy, it identifies a clear direction for democratic renewal.
This book focuses a great deal on Deliberative Polls, which are only one
possible design for bringing representative and thoughtful judgments
from the public to policy making. There are others. It is only one part of a
world-wide movement to supplement our current electoral democracies
with public input from deliberating random samples. I am convinced
there will be even better designs in the future. I am also convinced that
practitioners of this movement can all learn from each other. This book is a
contribution to that dialogue.
9
Notes
1. Some public choice scholars have used the analogy of sporting fans rooting for
their teams to try to restore rationality to the decision to vote—a decision not
motivated by its effects on a team victory but the enjoyment of taking part as a fan
(even though a fan will have no effect on the outcome). See G. Brennan and
J. Buchanan, “Voter Choice: Evaluating Political Alternatives,” American Behavioral
Scientist, vol. 28 (1984), pp. 185–201. While this approach might shed light on
decisions to vote, it does not help with the issue of whether voters will become
informed or attempt to think about the merits of the competing alternatives
However, it might encourage more unbalanced knowledge acquisition (partisan
selectivity) as voters find congenial information supporting their team. It clearly
does not support the deliberative voter.
2. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1989).
3. Michael Walzer, “Deliberation and What Else?” in Stephen Macedo, ed., Delibera-
tive Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 58–69.
4. See Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American
National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) for a reading of
Madison’s design for the national government in terms of deliberative
democracy.
5. For experimental evidence on demobilization see Stephen Ansolabehere, Shanto
Iyengar, Adam Simon, and Nicholas Valentino, “Does Attack Advertising Demo-
bilize the Electorate?” American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 4 (December
1994), pp. 829–38. For a contrary view, mostly based on survey evidence, see
R. Lau, Lee Sigelman, and I. Rovner, “The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns:
A Meta-Analytic Reassessment,” Journal of Politics, vol. 69, no. 4 (November 2007),
pp. 1176–209.
6. Even when the turnout increases, on balance, due to the countervailing force of
competitive mobilization efforts, the lack of substance undermines deliberation.
7. For arguments in favor of liberal democracy see Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of
Democracy Revisited, Part Two (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1987), pp. 386–93;
and Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy (New York: Times Books, 2008), ch. 1.
8. Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost (New York: Hachette, 2011).
9. “When the third wave began in 1974, only about 30 percent of the world’s
independent states met the criteria of electoral democracy—a system in which
citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular,
free, fair, and meaningful elections.” Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic
Recession,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 26, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 141–55.
10. Diamond, “Democratic Recession.”
11. The degree of electoral competition in some of the recently democratic countries is
contested. See Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Myth of Democratic Reces-
sion,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 26, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 45–58. Their argu-
ment is that many of the countries thought to be in democratic decline never
10
Notes
actually achieved full democratic transition but are best considered competitive
authoritarian cases.
12. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,”
Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 2 (April 2002), pp. 51–65.
13. Dave Bengardi, “Singapore’s Challenge to Democracy,” Berkeley Political Review,
October 12, 2015. Available at: https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2015/10/12/singapores-
challenge-to-democracy/. For a spirited defense of Chinese aspirations for merito-
cratic governance see Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the
Limits of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
14. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (repr. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1991; first published 1861), p. 56.
15. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) pp. 218–35. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of civic
voluntarism in the US, much of it outside of electoral politics. For a landmark study
see Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic
Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
16. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1969), p. 130.
17. Note the qualifier “widespread.” On restricted issues it is possible to apply delib-
erative democracy by the people themselves in authoritarian regimes. But those
applications are restricted to a given issue domain and might best be viewed as a
contribution to long-term reform. See J. S. Fishkin, B. He, R. C. Luskin, and A. Siu,
“Deliberative Democracy in an Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China,”
British Journal of Political Science, vol. 40, no. 2 (2010), pp. 435–48.
18. Alexander Meiklejohn, Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1948).
19. We will sometimes refer to this simply as deliberative democracy after we have
distinguished it from deliberation by representatives or what we will call elite
deliberation.
20. For an overview see Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know
about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1997).
21. For a compelling picture of the excesses that are possible, see Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Distraction, Deception and Democracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993).
22. “At its best” is an important qualifier, given incentives for vote suppression under-
mining political equality. See, for example, Spencer Overton, Stealing Democracy:
The New Politics of Voter Suppression (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
23. See the discussion of Madison on deliberation in Part II, Section 6. On the reading
here he was an advocate for what we will call elite deliberation, but this deliber-
ation was meant to speak for the people as a “filtration” of the public’s views. See
Part II, Section 6.
24. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 32–64. More precise definitions of these principles
appear in Part II, Section 2.
11
25. They will be subject to “participatory distortion,” a term I take from Verba, Schlozman,
and Brady, Voice and Equality, p. 15.
26. Is a deliberative referendum possible? See Bruce Ackerman’s proposal for instilling
an increased opportunity for deliberation, at least by the relevant elites, into a
constitutional referendum: a second-term president getting a two-thirds vote of
Congress and then requiring two successive referendum votes for passage with a
two-year waiting period. We will return to this project of adding deliberation to
the referendum, strengthening the mass participation side with Deliberation Day.
See Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998), pp. 410–11. One can only speculate what comparable requirements
in the context of the UK political system would have done to Brexit. If there were
an automatic requirement to revisit in two years before finalizing, it would likely
have improved the debate and the acceptance of the outcome, whatever it would
have been.
27. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (repr.; Indianapolis: The Liberty
Fund, 1995), p. 923, emphasis added.
28. Bryce’s observations remain cogent today. See chapter 76, “The Nature of Public
Opinion,” in The American Commonwealth. They find ample modern confirmation
in John R. Zaller’s magisterial The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
29. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, p. 925.
30. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, p. 921.
31. The case for including an agenda-setting stage in an ideal characterization of what
he calls a “full procedural democracy” is made by Robert Dahl in “Procedural
Democracy,” in Peter Laslett and James Fishkin, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society:
Fifth Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 97–133, especially pp. 106–7.
12
Part II
Can the People Rule?
1. Four Criteria for Popular Control
In democracies around the world, policy makers routinely invoke “rule by the
people,” but is this more than symbolic? Leaders win elections and claim
“mandates” from the people, but in what sense, or to what degree are the
people in control of the policies with which they must live? Or to what degree
is it realistic that they should be? A great deal of research supports the picture
of a public that is mostly inattentive, not well informed, and only episodically
aroused. How can such a public exercise any significant control? Consider
further that if leaders manipulate or deceive the public then in what sense
is the public exerting control over leaders even when the leaders are doing
what the public appears to desire? Or might it be the other way around—
leaders exerting control over the public?
Even when voters sincerely and thoughtfully vote for a package of policies,
without manipulation, they are often stuck with elements of the package that
can be profoundly unpopular, a pattern Dahl once identified as typical of
“minorities rule” rather than majority rule.1 These are only a few of the
obvious challenges facing democratic aspirations in the real world of large-
scale modern polities. Before we pursue the constructive remedy proposed
here—various doses of what we will call deliberative democracy—we need to
get a handle on the current infirmities of the system as we live it now.
We begin with some criteria. While each is so obvious that it hardly requires
explicit statement, the challenge is to satisfy all four. Our question is: What
would it mean for the members of the mass public actually to have a signifi-
cant role in ruling themselves? Consider these four criteria for popular control:
Inclusion: all adult citizens should be provided with an equal opportunity

to participate.
Choice: the alternatives for public decision need to be significantly different
and realistically available.
Part II: Can the People Rule?
Deliberation: the people need to be effectively motivated to think about

the reasons for and against competing alternatives in a context where they
can get good information about them.
Impact: the people’s choices need to have an effect on decisions (such as
who governs or what policies get enacted).
Inclusion. The history of democratic reform, over a long time horizon, is a

story of greater inclusion. In ancient Athens and other ancient democracies
only adult male citizens could vote.2 Women, metics (resident non-citizens),
and, of course, slaves could not. In the US, the boundaries of the franchise
have been the subject of great political struggle. Waves of expansion, often
following wartime, brought the vote to citizens regardless of property own-
ership, race, and gender. But the expansion of the franchise to African-
Americans in particular drew a fierce reaction: whites re-disenfranchised
them under Jim Crow for most of a century, largely through devices such
as poll taxes and literacy tests, which purported to promote competent
voting and prevent fraud.3 The question of whether some voters (such as
black voters and poor voters) were competent enough to deserve the fran-
chise has been contested—and misused—for most of American history.
John Stuart Mill approached the question from a different angle: he famously
argued for wide inclusion, including the equality of women, but also advocated
“plural voting” by which more voting power would be given to those who
were better qualified.4 Thus, conceptually, we can separate the baseline ques-
tion of inclusion from the further question of whether all are included on an
equal basis. In the history of democratic reform in the US, one of the most
consequential moments was the Supreme Court’s intervention in “one person
one vote” cases, which struck down schemes by which small rural populations
could elect more representatives than far more populous cities. Such “dilution”
questions can arise even where everyone enjoys the same baseline right to
vote.5 Here, however, we will assume inclusion is implemented on a basis of
equality for all those given membership in the polity. Still, in almost all societies
there will be visitors, resident citizens of other countries, children, and others
who may not qualify. In the United States, almost all states prevent prisoners
from voting, and many also disenfranchise ex-felons long after their sen-
tences are completed. Issues of competence have sometimes been invoked to
rationalize exclusion or some scheme of unequal rights. Here we will assume
that inclusion means inclusion of all adult citizens on the basis of equality.
All adult citizens where? Of what? For our discussions here we will take the
boundaries of the nation state as given. Democratic theory requires a demos, a
population that is to be included as members in the democracy. Robert
Goodin observes “until we have an electorate we cannot have an election.
14
Four Criteria for Popular Control
But that is not just a temporal observation, it is a logical truth.”6 Brian Barry
illustrated the difficulty of applying majority rule to try and settle the bound-
aries of who is to be included by considering the Irish question in the early
twentieth century. He inferred likely majorities for conflicting results within
the UK as a whole, within Ireland (the whole island), and within the six
provinces that became Northern Ireland. The decision as to who is included
easily determines the democratic result, not the other way around.7
If we consider the boundaries of the polity as settled, what is the mode of
inclusion for its members? So far we have talked about who is included, but
not how. We have only said “equally.” But equally in what way? The most
common form of inclusion by far is the equal right to vote. This form of
inclusion ends up employing mass participation as the means for realizing
political equality in the mass public. This is encouraging for the realization of
two of our three core principles—political equality and participation. But in
the large-scale nation state, it is very difficult to effectively motivate or incen-
tivize deliberation for the mass public. Each individual citizen is too often
subject to rational ignorance and sheer inattention. If I have one vote in
millions, I will often tune out or engage only episodically as my individual
views will not make any appreciable difference to the outcome.
Much depends on how we interpret the idea of giving everyone an “equal
opportunity to participate.” If participation is self-selected, there may be sharp
differentials in who takes up the opportunity. In two landmark US studies,
Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady found a great deal of “partici-
patory distortion”—those who actually participate are “unrepresentative of
the rest of the public with respect to some politically relevant characteristic.”8
Their desideratum is “that what matters is not that the expression of political voice
be universal but that it be representative.”9 Their concern is the “distinctively
“upper-class accent” of the heavenly chorus which gives voice to the American
public.10 Minorities, the young, and the less advantaged tend to participate
distinctly less (the rich and more educated and older voters tend to participate
distinctly more). However, depending on the context and the design of political
institutions, it is possible that self-selection will have the opposite effect and
actually favor the least advantaged. In the “participatory budgeting” pioneered
in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and now spread to thousands of cases throughout the
world, there is clear evidence that it is the poor who are mobilized to turn out
and the middle classes who are not.11 As with voting, the citizens in participatory
budgeting all have “equal opportunity” in theory to participate, but the incentives
for doing so must be understood in their social context.
The more general lesson is that self-selected participation is virtually certain
to be unrepresentative and hence offer a distorted form of inclusion. The
people who feel more strongly or who are more engaged with the issues or
who are specifically mobilized to turn out will be the ones who participate.
15
One might respond to this challenge with compulsory voting requirements to

curb the biases from self-selection. In general, this method has its own prob-
lems. In Australia, it has greatly increased turnout but it has introduced
coercion and has not succeeded in effectively motivating informed voters.12
Other strategies are also possible. Instead of penalties there might be creative
incentives such as payment or a lottery prize for voting. These are great ideas
but they are largely untested.13
The strategy of inclusion we will initially focus on here is random sampling
with appropriate incentives for participation. In theory, if a good random
sample is recruited, in which all members have an equal chance to partici-
pate, that is another variant of equal opportunity. The literature on equal
opportunity has long included the random draw as at least one of its com-
ponent parts. Equality-of-life chances for valued slots in society is a common
criterion for equal opportunity for valued positions. If I have an equal chance
there is a sense in which I have an equal opportunity.14 Most importantly, a
good random sample should be free of participatory distortion. It should be
representative of the population in its political attitudes and demographics
(and the degree to which any given sample achieves this can easily be studied
empirically).
How much of a difference does participatory distortion make? While it is an
empirical question whether differences in key demographics imply differences
in political attitudes (either with, or without, deliberation), it is a key conten-
tion of normative theorists that the “politics of presence,” especially inclusion
in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity, will make a major difference to the
viewpoints offered by representatives as well as by voters.15 On the other
hand, Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone famously found little dif-
ference between voters and non-voters in their policy attitudes despite the
evident differences in demographic factors.16 This has been contested since,
especially on economic issues.17
From the standpoint of deliberative democracy, the key point would be to
probe the hypothetical. Perhaps non-voters offer similar views to those offered
by voters even though they are poorer, less educated, and include more
minorities. Presumably the non-voters have different interests on many issues
because their demographics and hence their positions in the socioeconomic
structure are very different. If they were to engage in a serious deliberation
about what to do, we cannot assume that they would uniformly come to the
same conclusions as their more well-off fellow citizens. If they think and
discuss, if they get their questions answered and become more informed,
they are likely to change some of their views. For deliberative democracy it
becomes a normatively relevant empirical question: What would they think if
they were to engage in the best available conditions for thinking about the
specific policy issues in question?
16
In a given case, their views might—or might not—be different from what
they actually do think now. We can only know if we start the deliberations
with a good microcosm, as representative as possible in both demographics
and attitudes. If we avoid participatory distortion in constructing the micro-
cosm, then engage it in the best practical conditions for extensive deliber-
ation,18 then we can arrive at an inference about a key hypothetical—what the
people would think if they were really considering the issue. If we started with
a microcosm that was unrepresentative in both demographics and attitudes,
perhaps as unrepresentative as many of our elections, we would not have a
plausible basis for drawing the hypothetical inference about what the public—
all the public—would think. Certain key interests and viewpoints would be
left out (e.g. perhaps the poor or minority groups). The dialogue might well
have been different if they were included, one could plausibly argue.
Random sampling is a form of inclusion that can be used to gather the
whole population, in microcosm, to the deliberations. It is a gathering of all
the relevant viewpoints and interests in their appropriate proportions in the
population, under conditions where those who have those viewpoints and
interests can engage with each other in dialogue. It is consonant with the idea
Mill offered for an ideal parliament, a “congress of opinions”:
where every person in the country may count upon finding some-
body who speaks his mind as well or better than he could speak it
himself—not to friends and partisans exclusively, but in the face of
opponents, to be tested by adverse controversy; where those whose
opinion is over-ruled feel satisfied that it is heard and set aside not by
a mere act of will but for what are thought superior reasons.19
As a citizen, I am included in that I can see my viewpoints and interests

expressed and defended as well or better than I could myself, in a dialogue
with all the competing perspectives. Some may view this as a less effective and
tangible form of inclusion.20 But it is also substantive, bringing the issues to
life. Further, if the deliberating group is a good sample, it will likely be more
representative of all the perspectives and interests in the population than
would self-selected voting.21
Random sampling is a form of inclusion but it is not a form of consent.
Bernard Manin argues that selection by lot lost out to election as a form of
representation in the birth of modern representative governments because
elections can be seen as requiring a kind of consent from the people every time
they vote. They provide a continuing source of perceived legitimacy through
the tangible act of voting.22 While Manin may well be correct in this historical
argument, it does not undermine our including random selection as an
important, indeed potentially transformative, form of inclusion in the design
of deliberative institutions.
17
Choice. Suppose everyone participates but there is only one choice. Or only
one choice that is a realistic possibility, with the other choices only symbolic
afterthoughts creating the illusion of choice. Or suppose there are two choices
but they are identical in their policy implications for all practical purposes, like
the Tweedledum and Tweedledee positions sometimes ascribed to American
political parties in the 1950s. People cannot exercise meaningful choice if
there are no real differences to choose between.
To explore further, even when there are significantly choices, they may not be
realistically on offer.23 Suppose there is a completely dominant party and it
tolerates a token opposition that advocates different policies. But there is no
realistic possibility that the opposition will ever win. Hence, while it is true
that the policies they advocate are undoubtedly significantly different from
those of the dominant party, those alternatives are only symbolically avail-
able. No real choice is actually being presented to the public. Hence the need
for choices that are both significantly different and realistically available.
Where do the choices come from? First, let us say that so long as the choices
are significantly different and realistically available, the choice criterion is
satisfied for the issue at hand. A and B are widely accepted to be significantly
different,24 and both are realistically on offer so that the people can exercise
choice. But why A and B? There will usually be any number of other possibil-
ities that could have been offered and different democratic designs will win-
now the choices to a manageable number (not necessarily two) in various
ways. Perhaps candidates are running for office and there are primary elec-
tions. Or perhaps there is a political convention where party notables in what
used to be called “smoke-filled rooms” deliberate and bargain to choose the
nominee of their party. Perhaps it is an initiative put on the ballot by petition
for an up or down vote by the people. Or perhaps it is a referendum authorized
by a vote of parliament or by an American state legislature. These are among
the common ways that an agenda for decision can be set.
We have stipulated that ideally, for a “well-ordered deliberative process,”
there would be a deliberative consultation as part of the agenda-setting pro-
cess. In Part IV we will explore what that could look like and how it could be
experimented with. Such a process would give the public greater and more
thoughtful control over the choices they are presented with. Deliberative
agenda-setting is an important area for reform. But even without it, when
the people are asked to choose between significantly different and realistic
alternatives they are exercising choice on the issue posed.
How do they choose? We need to consider both the mode of expression
for each individual’s preference and the decision rule for aggregating those
preferences. We will not attempt to stipulate the general solutions to these
problems here. But it is worth noting some elements that seem useful for
18
satisfying the values we will discuss—especially those of deliberative democracy.

First, the mode of expression. Secret ballot or other forms of confidential expres-
sion? Or public voting by which individuals take public responsibility for their
positions? John Stuart Mill argued for public voting, common at the time, so that
people would take responsibility and have to think about how to justify their
votes to others.25 His father, the philosopher James Mill, argued that the secret
ballot was necessary to protect voters from coercion, particularly poor voters in a
vulnerable position who could be told by their landlords or their employers how
to vote.26 There is some power to both arguments. However, we see the advan-
tages of secret ballots, or, in some deliberative democracy contexts, confidential
questionnaires, to help ensure that the expressions of individual judgment are
free of social pressure. We want to facilitate the expression of what people really
believe, not what they are pressured to express.
Instead of aggregating individual expressions of preference, a group or insti-
tution could act on the basis of rough consensus or acclamation: “If there are no
objections we all agree to X.” But with such a method the individual dissenter
must speak up against the social pressures of the majority. That person will
likely feel subject to the “spiral of silence” and not object, and a distorted sense
of the public view will result.27
Hence there are advantages to the individual expression of preferences in
confidential ballots or questionnaires rather than in publicly voicing your
vote.28 How should these preferences or judgments be aggregated? What can
we say about the appropriate decision rules for democratic choice?
In a democratic context, the idea is to see which policies or which options
the people most support. Once the boundaries of the community have been
established, the argument for majority rule has been canonical since John
Locke, who argued that the majority was the “greater force.”29 By definition,
more people support the majority view than support the minority one.
But for some questions there is also a long tradition of requiring super
majorities rather than simple majorities. Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that
“the more grave and important the questions discussed, the nearer should
the opinion that is to prevail approach unanimity.”30 However, super major-
ities privilege the status quo over change. Unanimity, the strongest possible
super-majority rule, would give everyone a veto and make new policies nearly
impossible.31 While many theories of deliberative democracy prize consensus
and seek to achieve “rationally motivated agreement,”32 they typically leave
room for voting by majority where consensus or unanimity is not achieved.
Ultimately, we are interested in which proposed policies or candidates are
supported by the preponderance of opinion and what are the reasons the
people have for their conclusions. The decision rule for actual decisions (on
the continuum from majoritarian to super majoritarian) as well as the voting
system to measure it, are matters of institutional design which get entrenched
19
in a given political order and constitutional system. Deliberative democrats

are concerned with the representative and thoughtful measurement and
expression of the public’s considered judgments. How large a majority should
be required for a given kind of decision may vary by constitutional and
institutional design for different kinds of issues. There is more of an argument
for super-majority requirements in constitutional change in order to stimulate
additional rounds of deliberation. Policy changes might be more suitable to
the majority principle.
A cautionary point is the well-established argument that majority rule can
produce voting cycles,33 opening up democracy to inconsistency and manipula-
tion. While we can only pause momentarily to acknowledge this enormous
literature, it is worth noting, first, that the cases of actual voting cycles are,
arguably, vanishingly rare.34 Second, there is reason to think that any thorough-
going application of deliberative democracy will be even less vulnerable to voting
cycles than would non-deliberative democracy. Voting cycles are ruled out if there
is an underlying dimension along which the voters can array the alternatives. The
dimension might be left to right in the familiar political space. Or it could be some
other dimension.35 People do not need to agree on what should be done, but such
an ordering clarifies what they are agreeing, or disagreeing, about. Duncan Black,
in a classic study, named this property “single-peakedness.”36 When this applies,
voting cycles are impossible. In a study of deliberation in different contexts and on
different issues (with Deliberative Polls) we found that deliberation increased
proximity to single-peakedness, creating the (largely) shared dimension that
would effectively rule out cycles.37 This empirical finding is in the spirit of a
hypothesis of William Riker, the most influential proponent of the near intract-
ability of the problem in modern democracies. Riker concluded:
If, by reason of discussion, debate, civic education and political socializa-

tion, voters have a common view of the political dimension (as evidenced
by single-peakedness), then a transitive outcome is guaranteed.38
If a microcosm deliberates, the confusion and collective inconsistency of the

voting cycles can be largely avoided. And if we were to achieve a deliberative
society, the problem could likely be avoided for the macro scale.
Deliberation. The past two decades have witnessed a “deliberative turn in

democratic theory.”39 There has been a surge of interest in “deliberative
democracy” in both political theory and empirical work.40 What does delib-
eration add to democracy? What does it add to the evaluation and possible
reform of democratic practices? Obviously the performance of democratic
institutions could be enhanced in ways that have nothing to do with deliber-
ation. What is the advantage of the deliberative approach? It foregrounds
issues that were always a part of democratic theory, but which bring into
20
view the problem of public-will formation. Our premise is that democracies

ought to make decisions that have some connection to “the will of the
people.” But what is the condition of our public will when the public often
has low levels of information,41 limited attention spans, and is the target of so
many millions spent by the persuasion industry—on campaigns, elections,
and issue advocacy?42 How different would public opinion—and voting—be if
people weighed competing arguments on the basis of good information about
the alternatives? If they considered competing candidates, competing parties,
competing ballot propositions, or competing policies, all under good condi-
tions for really thinking about the tradeoffs posed by those choices?
The root of deliberation is weighing.43 And the root idea of deliberative

democracy—admittedly a very simple and commonsense notion—is that the
people should weigh the arguments, the competing reasons, offered by their
fellow citizens under good conditions for expressing and listening to them
and considering them on the merits. A democracy designed without success-
ful attention to this kind of public-will formation could easily be reduced to a
democracy of manipulated sound bites and misled opinions. Even if the
elections for candidates, parties, or ballot measures are competitive and pro-
cedurally fair, and even if the people are presented with a choice between
significantly different options, it may be no more thoughtful or authentic a
choice than one between brands of soap or cigarettes.
The deliberative character of any discussion may be construed as a
variable—a property that any given communicative interaction possesses to
a greater or lesser degree.44 At the far end of this continuum lies a situation in
which every argument offered is answered by anyone with a different view-
point and those arguments are answered in turn with participants weighing
all the reasons offered by everyone on the merits. Such an ideal cannot be
fully realized in practice because it presumes virtually unlimited discussion.
But it suggests a continuum in terms of the completeness or incompleteness
with which the arguments offered are responded to.45 Such a situation is
reminiscent of the famous “ideal speech situation,” a “methodological fiction”
Habermas applies not just to politics but to all validity claims.46 Habermas’s
proposal is a “thought experiment,” but there are, he believes, conditions for
actual decision procedures that can be realized. Key conditions include
exchanges of “inclusive, public” arguments free of external coercion and
“free of any internal coercion that could detract from [the participants’]
equality. Each [participant] has an equal opportunity to be heard, to introduce
topics, to make a contribution, to suggest and criticize proposals.” Without
distorting factors such as external or internal coercion, the conclusions would
ideally be motivated by the “unforced force of the better argument.”47 While
Habermas, building on work by Joshua Cohen, sketches some criteria that
21
should be satisfied by actual decision processes, his institutional proposals have

been criticized, even by sympathetic proponents, for seeming to leave our
current liberal democratic institutions of representative democracy largely in
place.48 He
refuse[s] to elaborate institutional venues of deliberation . . . he would

insist that a theory of deliberative politics cannot determine the details
of institutions because these must fit the context, be discussed, shaped,
and adopted by a particular group of people with a particular cultural and
political history.49
So how are we to achieve a deliberative politics of public opinion and will

formation?50 How are we to move from thought experiments to real experi-
ments? We will pursue these questions in the case studies in Part III and, more
generally, in Part IV.
On this continuum of increasing deliberative quality from mere conversa-
tion about public issues to an imaginary structured dialogue of near-unlimited
duration, we can place “everyday talk in the deliberative system” near the
lower, more informal end, and actual dialogues in a structured process meant
to engage the public in reasoning under good conditions (the deliberative
microcosm or mini-public strategy) somewhat nearer the high end—but, of
course, still far away from purely imaginary dialogues in perfected thought
experiments such as might be envisioned in the “ideal speech situation.” Jane
Mansbridge insists that “everyday talk” should be judged by the same delib-
erative standards as highly structured deliberative processes,51 admitting that
they will likely not do as well in fulfilling those expectations.52
Impact. Thus far we have discussed criteria for including everyone, for their
having substantive choices that are realistically available, and for their being
able to deliberate about those choices. A final criterion for popular control is
that their choices should actually make a difference. The people’s choices need
to have an effect on what policies are adopted or over who gets chosen for
political office. Otherwise there is no effective democratic control.
Are we only interested in a formal connection between the judgments of the

public and the policies adopted or the candidates chosen? Habermas empha-
sizes that the informal processes of public opinion formation can have a major
effect on the formal processes of actual decisions (public-will formation). His
observations are much in the spirit of what we saw from Bryce about “gov-
ernment by public opinion.” Many effects of public opinion will operate
informally as policy makers adjust and react to their perceptions and inter-
pretations of the public will. Of course, some of what they do will be attempt-
ing to lead or manipulate. Leaders who appear to be following opinion may
in fact be creating it.53 Whether or not one considers this leadership or
22
Four Forms of Democracy
manipulation, it undermines claims to popular control.54 If leaders appear to

be controlled by opinions which they, to at least a degree, are manipulating,
then the appearance of public control is to that degree, a facade. Popular
control requires impact for the non-manipulated views of the people. Finding
and facilitating public spaces where that is possible will be part of the quest of
this book. The channels for influence will often be some combination of
formal and informal connection.
2. Four Forms of Democracy
There are many notions of democracy, but in my view they boil down to a few
competing democratic principles and how they combine to form what we will
call four forms of democracy, four conceptions of democratic practice. Our plan
is to take the criteria for democratic control specified in Section 1 and apply
them to each of these forms of democracy. In actual institutional designs none
of these forms of democracy are self-sufficient. They coexist and connect with
other institutions, usually exemplifying other forms of democratic practice (as
well as other modes of decision making such as judicial decisions or adminis-
trative processes). But we will focus here on explicitly democratic elements,
and on how these four forms of democracy can work alone or in combination
to provide a satisfactory picture of rule by the people.
There are so many kinds of democracy, how can we get a handle on their
variety?55 It is useful to think of some core component principles—political
equality, (mass) participation, deliberation, and avoiding tyranny of the
majority (which I will call non-tyranny). Three of these principles are internal
to the design of democratic institutions and one (non-tyranny) is about the
effects of democratic decision, effects that have long worried critics of dem-
ocracy. If we consider these four principles essential components of a demo-
cratic theory, then the variations in commitment to them provide a kind of
rudimentary grammar that allows us to specify the range of alternative nor-
mative theories of democratic practice. In other words, we can get a handle on
different forms of democracy according to whether or not they accept or reject
these component principles.
By political equality I mean, roughly, the equal consideration of one’s views
as these would be counted in an index of voting power. Does the design of a
decision process give each person a theoretically equal chance of being the
decisive voter? Or, to take an obvious example, do voters in Rhode Island have
far more voting power than voters in New York in selecting members of the
Senate? By participation I mean actions by voters or ordinary citizens
intended to influence politics or policy or to influence the dialogue about
them. By deliberation, I mean, roughly, the weighing of reasons under good
23
Table 2.2.1 Forms of Democracy
Principles
Competitive Elite Participatory Deliberative

Democracy Deliberation Democracy Democracy
Political equality + ? + +
Participation ? ? + ?
Deliberation ? + ? +
Non-tyranny + + ? ?
conditions in shared discussion about what should be done. The good condi-
tions specify access to reasonably good information and to balanced discus-
sions with others who are willing to participate conscientiously. This
summary is a simplification but should do for now. By non-tyranny, I mean
the avoidance of a policy that would impose severe deprivations when an
alternative policy could have been chosen that would not have imposed
severe deprivations on anyone.56 Obviously there are many interesting com-
plexities about the definition of severe deprivations, but the basic idea is that a
democratic decision should not impose very severe losses on some when an
alternative policy would not have imposed such losses on anyone. The idea is
to rule out only some of the most egregious policy choices and leave the rest
for democratic decision (see Table 2.2.1).
Each of these four forms of democracy embraces a commitment to two of
the principles mentioned. The position is usually agnostic about the other
two. While there are obviously sixteen possible positions defined by accept-
ance or rejection of the four principles, I have argued elsewhere that the useful
positions reduce to these four.57 Variations that aspire to more than the four
are either unworkable or merely utopian or empty (such as the rejection of all
four principles). Those that aspire to fewer include elements of one of these
but are less ambitious than necessary.
The four positions have all been influential. In some cases, I modify a familiar
position to make it more defensible, in order to get the strongest version of each
position.
By Competitive Democracy I mean the notion of democracy via electoral
competition. Most influentially, this approach was championed by Joseph
Schumpeter and more recently by Richard Posner and others.58 This approach
to democracy is in fact the one that is most widely accepted around the world.
On this view, democracy is not about collective will formation but just a
“competitive struggle for the people’s vote,” to use Schumpeter’s famous
phrase. Legal guarantees, particularly constitutional ones, are designed to pro-
tect against the tyranny of the majority. Within that constraint, the key desid-
eratum is competitive elections. On Schumpeter’s view, it is a mythology left
24
Four Forms of Democracy
over from ill-defined “classical theories” of democracy to expect the will of

the people to be meaningful. Electoral competition, without any constraints
on whether candidates or parties can mislead or bamboozle the voters to win,
is what matters on this view. While Schumpeter did not even specify political
equality in competitive elections,59 I have included it here, on the grounds
that it makes the position more defensible than would a position that
embraced competitive elections in rotten boroughs (the constituencies that
overrepresented small populations in nineteenth-century Britain). The ques-
tion marks in the figure signal agnosticism about the other two principles.
Some variants of this position avoid prizing participation, viewing it as a
threat to stability or to elite decision-making. Better not to arouse the masses,
on this argument, as their passions might be dangerous and motivate fac-
tions adverse to the rights of others, threatening the position’s commitment
to protect against tyranny of the majority. Because of collective action prob-
lems and incentives for “rational ignorance” (to use Anthony Downs’ famous
phrase), little can be expected of ordinary citizens. This position makes that
minimalism a virtue.60
Schumpeter argues that we should not expect a “genuine” public will, but
rather “a manufactured will.” “The will of the people is the product and not
the motive power of the political process.” Further, “the ways in which issues
and the popular will are being manufactured is [sic] exactly analogous to the
ways of commercial advertising.” In fact, he believes that competing parties
and interest groups have “infinitely more scope” on public issues than in
commercial competition to manufacture the opinions they hope to satisfy.61
Competitive democracy, at least on Schumpeterian terms, sees little likelihood
and little need for deliberation by the people.
Turning to the second column in Figure 2.2.1, by Elite Deliberation I mean
the notion of indirect filtration championed by Madison in his design for the
US constitution. The Constitutional Convention, the ratifying conventions,
the US Senate were all supposed to be small, elite bodies that would consider
the competing arguments. They would “refine and enlarge the public views by
passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,” as Madison
said in “Federalist No. 10,” in discussing the role of representatives. Madison
held that the public views of such a deliberative body “might better serve
justice and the public good than would the views of the people themselves if
convened for the purpose.” This position, like the last one, avoids embracing
mass participation as a value. The passions or interests that might motivate
factions are best left unaroused. The founders after all, had lived through
Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising of farmers in Western Massachusetts that drama-
tized the dangers of the mob. They had an image of unfiltered mass opinion
as dangerous. If only the Athenians had had a Senate, they might not have
killed Socrates.62
25
By Participatory Democracy, I mean an emphasis on mass participation com-

bined with equal counting. While many proponents of participatory democ-
racy would also like deliberation, the essential components of the position
require participation, perhaps prized partly for its educative function (as
Carole Pateman argued63) and equality in considering the views offered or
expressed in that participation (even if that expression is by secret ballot).
Supporters of participatory democracy might also advocate voter handbooks,
as did the Progressives, or perhaps new technology for voter information,64
but the foremost priority is that people should participate, whether or not
they become informed or discuss the issues.65 Part of the problem with this
position is that it is sometimes advocated based on a picture of small-scale
decision-making, such as the New England town meeting, in which discussion
is facilitated, but then the position is implemented in the social context of
mass democracy—the California process of ballot initiatives, for example,
where plebiscitary processes involving millions of voters are employed to
change the laws or the constitution.
A fourth position, which I call Deliberative Democracy, attempts to combine
deliberation by the people themselves with an equal consideration of the
views that result. One method for implementing this twofold aspiration is
the deliberative microcosm chosen by lot, a model whose essential idea, as we
will see, goes back to ancient Athens for institutions such as the Council of
500, the nomothetai (legislative commissions), the graphe paranomon, and the
citizens’ jury. Modern instances of something like this idea include the Citi-
zens’ Assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario and the Deliberative Poll.
A second possible method for implementing deliberative democracy by the
people themselves would involve some scaled-up institution of mass deliber-
ation under good conditions. We will return to this possibility in Part IV.
Deliberative democracy by the people themselves is often invoked but rarely
tried. However, there may be unusual intense periods amounting to a “con-
stitutional moment” when the people as well as political elites are actively
engaged in considering competing arguments for what will amount to con-
stitutional changes. Notably, Bruce Ackerman argues that the American
founding, Reconstruction and the New Deal, and, most recently, the Civil
Rights Movement, constituted such unusual periods in American history
when there really was a widespread and substantive national debate forging
revisions in our constitutional self-understanding.66 On his view, outside such
extraordinary periods we have only “normal politics,” combining a relatively
more disengaged public with elite competition. Within “normal politics”
there is not much room for mass deliberation.
Lastly, a word about the more general category “politics.” Our argument will
be that politics can be invigorated through deliberation by the public. We can
treat “politics” as the exercise of power for the solution of public problems.
26
Popular Control in Competitive Democracies
The power can be institutionalized through some process of decision or it can

be informal through the exercise of persuasion. Only some politics are demo-
cratic. We will restrict our discussion of democracy to the four forms discussed
here. Any of these four forms of democratic practice can be considered an
exercise of democratic politics. As we will see in our discussion of authoritarian
deliberation, even non-democratic forms of politics can be invigorated by
citizen deliberation. However, in this book our main focus will be democratic
politics and its potential for the use of deliberation by the people themselves.
Connecting politics to public deliberation can increase legitimacy and improve
governance by providing a route to impact for the public’s considered judg-
ments about what should be done. It allows the public to take ownership of
the policies they must live with and hence achieve a form of collective self-
rule. That is the ideal. We will encounter many complications in practice.
3. Popular Control in Competitive Democracies
We have outlined four criteria for popular control and four forms of democ-
racy. Recall that our criteria for popular control are: inclusion, choice, deliber-
ation, and impact. If everyone is included, if they weigh the reasons for and
against alternatives that are significantly different, if they make a choice
among those alternatives and their choice has impact, then they have exer-
cised popular control on the question posed. Can any of the four forms of
democracy fulfill all four of these criteria?67 What challenges do they face?
We begin with competitive democracy. Providing a form of politics that
will allow the public to exercise popular control is the great aspiration of
modern democracy. As Willmore Kendall noted, John Locke’s influential
argument for majority rule in the seventeenth century left it almost entirely
unspecified how the majority would work its will, apart from the right of
revolution.68 In the modern era, Austin Ranney pointed out that it has been
left to political parties (and the competition between them) to fill this gap.
The challenge is to find the best “conduit or sluice by which the waters of
social thought and discussion are brought to the wheels of political machin-
ery and set to turn those wheels.”69
Must it be competition between parties? In a classic exposition, E. E.
Schattschneider claimed that “democracy is unthinkable save in terms of
parties.” John Aldrich amended this to say “democracy is unworkable except
in terms of parties.” He elaborated: “The political party as a collective enter-
prise, organizing competition for the full range of offices, provides the only
means for holding elected officials responsible for what they do collect-
ively.”70 There are competitive elections, particularly at the municipal level,
or for candidate selection at the state level, that are officially non-partisan. But
27
these seem to stimulate the informal recreation of party-like coalitions and the
experiments have been met with mixed success.71 For the moment we will
assume competition between parties. In Part IV we will look at other forms of
democracy that are “thinkable” without parties.72
If there are two parties and everyone votes, the spatial model of politics,
made famous by Anthony Downs, tells us that the two parties should take very
similar positions converging on the median voter.73 The original insight was
developed by the economist Harry Hotelling in 1929, who applied it to firms
competing on the basis of location and converging toward similar positions.
He also applied it to politics:
The competition for votes between the Republican and Democratic par-
ties does not lead to a clear drawing of issues, an adoption of two strongly
contrasted positions between which the voter may choose. Instead, each
party strives to make its platform as much like the other’s as possible.74
Think of it as a spatial dimension from left to right. Just as firms seeking business
from the public will choose a median location geographically (grocery stores or
gas stations locating near each other on a street to attract customers, one hoping
to get all the business coming from one direction, and the other all the business
from the other), political parties competing with each other will rationally locate
near the position of the median voter in the left–right space. The party very
slightly on the left will hope to get all the left-to-center voters, the one very
slightly on the right will hope to get all the right-to-center voters. If there are no
abstentions and the voters select the parties according to their location in the
space, it is rational for the parties to behave in this way. However, if there are
abstentions, if voters on the extremes fail to turn out because the differences
between the parties near the center are not significant enough from their
perspective, then the parties will converge less. They will distinguish their
positions in order to get some of those voters who might abstain. And if the
population polarizes and not everyone is sure to vote, then there will be
further pressures for the parties to differentiate themselves.75
For our purposes, the first thing to note is that by our criteria for popular
control, if the parties are offering essentially the same positions, then the
choice criterion is violated. If the people do not have a substantive choice to
make, then they cannot exercise popular control by expressing their prefer-
ence between two (or more) such alternatives.
Reacting to an environment of ideologically similar and undisciplined pol-
itical parties, reform efforts in the mid-twentieth century focused on fostering
the model of “responsible parties.” The idea was to develop two cohesive and
disciplined political parties to offer the public a definite choice and allow that
choice to determine policy via the implementation of a clearly articulated
party program.
28
Popular Control in Competitive Democracies
A landmark report of the American Political Science Association advocated

“first that the parties are able to bring forth programs to which they commit
themselves and second that the parties possess sufficient internal cohesion
to carry out these programs.” In addition, the report emphasized “the
need for an effective opposition party . . . in which the opposition party acts
as the critic of the party in power, developing, defining and presenting
the policy alternatives which are necessary for a true choice in reaching
public decisions.”76
For the issues posed, this model would satisfy our criteria of choice, impact,
and inclusion (assuming widespread opportunity to vote). If there were a
strategy for achieving public deliberation, it could realize a coherent vision of
popular control. It would seem to have potential for satisfying our four cri-
teria. However, the deliberation criterion will be key. It is an antidote to
manipulation and other concerns that the people are not actually in control
of their choices and, hence, not in control of the outcomes. But set that aside
for the moment.
At least the responsible party doctrine specifies a mechanism by which the
people can choose in a way that will have consequences. It is one solution to
the “sluices” problem. But choose between what? Riker criticized the proposal
as “morally wrong from a liberal democratic view, because to get binary choice
one must enforce some method of reducing options.” We cannot get “a coher-
ent program” just “by weaving together individual judgments.”77
The packages presented by the parties to the public are undoubtedly the
result of bargaining and log-rolling of various kinds. The result may well be
individual proposals that only have minority support but which together
amount to a package with majority support. Dahl offered a clarifying hypo-
thetical to illustrate what he called “minorities rule”—packages of policies
constructed to piece together intense minorities supporting unpopular policies
but adding up to a majority. Suppose one quarter of the voters strongly support
a foreign policy opposed by 75 percent, one quarter support a farm policy opposed
by 75 percent, and one quarter support fiscal policy supported by 75 percent.
This package of unpopular policies, a party platform if you will, can get 75
percent support based on the intense views of those who get what they want
most, even though each part of it is opposed by 75 percent. Dahl did not
portray “minorities rule” as an unusual occurrence, but instead viewed it as a
frequent pattern in American politics and, indeed, other democracies.78 Clearly
a full solution to the problem of popular control needs to deal with agenda
setting, a topic to which we will return in Part IV.
The possibility of what Dahl called “minorities rule” was further buttressed
by later work by Philip Converse, Jon Krosnick, and others on “issue pub-
lics.”79 The intuition is that we don’t all focus on all the issues but a few of us
focus on an issue of real importance to us, and others focus on other issues, and
29
so on. There is a kind of division of labor. The farmers focus on farm policy and
other groups focus on their issues. Many distinct subgroups view various
issues as important and those few may become highly informed about those
issues and probably less open to change on their issues of highest importance.
So, to elaborate on Dahl’s example of “minorities rule”: if a distinct minority
attaches importance to farm policy (perhaps the farmers and agriculture
sector) and a distinct minority to a foreign policy issue (say those Jewish voters
who feel strongly about supporting settlements on the West Bank), and a
distinct minority to fiscal policy (say the deficit hawks on the budget) we
can easily imagine intense-issue minorities pushing their parts of a package
that has majority support overall—but within which each component is
extremely unpopular. Perhaps Dahl’s example of 75 percent against each
component is an extreme case, but both the logical possibility and empirical
vulnerability are evident.
But even with these limitations, there is no denying that if there is majority
support at the end of the day for a given package or platform, and if the public
chooses it, and if it is implemented, then there is a kind of control being
exercised by the majority—even if its elements are all, taken separately,
unpopular. Note that the intense-issue minorities are precisely the voters
who are least likely to change their views or even be open to opposing points
of view. In natural settings, they are least likely to be open to deliberation.
So the decision is likely to be a consequence of issue mobilization of intense
minorities to achieve their views in the platform or policy package. It is
popular influence by intense minorities, not popular control by a deliberating
populace.
Yet even if all these conditions are satisfied, it is a blunt form of popular
influence. As Schattschneider famously remarked: “The people are a sovereign
whose vocabulary is limited to two words, ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ This sovereign
moreover can speak only when spoken to.”80
More nuanced and policy-specific input from the public could be facilitated
if there were more than two major parties. If there were multiple parties with a
real chance for office, then citizens could more easily connect their policy
preferences to their representatives. They would not be forced to choose one
of only two predetermined packages, perhaps neither representing their pre-
ferred views. However, the prospects for viable multiparty systems depend,
crucially, on the electoral system. The American style of plurality elections
(whoever gets the most votes within a district wins) provides strong incentives
for two parties rather than multiple parties. Voters hesitate to “waste” their
votes on third or fourth parties with no realistic chance.81 Of course, with
geographical districts there can be third parties with negligible showings in
some regions but strong prospects in others. But the logic of the situation for
mainly two parties in any geographical area plays out nevertheless.82
30
Is There Democracy for “Realists”?
A different voting system, such as ranked-choice voting (also termed instant-

runoff voting), allowing voter preferences for multiple parties to count with-
out wasted votes, could allow for more viable third parties.83
Even if multiple parties were viable, would this facilitate better popular
control? If the question for impact is which government is in power, then
the answer is probably no. In a major study Arend Lijphart studied multiple
countries and classified them on various criteria from majoritarian (mostly or
entirely two-party systems) to consensual (relying on multiparty coalitions).
For the consensual multiparty systems, there are vanishingly few actual turn-
overs in government even over a very long period. The various parties get
elected and then governments get reshuffled or renegotiated, enabling a
variant of the same government to retain power. Lijphart is studying stable,
well-established, party competition-based democracies:
Of the 20 countries with the longest democratic history . . . all of which are
undoubtedly stable and consolidated democratic systems, no fewer than
three—Luxemberg, the Netherlands and Switzerland—fail even the one-
turnover test during the more than sixty years from the last 1940s to
2010, that is, they experienced many cabinet changes but never a com-
plete turnover, and six—the same three countries plus Belgium, Finland
and Germany—fail the two turnover test.84
While Lijphart makes a case for better policy consequences (by his lights) in
the consensual (multiparty) democracies, there does not seem to be a case for
better popular control of who governs or what they do. Six of the twenty
countries did not have even two turnovers over a sixty-year period. The
intermediate stage of coalition formation and reshuffling makes the construc-
tion of governments and their policy priorities a matter of elite negotiation.85
The people have an effect on who the players are,86 but their effect on the
results is greatly muted by this intervening stage.87
4. Is There Democracy for “Realists”?
Perhaps it is too much to expect policy-specific input from the public to

provide democratic control in competitive party systems. Christopher Achen
and Larry Bartels, in their comprehensive assessment of whether elections can
produce responsive government, offer a sustained critique of two remaining
mechanisms—spatial theory and retrospective voting.88 These could offer less
specific mechanisms for popular control, either by connecting voters to the
general ideological position of the parties or by empowering the electorate to
“just say no” when they disapprove of what has been done.
31
We have already encountered spatial theory in our discussion of political

parties. Without denying the elegance of the spatial theory formulation, it
depends first on whether real voters and candidates locate themselves in the
space (whether left to right or some other space). Second, it depends on
whether candidates (or parties) compete in the space by locating themselves
to attract voters who evaluate them based on their positions in the space.
While there do seem to be connections between the issue positions of candi-
dates and voters, do they play a causal role? Do voters evaluate candidates
depending on how close they are to the voters’ already determined policy
positions? Or rather, do voters simply adjust their policy positions to fit the
candidates they happen to prefer for whatever reason? Such a possibility
would undermine the scenario for democratic control because voters would
be conforming to the candidate positions rather than the other way around.
The spatial distance or “issue proximities” of candidates’ positions to voters’
positions do seem connected to voter support. But is this connection causal?
Achen and Bartels build a skeptical case, relying on the work of Gabriel Lenz,
who summarizes:
Voters, having decided they like a particular politician for reasons having
little or nothing to do with policy, may simply adopt that politician’s
policy views. In this view, democracy is a farce. Politicians lead, citizens
follow . . . Voters don’t choose between politicians based on policy stan-
ces; rather, voters appear to adopt the policies that their favorite politi-
cians prefer.89
Lenz does, however, find more evidence that voters reward candidates for
performance, at least on the economy.90 However, this is past performance,
and hence a variant of “retrospective voting.” This is the one area where Achen
and Bartels find a modest basis for accountability to voters, but it is, as Morris
Fiorina, its most well-known proponent, puts it, “rough justice.”
Retrospective voting is a response to the information demands of voting. It
is a way for voters to draw inferences about the future based on the past.
Fiorina asks a “deceptively simple question”:
What is an election? In principle, two or more groups of like-minded

people put forth alternative visions of future societies. After carefully
weighing the alternatives, the citizenry entrusts one of the competing
parties with the mantle of leadership. In practice, however, an incumbent
party attempts to convince an appropriate proportion of the electorate
that it lives in the best of all possible worlds, while an opposition rails at
the incumbents and advances a collection of unrealistic promises.91
Nothing in this statement would have surprised the proponents of “a respon-

sible two-party system.” The problem is the information demands for “weighing
32
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jäähyväiset Ottilialle, ystävällisin kädenpuristuksin Nannylle, ja
ratsasti vielä samana yönä paikkakunnalta pois, ketään muuta
näkemättä.
Haavuri oli tytön tietämättä jäänyt yöksi kirkkoon ja havaitsi hänet

aamulla hänen luoksensa tullessaan iloisena ja rauhallisena. Hän
odotti kuulevansa monenlaisia houreita, luuli tytön alkavan puhua
yöllisistä keskusteluistansa Ottilian kanssa ja muista sellaisista
ilmestyksistä. Mutta tyttö olikin luonnollinen, levollinen ja täysin
itsestänsä tietoinen. Hän muisti täydellisesti ja varsin tarkoin kaikki
menneet ajat ja olot, ja todellisuuden tavallisesta juoksusta poikkesi
hänen puheessansa ainoastaan se kohta, jossa hän kertoi Ottilian
kohottautuneen paareiltansa, siunanneen häntä, antaneen hänelle
anteeksi ja siten hänet ainiaksi rauhoittaneen.
Ottilian yhä jatkuva, kaunis, pikemmin unen- kuin

kuolemankaltainen tila houkutteli paljon ihmisiä hänen luoksensa.
Kylän ja lähiseudun asukkaat tahtoivat hänet vielä nähdä, ja jokainen
halusi mielellään kuulla Nannyn suusta uskomattoman asian, monet
tehdäkseen siitä pilkkaa, useimmat epäilläkseen, vain harvat sitä
uskoakseen. Jokainen tarve, joka ei tule luonnollisella tavalla
tyydytetyksi, pakottaa turvautumaan uskoon. Kaikkien nähden
murskautunut Nanny oli tullut hurskaan ruumiin kosketuksesta
jälleen terveeksi; miksi ei toisiakin voisi kohdata samanlainen onni?
Hellät äidit toivat aluksi salaa pienokaisiansa, joita rasitti jokin
sairaus, ja uskoivat havaitsevansa äkillistä parantumista. Luottamus
lisääntyi, ja lopulta ei ollut niin vanhaa ja heikkoa, joka ei olisi etsinyt
sieltä virkistystä ja huojennusta. Tungos lisääntyi, ja vihdoin täytyi
sulkea kappeli, vieläpä kirkkokin, mikäli ei siellä parhaillaan pidetty
jumalanpalvelusta.
Eduard ei uskaltanut enää lähteä vainajan luo. Hän eleli
yksikseen, ei näyttänyt enää voivan itkeä, ei tuntea enää mitään
tuskaa. Hänen osanottonsa keskusteluun, hänen nauttimansa ruoan
ja juoman määrä niukkenevat päivä päivältä. Jonkinlaista virkistystä
hän näyttää vielä saavan lasista, joka ei ollut hänelle mikään oikea
profeetta. Hän katselee yhä vielä mielellään toisiinsa kietoutuneita
nimikirjaimia, ja hänen vakaanhilpeä katseensa tuntuu osoittavan,
että hän vieläkin toivoo saavansa kerran Ottiliaan liittyä. Ja
samoinkuin kaikki syrjäseikat näyttävät suosivan onnellista, jokainen
sattuma auttavan hänen kohoamistansa, samoin voivat
pienimmätkin tapahtumat toisiinsa yhtyen johtaa onnettoman
loukkautumiseen, jopa tuhoutumiseenkin. Eräänä päivänä,
kuljettaessaan rakasta lasia huulillensa, Eduard työntää sen
kauhistuneena takaisin: se oli sama ja kuitenkin toinen; hän kaipaa
erästä pientä tuntomerkkiä. Kamaripalvelijaa ahdistetaan, ja hänen
täytyy tunnustaa, että oikea lasi on äskettäin särkynyt ja sen sijaan
salaa asetettu toinen samanlainen, Eduardin nuoruusajoilta. Eduard
ei voi olla vihoissaan; tapahtuma on lausunut julki hänen kohtalonsa:
kuinkapa voisi vertaus häntä liikuttaa? Mutta asia rasittaa häntä
sittenkin kovin. Juoma näyttää siitä lähtien käyvän hänelle
vastenmieliseksi; hän tuntuu tahallansa pidättyvän aterioimasta ja
keskustelemasta.
Aika ajoin hänet kuitenkin valtaa levottomuus. Hän pyytää jotakin

nautittavaksensa ja alkaa jälleen puhua.
Kuinka olenkaan onneton, virkkoi hän kerran majurille, joka

melkein aina viipyi hänen luonansa, kuinka olenkaan onneton, että
koko pyrintöni aina jää pelkäksi jäljittelyksi, vääräksi vaivannäöksi!
Se, mikä oli hänelle autuudeksi, muuttuu minulle tuskaksi, ja
kuitenkin täytyy minun tuon autuuden vuoksi ottaa sietääkseni tämä
tuska. Minun täytyy kulkea hänen jäljessään tätä tietä, mutta luontoni
pidättää minua ja lupaukseni. Verrattoman jäljitteleminen on kamala
tehtävä. Minä tunnen varsin hyvin, että neroutta vaatii kaikki,
marttyyriuskin.
Miksi muistelisimmekaan niitä aviopuolison, ystävien ja lääkärien

toimenpiteitä, joita tässä toivottomassa tilassa jonkin aikaa koeteltiin.
Vihdoin hänet löydettiin kuolleena. Mittler teki ensimmäisenä tämän
murheellisen havainnon, kutsui lääkärin ja tarkasteli tapansa mukaan
yksityiskohtaisesti niitä olosuhteita, joissa oli vainajan tavannut.
Charlotta riensi luo: hänessä heräsi epäluulo, hän pelkäsi olevan
kysymyksessä itsemurhan, tahtoi syyttää itseänsä ja muita
anteeksiantamattomasta varomattomuudesta. Lääkäri ja Mittler
osasivat kuitenkin pian saada hänet vakuutetuksi siitä, ettei niin ollut
laita, edellinen luonnollisiin, jälkimmäinen siveellisiin syihin
vetoamalla. Kuolema oli ilmeisesti yllättänyt Eduardin. Hän oli
eräänä hiljaisena hetkenä ottanut esille muuten huolellisesti pieneen
lippaaseen, kirjesäiliöön kätkemänsä muistot: Ottilian kiharan,
kukkasia, onnellisena tuokiona poimittuja, kaikki häneltä saamansa
pienet kirjeliput, alkaen siitä ensimmäisestä, jonka Charlotta oli
satunnaisen aavistuttelevasti hänelle ojentanut. Tuota kaikkea hän ei
olisi jättänyt tahallansa kenen hyvänsä nähtäväksi. Niin lepäsi
tämäkin äsken vielä sanomattomaan liikkeeseen kiihtynyt sydän
häiritsemättömässä levossa, ja koska hän oli vaipunut viimeiseen
uneensa pyhää olentoa ajatellen, sopi häntä hyvinkin sanoa
autuaaksi. Charlotta sijoitti hänet Ottilian viereen ja määräsi, ettei
tähän holviin saanut enää ketään haudata. Tällä ehdolla hän teki
kirkolle ja koululle, sielunpaimenelle ja opettajalle melkoisia
lahjoituksia.
Niin lepäävät rakastavaiset toistensa vieressä. Rauha väikkyy
heidän lepokammionsa vaiheilla, iloisten enkelien sukulaiskasvot
katselevat heitä holvin laesta, ja suloinen on varmaan kerran heidän
yhteisen heräämisensä hetki.
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Democracy When The People Are Thinking Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation James S Fishkin Full Chapter PDF

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Democracy When The People Are Thinking Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation James S Fishkin Full Chapter PDF

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Democracy When the People Are

Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics

GlobalChurch: Reshaping Our Conversations, Renewing Our

The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean

Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy Through Our

Direct Democracy and International Politics: Deciding

Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice 1st Edition

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes

Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian

Democracy When the People Are Thinking

Democracy When the People

Deliberative democracy, in theory and practice, has been my principal occu-

Part II: Can the People Rule? 13

Part III: Making Deliberation Practical 69

Part IV: Reimagining Democratic Possibilities 137

4. Deliberative Democracy and Candidate Selection 157

2.2.1 Forms of Democracy 24

A3.23 European Union: Knowledge Gain 240

3.3.1 Heating and Insulation 96

Imagine a national competition between two or more “teams” testing their

question? How is it a practical answer? What might we mean by good conditions?

Party Competition and Its Limits

1. Party Competition and Its Limits

Party Competition and Its Limits

authoritarian hold elections and adopt the trappings of democracy, but

Self-government may, on the whole, provide a better guarantee of the preservation

While granting the likelihood that democracy will, in general, serve to

2. Deliberation and Reform

Efforts at democratic reform have long been entangled in an apparently forced

Deliberation and Reform

Deliberation and Reform

Can the People Rule?

1. Four Criteria for Popular Control

Inclusion: all adult citizens should be provided with an equal opportunity

Part II: Can the People Rule?

Deliberation: the people need to be effectively motivated to think about

Inclusion. The history of democratic reform, over a long time horizon, is a

Four Criteria for Popular Control

Part II: Can the People Rule?

One might respond to this challenge with compulsory voting requirements to

Four Criteria for Popular Control

As a citizen, I am included in that I can see my viewpoints and interests

Part II: Can the People Rule?

Four Criteria for Popular Control

satisfying the values we will discuss—especially those of deliberative democracy.

Part II: Can the People Rule?

in a given political order and constitutional system. Deliberative democrats

If, by reason of discussion, debate, civic education and political socializa-

If a microcosm deliberates, the confusion and collective inconsistency of the

Deliberation. The past two decades have witnessed a “deliberative turn in

Four Criteria for Popular Control

view the problem of public-will formation. Our premise is that democracies

The root of deliberation is weighing.43 And the root idea of deliberative

Part II: Can the People Rule?

should be satisﬁed by actual decision processes, his institutional proposals have

refuse[s] to elaborate institutional venues of deliberation . . . he would

So how are we to achieve a deliberative politics of public opinion and will

Are we only interested in a formal connection between the judgments of the

Four Forms of Democracy

manipulation, it undermines claims to popular control.54 If leaders appear to

2. Four Forms of Democracy

Part II: Can the People Rule?

Table 2.2.1 Forms of Democracy