- For more than a decade, the world has been experiencing a process of democratic backsliding, while alternatives to governing by popular consent have gained popularity, even in the West.

Today's guest offers a path to improving not just the health of democracy, but the effectiveness of liberal democratic governments.

He's James Fishkin, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(light music) (light music continues) (light music fades out) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

And our guest this week is an internationally acclaimed scholar, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University, and the author of an important new book, "Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?"

It's a big question.

He's joining us today from Stanford, California.

Jim, thank you so much for being with us.

- My pleasure.

- So again, congratulations on the book.

We're gonna get to that in just a moment, but I know that a lot of this stems from your work running the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford.

Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the lab and the kind of work that it does?

- Well, the lab focuses on a method that I call Deliberative Polling that I've been conducting for a long time, several decades, and it was designed to assess what the public really would think if it were thinking.

We've got lots of polls, thousands of them, that show what the public is thinking when it's often not thinking very much.

It's just giving an impression of sound bites and headlines.

But what would it really think under some stipulated, very commonsensical, good conditions?

So we've been doing this.

We've had 160 of these experiments in every inhabited continent all around the world.

And we get very surprising results.

And those results have stimulated my thinking about this little book.

- So when you say experiment, what do you mean?

- I mean in the strict social science sense, we have a deliberating group and randomly assigned, we have another group, a control group, that doesn't deliberate, and we compare the differences.

And just like all the experiments that justify your medical treatments and that justify other controlled experiments, I'm trying to use social science to explore the possibilities of a better democracy.

- So your work is set against the backdrop of so-called democratic backsliding, a global phenomenon.

Tell us about that.

What is going on here?

- Well, we're getting, we're moving to what's called competitive authoritarianism, that is, we have the appearance of, we are moving in the direction of a system where elections are not, the norms that protect electoral competition are not being respected.

And the rule of law is being undermined.

This is a global phenomenon.

But my concern is even broader, because even if we did respect the norms of electoral competition, we need something more in my view.

Because democracy has to make a connection to the will of the people.

And the very process of trying to assess and arrive at the will of the people is so distorted now by one-sided advocacy, misinformation, disinformation, social media that has broken up our shared consideration of the options, the so-called public sphere.

People are in their filter bubbles and enclaves, and they may not ever hear the other side of an argument.

So falsehoods are not being corrected as in classical democratic theory.

So these are all parts of the decline of democracy, which I'm trying to see how they can be addressed.

- Yeah, Jim, I'm fascinated by this.

I worked in politics for a time before I came to the academy.

One of the things that always sort of fascinated me was that a lotta times, politicians don't even seem to want to engage in a debate or a discussion.

They've got their set of talking points.

They've got the things that they think are gonna activate their segment of the population and maybe suppress the rest of the segment of the population.

But I don't even see among a lot of elected officials a desire to engage in that kind of back-and-forth real argument about real policy alternatives.

Is what you're describing with deliberation a cure to that?

- Well, politicians respond to their incentives for a reelection.

And in the current system as it's structured, they have to worry about being primaried.

They have to worry about their own base.

They don't have real incentives to engage the other side.

But if we have deliberative processes where the public shares their views, it turns out they end up changing them in very surprising ways.

And if you have dramatic cases where there's a problem to be solved, we found in various countries that a random sample deliberating helps chart the way, because it shows what the people would accept and hard trade-offs if they had to.

And whenever we face hard choices, somebody's gonna lose something and somebody's gonna win something.

And it turns out there are reasonable cases where even politicians see the merit of using Deliberative Polling.

And I can tell you about cases around the world, but more importantly, if we could spread the deliberative process so that we had a more deliberative society, that's the vision at the end of the book.

And we now have technology to do that cost-effectively.

We think that we would find a world where many of our seemingly intractable problems disappear.

- So Jim, talk to us- - And that's very surprising.

I know that sounds Pollyanna-ish, but this is all based on real experiments with the public, mostly in this country, but also around the world.

- So what is Deliberative Polling?

This is something that you've pioneered.

You've mentioned where it's been done around the world, it's been done here in the US, and we're gonna get into a couple of countries and here in the US.

But what is Deliberative Polling?

- It's just a simple idea.

In fact, it's almost embarrassingly simple.

It's just a design to say, what would the people think under some stipulated good conditions which are commonsensical?

So first, we conduct an ordinary survey with the best sample we can get.

And then we randomly assign people to the condition where they're gonna be deliberating and also a control group that doesn't do anything except answer the questionnaires at the beginning and then several weeks later at the end of the process, after the people convene for a weekend.

We invite the people to deliberate for a weekend, either face-to-face or online, several hundred people, sometimes up to 1,000 people.

We bring them together if it's face-to-face and randomly assign them to small groups.

The small groups are also a random sample of a random sample is also a random sample.

So the diverse small groups for moderated discussion, I'll come back to that.

We have an agenda of issues.

They're things that could be done to solve some pressing problem.

Those are policies from different points of view.

Some are from the right, some are from the left, some are just from experts.

We work hard to state those policy proposals in the clearest possible way, and we identify initial pros and cons that are balanced and vetted by an advisory committee.

This is what could be done, here are some of the pros and cons, and you'll have an opportunity to add more about what you think are the advantages and disadvantages.

And then ask questions, agreed questions from the group, to competing experts in plenary sessions.

So it's mostly small-group discussions that are moderated.

People weigh the pros and cons.

They come up with their questions.

Those questions are posed to panels of competing experts who don't give speeches.

They just correct each other and respond to the peoples' questions.

This process goes on for a weekend.

At the end of the weekend, it's either face-to-face or online.

At the end of the weekend, they answer the same questionnaires they did before, and then the control group also answers the same questionnaire.

And we see very surprising changes of opinion.

Our divisions are not intractable.

In fact, when people actually listen to each other, they make a lot of sense and they come to informed conclusions.

So but we get the results in confidential questionnaires to protect people from the social pressure of going along with a crowd, as in a jury verdict.

This is what the people individually really think, and we aggregate it, and we see what the people together are recommending should be done.

- I'm curious, is there something about the process of being engaged and the deliberation with others that makes the alternative viewpoints and the grappling for a solution seem more, I'm not sure what the word is, but that it's something about the process itself that is bringing people together to find solutions that are gonna essentially improve democracy?

Is it that process?

- Yes, yes.

Well, first of all, you have to prepare an agenda of some things that could actually be, that are thinkable, that could be done, and pros and cons.

But as people deliberate together, at first, particularly on our most divisive issues, people may not even, may come in with little respect for the other side and they'll start yelling at each other a little bit.

(Jim L. laughing) But they will learn to listen to each other.

And once they learn to listen to each other, they will open up, and some of them, there will be some empathy for the conditions of other people who will be affected by the policies.

And over the course of just a weekend, there are striking changes of opinion.

They're working together to try to find solutions to our common problems in a civil dialogue that's evidence-based.

And we are able to get surprisingly good samples to participate that are representative.

And we know that 'cause they're just like the control group that just has to answer a survey.

And they don't have to go to any additional effort.

So we get these representative samples.

So this was designed to assess the will of the people at a time of disinformation and misinformation and distortion.

But it has this second effect, which is it depolarizes.

The divisions between Republicans and Democrats in this country or between any other divided group and groups in other countries diminish as people listen to each other and they're working together to find common solutions.

They may not start out wanting to find common solutions, but by the end of the process, they do.

So there have been televised things where the people who felt most intensely anger at the other side ended up hugging each other by the end.

- (laughing) Wow.

- And I really enjoy that.

There's a couple of things on CNN that are like that, for example.

- That's, I mean, that's really encouraging and really sort of incredible.

What are some of the issues that are discussed during these weekends?

- Any contentious issue.

In fact, the more contentious, the better.

Because the more polarized we are, the more depolarized we can become.

And so we've done immigration, divisions about healthcare.

We've done, but also, issues that people haven't really thought about, even though they're polled about.

There are lots of polls that purport to represent what the public is thinking, but the public may not even be aware of the issue.

And if they haven't thought about it, they offer an answer 'cause they don't like to admit they don't know.

Let me just illustrate that.

So some of the time, we're replacing what I call phantom opinions or, that is, George Bishop at the University of Cincinnati, a late friend of mine, did surveys about the Public Affairs Act of 1975, which the people answered.

But it didn't exist.

There was no Public Affairs Act of 1975.

(hosts laughing) So then "The Washington Post" went back to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Public Affairs Act of 1975, told half the sample that the Republicans wanted to repeal it and half the sample that the Democrats wanted to repeal it.

And they got different answers.

But you can't repeal something that doesn't exist.

And another colleague of mine, Doug Rivers, did the same thing in the United Kingdom and asked the British about the Public Affairs Act of 1975, and he got very similar results.

People, if they don't have an opinion, don't like to say they don't know and they'll just offer something.

And some of the results you see in ordinary polls are like that, or some of the results are close to that 'cause it's just a vague impression of sound bites and headlines and they haven't thought about it.

Then there are the other people who feel really intensely, know a lot, but they know a lot about their side, and they may not be open to the other side because we're so divided.

Our political communication system has been divided, dissolved into filter bubbles.

So that's why we need to communicate with each other.

And it turns out, people are more open than you would think to communicating with each other, and they are, in aggregate, very intelligent.

The collective intelligence of the public is awesome.

And we find that over and over.

If you can only reach them and get their attention and get them engaged in a civil discussion.

- So one of the things that I love about this is that this is not just theory.

As you say, you've done this 150-plus experiments in the United States and around the world.

One of the places this has been applied was in the State of Texas.

Tell us about- - Yes.

- Tell us about the experience there.

- Oh, well, that was, (laughing) that was a while back, but it was very interesting.

That's an example of an area, I mean, we get dramatic changes in two kinds of cases: one, when the people haven't thought about it at all and they might be giving you phantom opinions or just vague impressions, and the other is when there's intense division and they have thought about it, but just from their side.

So the Texas case was the first kind.

In fact, the very idea of what I'm calling phantom opinions was discovered in a panel survey of about the government's role in electric power.

People couldn't remember what they said the previous year in four years in a row in order to try to even be consistent and it varied all over the place.

- Wow.

- So that's how that was discovered.

Anyway, this was in Texas.

Texas is growing.

Texas has long been growing very fast, and they have to figure out how to provide electric power.

So the Public Utility Commission decided that they wanted to consult the public, because they're choices that will affect the environment and the prices and everything else, the choices being, are you going to invest in renewable energy like wind power?

Are you going to solve your electricity by burning coal, which has effects on the environment?

Are you gonna do natural gas, which is variable in price, cleaner than coal?

Are you going to invest in conservation, which just cuts the need for more electricity?

Those are the kinds of choices.

And so the electric utility companies faced this requirement to consult the public.

And we had done, at that point, a very big project with Jim Lehrer and PBS with a national Deliberative Poll.

And the commission said, "Oh my goodness, how are we gonna do this?

If we do polls, we may get phantom opinions.

We can't invest hundreds of millions of dollars based upon the vaguest of impressions or no impressions at all.

If we do town meetings, we'd just be swamped by lobbyists and interest groups.

So if we do focus groups, they're not representative.

They're too small.

So how are we going to do this?"

So by coincidence, we had this PBS broadcast at the time with Jim Lehrer, and it demonstrated this method.

So they turned to me and various colleagues whom I recruited, and I said, "Well, we need an advisory group that will vet all the materials representing all the options.

And we need good random samples of each of the service districts."

And the thing that came out of it, which was a surprise to everybody, was among the results was the public was willing to pay more on its monthly utility bills to subsidize wind power, renewable energy, because it was clean.

And- - Wow.

- And the percentage over average over the eight projects which covered every district in Texas, all the major utility districts in Texas, averaged over the eight projects went from 50% to about 84% in willingness to pay more.

This really caught the attention of the companies and the Public Utility Commission.

So they filed a series of plans, they call them integrated resource plans, about how to provide energy in the future that involved large investments in wind power and in conservation, as well as investments in natural gas, which was the next preferred option generally, as opposed to coal.

And the result of that was the legislature then added more investments in renewable energy, 'cause the commission advocated for the results.

And by the way, this was a Republican-led commission, led by George W. Bush appointees at the time.

- Wow.

- And the story is, Texas went from last among the 50 states, dead last in the amount of wind power, to first by 2007, surpassing California.

And there's been no looking back.

It's only increased its investments in wind power, as wind power's become ever more cost-effective and an ever larger part of the energy picture in Texas.

But this came from the people when they thought about the alternatives.

And so that's the story of wind power in Texas.

So we've been credited with launching the Texas wind power boom, as it's been called in some of the literature.

- That's tremendous.

- And that's a direct effect on policy as the people thought about the alternatives.

- So you've used this process in a number of foreign countries.

And we don't have time to get into all of 'em, but they include Mongolia, Japan, and many other countries.

But let's get back here to the United States.

We have a nearly 250-year-old system of democratic practice.

How can deliberation, as you practice it, improve it?

- Well, the suggestions do come from other countries in the sense that there's so many different areas in which we have applied Deliberative Polling on national problems, on regional problems, where whenever there's a big problem, and the world is full of problems, there have been cases where policy leaders, enlightened ones in my view, have said, "Well, let's share responsibility with the people for how to solve them."

And I can easily envision the same process happening here, but we can also spread the deliberative process in the schools, which we're trying to do.

And we're also making plans to scale the deliberative process in the US to create a more deliberative society.

And that's why we've developed a technology which actually produces the same results as a human-moderated, face-to-face deliberation, but online in video discussions where people can see each other, but it moderates the discussions without a human moderator.

It's AI-assisted.

And we've used that now in about 60 countries, very successfully, and we've done experiments where some of the people deliberate face-to-face and some of the people do the process in our online, the Stanford online deliberation platform.

We did that for the parliament in Finland and we got identical results.

And it was a fully controlled experiment.

So we're quite confident in our technology.

So we hope to use the technology to spread the deliberative process, and we're actually spreading it in schools and universities around the country.

But let me just mention just a couple of cases about the foreign cases that you've eluded to.

We actually have it required by law now in Mongolia, in order to change the constitution, because we've done a series of them there.

So in order to change the constitution in Mongolia, they have to convene a Deliberative Poll with the public's suggestions about possible amendments, an independent committee.

And then, if the results are passed to the parliament and they support by 2/3, they can pass a new amendment.

And we just had a big celebration, which I'm back from Mongolia, which is a competitive democracy located between Russia on the one side and China on the other.

So I would say it's a tough neighborhood.

(hosts laughing) They have, they passed the second time, the second constitutional amendment that they passed with this process changed the electoral system, adding instead of just individual districts where members of parliament are elected, they added proportional representation for an additional 50 members of parliament, which is a lot given the size of parliament, about 50.

And with proportional representation, they hope to get third parties.

The public, when they deliberated, said, "We've got these two big parties that are at each others' throats all the time, that are castigating each other, and we want more choices.

So how can we get more choices?"

One of the options was add more members of parliament who will be elected by proportional representation.

So they adopted that.

That was passed by the parliament by a 2/3 vote.

And they had an election, and what happened?

They got third parties as well represented in the parliament.

So then they had a big celebration of the 10 years of Deliberative Polling in Mongolia.

They invited me back.

And I got a presidential medal, which is their highest state award, for introducing Deliberative Polling to Mongolia.

And they had a big international conference with our friends from South Korea and Japan and other places that had used Deliberative Polling on behalf of the government in those countries to solve big problems.

So I would show you my medal, but it's in the other room.

(hosts laughing) - Hey, Jim, we've literally got 15 seconds here, but can this help improve the health of American democracy?

- Absolutely.

The last chapter shows all the different ways, which are surprising, that we can use this at the local, state, and national level in different contexts.

And if we used it over and over, everybody would have a chance to deliberate.

And we have found lasting effects of deliberation, even as long as a year later.

So we think we could cure the ills of democracy, and these are not just claims that I make and that we, but also, they've been survived peer review in the top journals in political science, "The American Political Science Review" especially.

And we've demonstrated the results.

So read the book and let's think about it, but I say, the most important thing about the book is the question mark at the end.

And the question mark is an invitation.

It's a question of collective political will.

Can we find all the opportunities to apply deliberative processes that will dissolve our divisions and bring us together in a thoughtful way to solve our common problems?

- Jim, that is a great place for us to leave it.

Can deliberation cure the ills of democracy?

We've got the answer, James Fishkin, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we've got this week.

If you wanna know more, you can find us online.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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