The 20-page article, Taking the Goals of Deliberation Seriously: A Differentiated View on Equality and Equity in Deliberative Designs and Processes (2016), was written by Edana Beauvais and Andre Baechtiger, and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 12: Iss. 2. The article reviews the goals of healthy deliberative systems and the different designs of civic forums, including participant recruitment, nature of interaction, and decision-making. The authors reviews research which shows evidence that the design of a deliberative system affects its outcomes and goals. Read an excerpt of the […] (continue)

Written by NCDD director Sandy Heierbacher to expand upon the text on our “What Are Dialogue & Deliberation?” page. This resource provides enough details to enable you to decide which of these leading dialogue and deliberation methods you should learn more about. In addition to looking at which methods fit your intentions, you will need to consider which methods are aligned with your resources, timeline, and the people you feel need to be involved. The text below is drawn from NCDD’s Engagement Streams Framework. AmericaSpeaks […] (continue)

This September 2, 2010 article by Joe Klein on the Time Magazine website compares Jim Fishkin's Deliberative Polling process with the kleroterion process used in ancient Athens (a citizen decision-making process that used random selection), and suggests that rather than appointing a "blue-ribbon" commission to study the federal deficit, Obama ought to have initiated a deliberative democracy program using Deliberative Polling. (continue)

All over the world, democratic reforms have brought power to the people, but under conditions where the people have little opportunity to think about the power that they exercise. In this 2009 book, NCDD member James Fishkin, creator of Deliberative Polling, combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice and shows how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive our modern democracies. (continue)

NCDD member Jim Fishkin was featured in a May 6, 2010 article in The Economist print edition. Jim is the Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford and creator of the Deliberative Poll. The article, titled “Ancient Athens online: Democracy is about discussion, not just voting” can be viewed in full at this link on The Economist’s website. The full text is quoted below. (continue)

Deliberative Polling (continue)

The author of this presentation shows deliberative polling and a small sample of online deliberation as possible designs for deliberative democracy. For deliberative polling, the author reviews Fishkin's model as well as displays a New Haven Regional Deliberative Poll as an example. The online deliberation models under review are e-thePeople, Web Lab, and Unchat, among others. (continue)

Citizens are looking for a stronger voice in government decision making. They are becoming less willing to have decisions made for them by government, and are more inclined to trust their own judgment in political matters. This 2001 paper byNancy Averill (Canadian Government Executive, 1, 11-13) provides an overview of deliberative polling, detailing how it can give powerful insights into the public's true thoughts. (continue)

Using data from the first fully randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, we examine the effects of the Deliberative Poll's formal on-site deliberations on both policy preferences and "preference structuration" or single-peakedness (operationally, the proportion of individuals whose preferences are aligned along the same shared dimension). The issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing in New Haven, Connecticut and its surrounding towns. We find that deliberation significantly altered aggregate policy preferences and increased the degree of single-peakedness on revenue sharing, though not airport expansion. These results both confirm the promise of civic deliberation as a means of transforming citizen preferences and raise the question of how deliberation's effects may depend on the kind of issue being deliberated. (continue)

Sometimes politics gets in the way of democracy, according to the author of this paper. The author goes on to tell how "This week, CPRN released the results of a dialogue with a randomly selected group of 250 Ontario citizens on the province's budget strategy for the next four years. Because it had been commissioned by the government, it was rejected as useless in the Ontario legislature." The paper further explains deliberative democracy and how it functions in other societies in contrast to Canadian usage. (continue)