Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:05]
B
Welcome to another episode of Frankly Fukuyama. If you like the video, please feel free to like and subscribe. So I'm very happy to be speaking to my colleague Jim Fishkin. Jim runs the Deliberative Democracy Lab at the center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which is my home institution at Stanford University. Jim has been working on deliberative democracy for many years now. And it's not just a theory. Him, I've just discovered that he has two PhDs, both in political science and philosophy. So it's not simply a theoretical issue for him, but it's also a practical one because he feels that we don't do enough deliberation and that democracy depends on deliberation and he actually has a method for promoting that. So Jim, let's just start with the issue of deliberation. How is it critical in a democracy to be able to actually deliberate?
- [00:59]
A
Well, the root of the word deliberation is weighing. Weighing the pros and cons, the competing arguments, the trade offs. And that's what I think people need to do if they're going to contribute to the discussion about what should be done. My fundamental premise is that democracy should make some connection to the so called will of the people. But what is the will of the people these days? When you've got everybody trying to propagandize, the public persuade, and people are stuck in their social media enclaves or filter bubbles, they may never hear the other side of the argument. They may hear the pros, but not the cons. The cons and not the pros of different policy alternatives. And they may be subject to massive amounts of misinformation or even disinformation. Information that's spread by non humans, by bots and various kinds of AI generated people who don't even exist. So, so I invented deliberative polling, a method to see what the public really would think under some fairly straightforward stipulated good conditions, whether that would make a difference. And it makes an enormous difference if it's organized properly. So now I'm also, I've made this method, which I call deliberative polling, an input to public policy at the state level, the national level, and all kinds of other countries. We've done 160 cases, they're controlled experiments and they are well received as the considerations that the public how the public would really come to certain conclusions if they thought about it. And we identify the reasons that they arrive at those conclusions. And those reasons, if we're doing this with good samples, should have weight with the rest of the public and many policymakers have gotten involved in participating in the processes as competing experts, but also in commissioning these things, particularly on difficult subjects where they want to share the decision about what to do with the people in a representative and informed way.
- [03:07]
B
And you've just written a book on this.
- [03:09]
A
It has what might seem a preposterous title, but it's meant to be that. It's Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? Question mark. And the question mark is the most important thing about the title. Because everything I advocate could be done if we had the political will to make it real. But it would be. We'd have to practice a deliberate collaboration on an organized design in a fairly extensive way and all kinds of venues of life. But we could. We can improve policymaking. We can improve the way citizens think before they vote in elections. We can improve. We can create even a more deliberative society in all the different ways this could be spread, most of which we've actually experimented with in one case or another. So this is. And my claim about the effects of deliberation, not only in terms of the conclusions people. People arrive at, but in terms of the byproducts. It cools down the affect of polarization. It creates greater mutual respect among the people who disagree amongst each other the most strongly. It creates citizens who have a greater sense of internal political efficacy that has come to the conclusion that they have opinions worth listening to. They pay more attention to the news. They become more thoughtful consumers of the news. They participate in elections at higher levels. When they vote, they vote in a way that we can show is coherently connected to their conscientious judgments. They're considered judgments about the issues rather than just party loyalty.
- [04:49]
B
So maybe you could talk a little bit about the actual method that you use. So the big problem with deliberation in a big modern democracy like the United States is one of scale, right? We have 340 million people. The deliberative models historically, that are out, out there are things like, you know, ancient Athens that had a population of maybe 25,000 citizens, or the New England town hall meeting that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about. So these are small units where you could actually get a large number of citizens to actively participate and argue deliberate with one another at the scale that the United States operates. Even, you know, when you go to a state or a municipal level, you're oftentimes dealing with millions of people. So how do you. How do you.
- [05:34]
A
Well, the first thing which I do, which the Athenians did, and which many other methods, which I think frankly are not as good as mine because they're not as empirical, carefully constructed empirically as mine are, as mine is, is. We have many publics or random samples. Let's say we did America in One room project in 2009 is what we called it then. We'd now done a whole series of American one room projects, some of them with Larry diamond, my colleague and your colleague. Excellent random samples. Stratified random samples of 500 up to 1000 who are recruited by NORC at the University of Chicago. They're really excellent samples. And with control groups who do not deliberate at all, but just answer the questionnaire in the same period, the time of recruitment at the end. So their conclusions are initially, their opinions about the issues are demonstrably initially representative of the population as it is. And then they change in dramatic ways and those become recommendations about what should be done. Now America in One Room was just a demonstration and a scientific experiment, but we've done the same kind of thing in lots of countries where they had to make decisions and the policymakers have taken the decisions as recommendations that they more often than not implement. So that's the first strategy, deliberative polling. It's a poll where the people, you have a poll before, then they deliberate, then you have another poll after and you have a control.
- [07:10]
B
How big is the group that you're sampling?
- [07:13]
A
Well, as I said, the deliberators might be 500, up to a thousand. There have been a few smaller ones. We've actually done a few that are even larger, but that's plenty large enough to evaluate the first statistically the representativeness of the sample because we have the control group that is just a good survey to compare it to in attitudes and demographics.
- [07:35]
B
And you're taking a baseline of this group of 500 or whatever. Yeah, but you don't have 500 people actually deliberate.
- [07:42]
A
Yes, yeah, in small groups of 10 or 15, either with human moderators or now we have developed with the crowdsourced democracy team here in the engineering school, we have an AI assisted moderator that replaces the human moderators and does a fantastic job. And in controlled experiments the it comes to the same conclusions as the human moderators. And so with, with that we could scale it and we're working step by step towards experiments in at least two countries where we're going to scale the deliberation to very large numbers. With this platform, technology can be used constructively and that's our plan. But that's the second, second aspect. Can we can we spread the deliberative process to the broader society because if we did these byproducts that I mentioned, the greater mutual respect, very dramatic depolarization on the most, on the issues that divide us the most, even the people who take the most extreme positions depolarize the most. We had a series of these that were featured in the New York Times and also we explained them in the American Political Science Review where the on immigration, for example, the Republicans moved from 80% to supporting sending all the undocumented immigrants home to only 40% after deliberation, and the same for DACA and the various other immigration proposals. And the Democrats really pulled back from the most ambitious redistributive social proposals and with changes almost as large or as large as 40 points, which is very dramatic. But. And then when we went back to these samples a year later, they voted in a way that was consistent with their considered judgments about the issues, which is very surprising because the control group, NORC's control groups voted almost perfectly, exactly like the actual electorate. One was in the presidential election of 2020 and another was in the midterms a few years later with our big project on the environment and energy, for which we had a thousand deliberators on this platform. So in each case, traders are large and sample of deliberators large enough that we can evaluate the changes in a statistically meaningful way and we can explain it. We also have transcripts of all the discussions because people spend a whole weekend in small groups discussing the issues. And we can mine the transcripts with our LLM models to identify the key reasons why, key reasons in favor and against that the people are considering as they move to change their opinions if they do change.
- [10:28]
B
So one of the big problems with public deliberation is, you know, so we have a lot of mechanisms for doing this already in the United States, our city councils will hold town hall meetings to discuss a big project or how to allocate the budget. I'm particularly interested in problems of infrastructure because, you know, we need more and it's been very difficult to build things. And the difficulty begins with, you know, the deliberative process as to, you know, do you want the project at all, what should it look like, how much are you going to pay for it and that sort of thing. The problem typically with open ended public participation is that you have this super organized civil society where all of the big interest groups, you know, organized labor, developers, the environmental lobbyist groups all show up at these meetings and they've got very fixed positions. And you don't actually get any deliberation out of this. I mean, everybody basically defends a position that they're paid. And furthermore, these are not ordinary citizens. Our civil society in the United States is highly professionalized. And so you have organizations with paid staff whose only job is to show up at these meetings and defend particular positions. And ordinary citizens get left out of it. And I think the usual complaint about that kind of participation is that it's ultimately not representative. It's representative of those groups that are organized and have resources and money. It's not necessarily reflective of the opinion of ordinary people who don't have a strong dog in the fight necessarily, but are still citizens that will be affected by the decision. So how does your method overcome that issue?
- [12:11]
A
Well, let me tell you a story which I mentioned to you before, which is in the book. But early when we started these things in Texas, the Public Utility Commission gave the big electricity companies, of which there were eight throughout the state, gave them the option of, or the requirement that they had to consult the public in some way to develop their so called integrated resource plans about how they were going to provide energy in the state. And so they weren't quite sure what to do. But with Jim Lair and pbs, we had just broadcast a big national deliberative poll and they knew about that. And so they approached me about doing deliberative polling. And I said, we'll do a deliberative poll with a good sample. I knew a survey researcher who would provide a good sample and with an advisory group that includes all the relevant stakeholders, the environmental groups, the consumer groups, the advocates of alternative energy, the large customers, the advocates of various kinds of wind power, but also coal, natural gas, all the things that could be done. And they would have to agree on a briefing document about the issues. And they and the company and the commission would agree on an agenda of proposals and identify pros and cons and the rest of it. And I said the commissioners who have to make the decision should appear at the end of the process and answer questions from the sample as experts. And then the people would fill out the questionnaire again. And they agreed to all those conditions. And we did all eight companies all over the state. And there were a lot of surprising results because first of all, the public doesn't know a lot about electric utility regulation. Indeed, Phil Converse at the University of Michigan when he discovered what I call phantom opinions, what he called non attitudes, that is opinions. People answer questions that they don't know about, haven't thought about, but they don't like to admit they don't know. So they randomly pick a response. It was a question about electric utilities that allowed for that discovery. And the companies were well aware that if they did surveys, they might get a lot of noise. And if they did focus groups, they're too small to be representative. And they were also aware that if they had open meetings, it would just be dominated by lobbyists and who could figure out, predict exactly how that would come out and they might be bound by these results. So they gulped a little bit and they said, well, we're going to do this process. And it worked well every time, all eight times. But one of the surprises was that the percentage of the public that was interested in actually willing to pay more on their monthly bill and how often are people willing to pay more on their monthly bill for anything in order to subsidize wind power and renewable energy more generally was went from 50% to 85% or something like that. And the commission was astonished by that. So they required the companies to make significant investments in wind power and then more investments in wind power. And over the years, by the time we got Texas surpassed California in the amount of wind power in the state by 2000, it's but no stopping ever since it's far surpassed everybody else in the amount of wind power. But the point is, this was representative of the public, demonstrably so as a matter of social science, it was well informed. We had knowledge questions that we could show the people. And the discussions were very in depth about the trade offs of the different kinds of power. And it overcame even some of the deceptive advertisements about clean coal, which really was not that much cleaner than old dirty coal. But the advocates of the coal industry were saying clean coal is so wonderful and there are even television advertisements about it. But then the natural gas people could say natural gas is a lot cleaner than clean coal, but it still has some issues in what it puts in the environment. But then the wind power people could say, you know, we're really clean, but of course it's intermittent. But then the conservation people could say, well, we're the cleanest of all. But nevertheless, it requires changes in human behavior, demand side management to get people to really. Anyway, so that same dynamic played out in Japan after the Fukushima disaster because we'd done a lot of projects in Japan and the Japanese government at the time was trying to figure out what to do about the future of nuclear power. They had these town meetings, some of which I attended with my Japanese collaborator, Professor Sone of Keio University electricity companies employees were dressed up as ordinary people, as they told me. And the rather rabid anti nuclear activists were yelling at them and they were yelling back. And they had these town meetings all over the country and was not very productive. So then they had online consultation, the same thing happened. And then they had polling of a conventional sort, but they couldn't tell exactly how informed the people were about the trade offs. So then the government officially sponsored a national deliberative poll conducted by Keio University and with us. And they identified they had the five options developed by a scientific committee and the cabinet at the time accepted the results. So that was an example where the same process that happened in about the public consultations of other sorts was finally led logically to the deliberative poll.
- [17:50]
B
So as I understand it, you brief the participants in the poll and give them basic factual information about.
- [17:58]
A
Yeah, vetted by an advisory committee that represents all the different stakeholders and points of view.
- [18:04]
B
I'm curious, by the way, I would say that now most Republicans in Texas would actually deny that they actually produce any alternative energy, even though they do.
- [18:13]
A
They're the leader in the United States,
- [18:15]
B
they're the leader, but they don't want anyone to know that. That the question, I guess, is whether you can, even today, given the degree of polarization, even come up with a common knowledge base from which people can derive opinions. I mean, you take something like vaccines or election denialism, you couldn't get agreement on what the basic facts in either of those cases are because you have very strong advocates who are living in a different world. And so how do you come up with a common set of facts that you give the people participating in the poll?
- [18:47]
A
Well, you have to do you have to have a working group that does a lot of research to document and then you get an advisory committee that actually does represent people from different points of view. There may be some issues where you couldn't get agreement, but we haven't found them. We even did one on election reform issues, which that's the one that Larry Dimon was involved in. And we had a lot of very. We had a lot of Republicans as well as Democrats, very thoughtful people who would talk about the substance of the issue. We didn't label these. We had proposals that were Republican leaning proposals and Democratic leaning proposals, but we didn't label them as Republican or Democrat or left or right. We just presented the substance and the likely consequences of doing one thing rather than another. And with a lot of work you can eventually get a thoughtful advisory committee to Sign on and their names are public. And the people are smart enough to engage in the arguments. And it's amazing the complex issues that they're willing to deal with. You're right that it's a challenge. It's more of a challenge than when we started, but I think it's still possible.
- [19:59]
B
And then I guess the question is, how much legitimacy do people accord to the process itself? Because I could easily imagine in today's world, you know, you have a deliberative poll that, you know, becomes more favorable, let's say, to the way we treat undocumented, you know, immigrants. And then there'll be people who'll say, well, but that's because you gave them all the wrong information. You know, you, you are hiding how the violence and the, the mayhem that's being caused by undocumented immigrants.
- [20:29]
A
Well, there are, there is some misinformation floating around about the behavior of undocumented immigrants. They actually have a lower crime rate.
- [20:39]
B
We're not talking about reality. I'm just saying if you got a significant part of the population that believes that Haitians are eating dogs and cats, and then you come up with a process that produces an outcome that's favorable to people like these Haitians, why are the anti immigration people gonna trust that process? Why aren't they gonna stop?
- [21:00]
A
Well, the best thing which we often have had is we've had a lot of coverage that actually covers not just the results, but the process. And people can see people like them deliberating in the small groups and raising issues and concerns that they would raise and then hearing the responses and then coming up with. They come up with shared questions which they ask to panels of competing experts and they can listen to those things. So the more transparency and coverage, the better the process produces its own legitimacy. As people see that these are not elite people deliberating. These are people just like them and they're raising concerns and questions that many of them would want to raise, and they see themselves in the process. So we actually maybe were just lucky. But we actually, even though we've had a lot of influence in a lot of places around the world, we've actually rarely been attacked as biased. Even this age of social media and disinformation.
- [22:00]
B
So if you look at other parts of the world, in Europe and other regions, you know, you have, for example, citizens assemblies that invite public participation and public deliberation. How do those compare to what you do?
- [22:13]
A
Okay, so we, the two big differences are, first of all, we have larger samples. The Irish citizens assemblies, the French Citizens Convention on Climate they had around 150 people, which is just barely enough. And, and how are they select? Well, that's the second thing. They use the word sortition, which means random sampling. But the French sent out 350,000 text messages in order to recruit 150 people. And they didn't ask them about their views about climate when they were recruited. There's a common criticism that who's going to, and because they want them to deliberate for up to two years, initially they were recruited for six months, then it was extended to a year and then two years. But who's going to give six months or a year or two years of their lives for an issue that they know what the issue is, unless they're especially interested in climate, for example. And so we have, there's no data on where the French Citizens assembly started, but everybody thinks that they were already much more prone to support climate action than the rest of the population. So my position is unless you know where they start, why should you trust where they end up up? Because they have to start where the rest of the public is and we go to a lot of trouble to collect that data. Then the second thing is we collect the opinions in confidential questionnaires rather than an agreed consensus statement. Criticisms of deliberative processes come out of the jury literature and juries do a pretty good job if you read the classic American jury making basic decisions about a fact, guilt or innocence, that sort of thing. But there, there's obviously some distortions, there's social pressure to go along with the rest in order to reach a jury verdict. This has been studied and Cass Sunstein has argued that the jury process, if it's the representative nature of the initial, depending on the, depending on the distribution of opinion at the beginning, it's very likely to go to further extremes. He calls it the law of group polarization. We don't get, get group polarization. In fact we, in our process we depolarize if there's any extreme polarization. But in the jury process, the push to consensus can produce further polarization as people go along with everybody else. And in the Citizens assembly is like a great big jury because they have to come and finally agree on a common report or a common draft of the law that should be adopted or that sort of thing. So the two big problems are the not collecting the judgments in confidential questionnaires, not having pre opinion data. The Irish also didn't have any pre opinion data because the civil servants didn't permit them to. A friend of mine was involved in those. And James Souter, a very good researcher, but she couldn't collect that data. Thirdly, we collect the transcripts of all the discussions and we analyze those. And they weren't allowed by the civil servants to transcribe or record the discussions. The discussions. We now have technological capacities to analyze group discussions in all kinds of ways in order to better understand what's going on. So we try to understand how and why people change their views or come to whatever conclusions they do. What are the reasons for that? Because it's in identifying those reasons, if it's a representative sample, those reasons should have weight with the rest of the public. And they do. And that's part of how the process has impact.
- [25:53]
B
Have you tried to do this? It's always seemed to me the group in the United States that needs this kind of structured deliberation the most are actually members of Congress. Have you ever tried to do it within a smaller group like that, not
- [26:06]
A
members of Congress, who of course are. They're subject to electoral pressures for re election. Obviously we have had some elite deliberations and at the Internet Governance Forum and at the Nobel Prize Summit, and it's worked quite well with elites, but we think that. But most of our processes are with ordinary people, samples of the public. But, you know, we're talking about various specialized populations. One of my graduate students from Brazil is trying to do a deliberate poll with the public defenders of Brazil about what kind of AI they need and because. They're up against prosecuting offices that have a lot of AI power and they don't have any. And how can that be remedied in a practical way? So that's an example. I think we've only scratched the surface about specialized populations that could do this.
- [27:06]
B
And then I take it that the actual deliberation has to be face to face.
- [27:11]
A
No, we do it on the platform too. So in Finland, our collaborate, one of Kimo Grunlund, professor there, worked with us and we got the Finnish parliament to sponsor a national deliberation and we did a national controlled experiment with one third being face to face, one third being on Zoom Online and one third being on our platform. And we got virtually identical results in all three conditions. So that was proof positive that the platform. Now what the platform does is, and we use the platform actually here at Stanford when the university was considering the issues with the door School, the new environmental school that's been established because there were lots of NIMBY issues and faculty who might be in the new school but might be in One of the current schools and how people might get moved around. There was a lot of emotion about it. And so they turned to us and we got a random sample of the Stanford faculty and we did a deliberation on that, on the platform. The faculty loved it so much that they said, I'd love to use that for faculty meetings because I'd like to be in a position where my colleagues can only talk 45 seconds at a time. But the point is that what the platform does is it mimics what a really good moderator would do. No hint of. Of its own opinion about the issue. There's an agreed agenda of proposals and the group, small groups of 10 decide. You know, have we discussed the first issue enough? The pros and cons, then they vote, move to the next one and move to the next one. Somebody is. It controls a cue for speaking 45 seconds at a time. We could set it at a minute if we want, we could set it at different times. But right now that seems to work. Everybody. It nudges people who have not privately, nudges people who have not participated, and it moves the group through the agenda prepared topics, and then it guides the people and the participants in arriving at the key questions they wanted. So it does all the things a human moderator does, and it actually empowers the group to take more control over the discussion.
- [29:23]
B
And then, I guess the reason I thought that it needed to be face to face is that human beings, as a result of the evolutionary process, have various mechanisms for coming to trust other people in interpersonal situations. It seems to me one of the problems with the rise of social media and the Internet is that people can interact with each other anonymously without any.
- [29:46]
A
You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.
- [29:48]
B
So how does your method deal with.
- [29:50]
A
Well, you see, you see them, it's like a zoom. You see the 10, the other nine people in your group all the time on the video, and they actually become quite attached. We did this big project in Chile
- [30:01]
B
and they know each other's identities, where they live, what their name.
- [30:05]
A
No, but they have names, but they don't know. We asked them to introduce each other at the beginning and they usually say where they're from and that sort of thing. But it's, you know, 10 strangers initially, but in our face to face processes, 10 strangers initially also, but they get to know each other. Anyway, I mentioned the Chileans because it was very striking. It was a very packed agenda on both healthcare and the pensions, which were two big issues. And it took the whole weekend and you might have thought there would be zoom fatigue or the equivalent, but instead they were crying at the end that it was over and they wanted to figure out ways to reconvene. And it became very emotional. Maybe that's the Chileans. It's a wonderful. They're wonderful people, a wonderful place. But the point is that they bonded as a group, just as a face to face group would. And maybe the experience of using zoom during COVID helped, you know, facilitate that, made people a little more comfortable with an electronic connection. But they do see each other and they talk to each other and they quite, you know, it's not asynchronous text, it's synchronous video. I think the changes that we get, we get an increase in empathy for each other. People learn to listen to each other. We, we seem to stimulate the old contact hypothesis where if people who dislike each other a great deal or are prejudiced against each other work together on a common task under conditions of equality, it increases their liking for each other. That goes all the way back to Gordon ALLPORT in the 50s at Harvard, a psychologist. But it's very well established social psychology. And I think that being able to see each other and listen to each other as another human being really helps that.
- [32:01]
B
Okay, well, Jim Fishkin, that's really fascinating. I think that it's very promising as a technique. I think that we really are in a crisis of non deliberation in the United States. And if this is something that can lead people towards actually talking to one another, you know, it's a very important development.
- [32:20]
A
Well, thank you. And if your listeners read the rest of my book, they'll see even more detailed plans about how we could scale it. I'd make a more deliberative society.
- [32:28]
B
Okay. We'll put a link to the book in the notes. So thanks very much.
- [32:34]
A
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [32:41]
B
Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to American Purpose and my Frankly Fukuyama column@www. Persuasion.community.