Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: Fishkin’s “Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?”

July 4, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: Fishkin’s “Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?”

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

  • (Chair) Jane Mansbridge, Harvard Kennedy School
  • (Presenter) James S. Fishkin, Stanford University
  • (Presenter) John Gastil, Pennsylvania State University
  • (Presenter) Jane Suiter, Dublin City University
  • (Presenter) Mark E. Warren, University of British Columbia
  • (Presenter) Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University

Session Description:

Fishkin’s new book Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? (Oxford University Press) argues that deliberation, if sufficiently frequent and widespread, could address two fundamental problems facing democracies around the world: extreme partisan polarization and the manipulation of public opinion clouding public will formation.

Democracy needs to make a connection between “the will of the people” and what is actually done. This connection has broken down in a world of propaganda, social media enclaves, misinformation, and manipulation. Meanwhile our political divisions seem ever more intractable and our democracies ever more ungovernable. Based on decades of applying and perfecting methods of deliberative democracy in countries around the world, Fishkin argues that deliberative democracy can have surprisingly positive effects on all these problems. Fishkin’s method of Deliberative Polling has been applied 150 times in countries around the world. In this book, Fishkin synthesizes the results and shows how they can be applied to help resolve many of democracy’s seemingly intractable challenges. Deliberative democracy can be applied to major national and local decisions, it can spread in the schools, it can be used by corporations, it can make for more meaningful ballot propositions, it can help reform the primary system, it can scale with technology, it can be incorporated into innovative constitutional processes (as in the Law on Deliberative Polling in Mongolia). Furthermore, it can help reform electoral democracy, help preserve the guardrails that protect the electoral process, and provide key policy inputs in almost every contested issue area from climate change to the rights of minorities. Fishkin ends by laying out a vision for how to combine elections with deliberation and build a more deliberative society—one that cures our extreme partisanship and leads to substantive dialogues that foster mutual respect and more engaged voters.