Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation.

• Author: Moriarty, Brendan

James S. Fishkin. Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 272 pages. Hardcover, $26.95.

When most people think of democracy, they envision varying overlapping concepts. We envision the mechanisms of the state, such as elections and how laws are passed. We might also think of political principles, such as equality and freedom. When professor of communications James S. Fishkin thinks of democracy, he thinks of four qualifications: political equality, participation, deliberation, and the absence of tyranny. From here, he sketches out four relevant forms of democracy which guarantee at least two of the four qualifications: competitive democracy, elite deliberation, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy. Naturally for Fishkin, the focus of this book, Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation, is on deliberative democracy.

Fishkin's aim, in this book and his extensive work in real life policy making, is to reform democracy. Recent efforts to reform democracy have run into a sort of Sophie's choice between political equality, deliberation, and participation. If people were able to create institutions which could realize all three, then they would realize a "full deliberative process." Going further, if there was also an agenda setting process and it was widespread, we would have a "well-ordered deliberative system." The purpose of such a system is to realize popular control of government, or what we might consider the "consent of the governed."

Setting aside the first three forms of democracy, Fishkin focuses on deliberative democracy, which guarantees political equality and deliberation. The most traditional case of deliberative democracy is that of Athenian democracy, which utilized sortition, or a drawing by lots for the holding of political offices. Fishkin lays out in great detail a more updated institution which he believes could be used to reform democracy as we know it--"deliberative polling." In deliberative polling, you gather together a representative sample of people and have them deliberate on a set of agenda items and create recommendations which would then be propagated to voters. This could be done for presidential primaries as well as ballot initiatives or referenda. As such, deliberative polling would constitute a more democratic form of cues to low information...