Deliberation Day

Brendan Conway, in today's OpionJournal, takes Professors Bruce Ackerman (Yale Law School) and James Fishkin (University of Texas Department of Government, Stanford University (see comment below)) to task for their suggestion that what the US needs is more deliberation in our democracy:

they propose a new national holiday, Deliberation Day, to make America's citizenry worthy of its own democratic aspirations. DDay calls for citizens to assemble in public buildings, listen to televised statements by major candidates, hear local activists and converse with one another according to rules designed to maximize civility and shame spoilers. No voting takes place, only deliberation. And there is no need to add a day off to the nation's calendar for all this worthy effort. We can simply cannibalize a current holiday, like Presidents Day.

I know, it all sounds like too much fun. But still, a few stragglers may prefer to stay away. How to motivate them? "Each deliberator will be paid $150 for the day's work of citizenship." With a turnout of 50 million Americans, the cost of DDay would be about $7.5 billion. A small price, say Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin, for a citizenry more familiar with candidates and the positions they take.

The reason?

they do believe that ordinary people--left, right or center--are too uninformed to govern themselves meaningfully, let alone teach at a university. "If six decades of modern public opinion research establish anything," they write, "it is that the general public's political ignorance is appalling by any standard."

The entire discussion is dealt with rather derisively by Conway. And, to be honest, I can't disagree with his criticism of the idea of Deliberation Day (not to mention the whole idea of paying $7.5 billion for it). However, I think he misses the idea that it is the case that most Americans are, indeed, woefully ignorant of how their government works, and about politics in general. The question, of course, is what, if anything, should (and can) be done about it?

I am well familiar with Dr. Fishkin's idea of deliberative polling (more here and the new CDD home with more info is here), as he was the Chair of the Department of Government at the University of Texas when I was a student there, and I had him for a class probably in the 91-92 academic year. He has been working on this idea of deliberation since at least that point, and I was at UT when he held his deliberative poll in 1994. The basic premise is: if you give people more information, it tends to change their opinions (and, further, the idea that citizens, in general, have insufficient information about politics). Now, I can't disagree with either premise (nor is either all that controversial).

The question, as I note above: what to do about it? I thought at the time, and concur with Conway, that this particular approach is remarkably paternalistic (and optimistic, for that matter, if not idealistic). For one thing, the idea that otherwise disinterested citizens can be paid to become informed strikes me as unlikely, and, further, the idea that it could be done in one day (or two days, as with the 94 experiment) strikes me as absurd. There is also the problem of what will be told to the citizens-for-hire during that 24 hour period. I know for a fact that both Ackerman and Fishkin are both rather focused on the issue of distrbutive justice (read: economic distribution) in the context of the liberal state (and not, specifically a classical liberal state but the liberal-welfare state that emerges as a strain of liberalism in the twentieth century). For example, Ackerman's Social Justice in the Liberal State (1980) while well-written, highly readable, and fun to discuss in class, is a remarkably impractical (and, to me, utterly unpersuasive) attempt to justify economic egalitarianism (at least at the start of each generation). And yes, that is an overly simplified version of the book--however, the basic argument of the book can easily be encapsulated in the following: "I am just as good as you are, so I should get at least as much."

But, back to deliberation: the idea that it is the government's job to foster deliberation strikes me as idealistic and an imposition. Further, the idea that having a one day a year paid (by tax dollars) holiday in which the government will provide (directly or through proxies) is positively Orwellian in its potential.

Plus, don't citizens have the right to be uparticipatory, and indeed, ignorant of government and politics if they want to be? If they decide it isn't worth their time, why should the government step in and try to "correct" their behavior?

Further, if we want better citizens, how about just providing better and more complete American Government classes in High School? How about having someone other than the basketball coach teach government and history? These seem more auspicious places to start.

Posted by Steven Taylor at March 24, 2024 09:03 AM | TrackBack