Governance: Beyond Opinion Polls

On a sunny Saturday this past June, two hundred randomly selected men and women sat in the classrooms of an ivied hall at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. For several hours they chatted cordially about municipal cooperation, took a survey, and then returned to their lives as homemakers and accountants from New Haven and its surrounding towns here on the timeworn edge of the nation’s most affluent state. This annual event, known as the Citizen’s Forum, might be the next-generation model for participatory democracy. Or it might just be a mirage of populism projected from the ivory tower.

The Citizen’s Forum gathers a representative slice of the regional population each year to discuss issues that cross town borders, such as airport expansion, local control over property tax revenue, and early childhood education. The assembled citizens, who are paid to participate, mirror the local population in age, race, income, and geographical distribution (although women and college graduates are persistently, though not deliberately, over-represented). Their day begins with an initial survey on a series of local issues. The participants then study background materials, discuss the issues in small groups with moderators, and pose questions to expert panels. Finally, Forum organizers poll them again on the same issues. The results show that a significant number of participants have changed their minds by the day’s end.

In this shift, supporters of the Citizen’s Forum see evidence of a subtler and more meaningful measure of public opinion than the telephone polls whose results dominate today’s political discussions. They also see a submerged popular consensus for municipal cooperation. Critics are suspicious of how closely these results align with the hopes and motives of the Forum’s backers, and they argue that the Forum is a populist shield for an elitist agenda, rather than an objective gauge of public opinion.

The participants themselves are just gratified to feel that their opinions actually matter. “It wasn’t just a gripe session,” remarked Audrey, an office assistant from the middle-class suburb of Hamden. “We had to really think about the issues.” Edward, a teacher from the more affluent town of Milford, enthused, “The experience was fantastic. A lot of us who never had a voice in politics could share our thoughts and feel valued.” Not all the comments were so high-minded: “I agreed to do it just for the hundred bucks and the free lunch,” admitted one jobless participant named Regina. But even she ultimately found the Forum valuable. “I’m not very well off, so I don’t get many chances to express my feelings like that,” she said. “I don’t usually pay attention to politics, so it was amazing how many thoughts were going through my head about what’s going on with our taxes.”

It’s hard to imagine the mundane issue of municipal cooperation inspiring such enthusiasm, or necessitating radical experiments in direct democracy in the first place. In many states, problems that extend beyond town or city boundaries are handled by county governments, regional authorities, and local councils. In Connecticut, however, these issues are more intractable. The state is like a jigsaw puzzle, a rough-hewn rectangle cut into 169 fragments, interlocking but never overlapping. Many of these towns and cities are reluctant to surrender their independence after surviving four centuries of boom and slump, growth and sprawl. But national and global forces are increasingly testing this resistance; modern challenges such as anti-terror enforcement, special education, and local air service are more than each municipality can handle alone. Frustrated by the parochialism they found in conventional political channels, supporters of inter-town collaboration turned to the Forum, based on a more general concept known as the Deliberative Poll, as a novel way to build the momentum for change.

The classic instruments of direct democracy in America-the town meeting, the recall, the referendum, and the public initiative-were largely invented on the ground in the give-and-take of politics. The Deliberative Poll, by contrast, had an abstract, academic birth. Stanford Professor James Fishkin conceived of the Deliberative Poll in 1987 while researching defects in the standard toolset of public opinion measurement and popular decision-making.

All of these totems for the democratic voice have their shortcomings. Town meetings are often tyrannized by petty bickering and indignant rants. Recall, referenda, and initiatives are cumbersome and easily hijacked by powerful interests. And ordinary polls, the ubiquitous yardstick of popular belief, are inexact and uninformed. They measure little more than the aggregate shout of hundreds of impatient citizens rattling off rash judgments into telephone headsets before their dinners get cold.

Furthermore, Fishkin found, polls have two major structural flaws. First, they encourage people to declare “phantom opinions.” Studies have shown that when asked about nonexistent issues (for example, the “Public Affairs Act of 1975” or “Wallonian” foreign policy), respondents will chose random answers rather than abstain or admit their ignorance. Second, polls facilitate “rational ignorance” by the use of simplistic questions and limited answer choices. By reducing complex political questions to something akin to a consumer taste-test, polls reinforce the view that assessing political questions doesn’t warrant serious effort from the average citizen.

Instead of merely fine-tuning the polls, Fishkin suggests a new instrument altogether, one measuring enlightened public opinion. He writes in The Voice of the People, “A deliberative poll attempts to model what the public would think, had it a better opportunity to consider the questions at issue.” Fishkin postulates that such deliberations, divorced from rash decisions and entrenched special interests, will produce policies that better achieve society’s long-term goals. Ideally, deliberative polls should also empower ordinary citizens, a few hundred at a time, to participate firsthand in policymaking.

In the past decade, Fishkin has convened a dozen deliberative polls in America and eight abroad, ranging in topic from Texan utility fees to American foreign policy to the British monarchy. Many were conducted as controlled experiments with results that seem to confirm Fishkin’s instincts. Participants do shift their views in surprising ways, preserve their new beliefs over time, and maintain a long-term interest in politics. And the vast majority raves about the experience. Fishkin feels this data indicates an energized, deep-thinking citizenry. “When you give people an opportunity to deliberate, they come to understand the nuances of political issues, to see all sides and carefully weigh decisions,” he says. “People will surprise you.”

Cynthia Farrar, the creator of the Citizen’s Forum (and a member of TNAC’s editorial advisory board), envisioned the deliberative poll as a potential link between the two cities that are the subject of her lectures to Yale undergraduates: her hometown of New Haven and ancient Athens. “In Athens, people without property, status, or proper breeding were part of the governing system. Every citizen thought of himself as a decision-maker,” she says. In the Athenian Forum, ordinary citizens were drafted by lottery to craft policy through public deliberation. To engineer a similar environment in the present day, she adapted Fishkin’s concept to a local, institutionalized context. The Citizen’s Forum is a model-T version of Fishkin’s deliberative poll-cheap, stripped-down, and replicable on a mass scale.

Farrar believes the Citizen’s Forum achieves three important results. First, it “tests standard assumptions about public views.” If the views of some citizens change in meaningful ways, this could alter the frame of political debate. Public hostility towards municipal cooperation, she hopes, would no longer be taken for granted. Second, the project should “impact civic engagement.” Participants should become more educated voters, mobilized citizens, and motivated community members. Third, the return of these enlightened democrats to the wider community each year should gradually kindle public interest and spark political action. Eventually the Citizen’s Forum might be enshrined in democracy, as were the poll, referendum, and town meeting. “We want people to realize that the deliberative poll reflects everyone, not just the folks who participated,” Farrar says. “We want public officials to see the Deliberative Poll as a new tool to bring more people into the conversation about community priorities.”

Farrar is by no means a bystander to this conversation. The future of New Haven, she feels, depends upon closer political integration with surrounding towns. “There won’t be movement in regional cooperation unless citizens want it,” she says. “Otherwise, there’s no incentive for political leaders to collaborate.” Finding many entrenched town leaders reluctant, Farrar is determined that citizens will be the catalyst for cooperation. If residents of the inner city, working-class suburbs, rural towns, and affluent coastal communities talked to each other and listened to expert panels, their views on regional priorities might shift alongside a growing recognition of the trade-offs of local independence. Farrar intends the Citizen’s Forum to be a vehicle for such change.

Follow-up surveys suggest she may be succeeding. Large majorities of participants found the Citizen’s Forum “highly valuable “ and thought they “learned a lot about people very different from me.” And the proportion that believed, “People with views different from mine often have very good reasons for their views,” rose ten percentage points. One politician’s experience suggests that the forum profits in more than good feelings. Carl Balestracci, First Selectman of Guilford, was impressed by some of his constituents who attended the first Citizen’s Forum and came back better informed and politically energized. “A couple of those citizens are now as active as they can be, regularly attending public meetings,” he says. And New Haven Mayor John DeStefano says, “When I go out and meet citizens, I often see a lot of the same faces sprinkled in the crowd. They tend to be people who are institutionally engaged in the city’s affairs, connected to some organization. In the Deliberative Poll, citizens were free agents.”

Particular views on the issues also changed in the Forum’s wake, tilting toward cooperative solutions. For example, the percentage of participants who believed that preschool should be available to every three- and four-year-old jumped from 47 percent to 66 percent. Before the Forum, 53 percent of participants disagreed with the statement that “the current system of taxation enables towns to cover the services they need.” Afterwards, that percentage rose to 69 percent. The proportion supporting exclusive local control over tax revenue dropped from 80 percent to 42 percent.

Such shifts have aroused critics’ suspicions. “In deliberative polls, citizens are told what to think and then asked what they think,” wrote State Senator William Aniskovich, a persistent Forum critic. Serving as a panelist in this year’s event only reinforced his skepticism. Supporters of the Citizen’s Forum take strong offense at this accusation. Ginny Shaw, a group moderator, cited the extensive information briefs developed by a balanced advisory committee, which “included fifteen opposing stances so that no participant could simply feed back what was read.” In response to Aniskovich’s critical opinion piece in a local newspaper, she wrote, “I can testify that the members’ viewpoints were intense, and often strongly conflicting. The exchanges were exciting; all had read the materials thoroughly, listened carefully to their neighbors’ points of view, and articulately expressed their own.”

Indeed, few participants seemed to notice any bias in the materials. “I didn’t see any slant, it all seemed fair,” said one. “The materials were just a surface scan, but they were balanced fairly,” said another. Nor did participation guarantee a changed perspective. Views about the future of New Haven’s regional airport barely budged during the 2002 Forum, although the concrete and geographically divisive nature of that debate, which involves a long-entrenched fight by airport neighbors against runway expansion, might make people’s views particularly immovable.

What is crucially absent, according to Aniskovich, is context. Opinions on abstract notions without a specific real-world focus, like municipal cooperation, might be more malleable: people can vouch support for reforms without fully calculating the consequences. “The problem is the extent to which the deliberative poll-any deliberative poll-isolates a single issue and removes it from the real legislative realm within which a decision must be made,” wrote Ansikovich; “one’s ‘commitment’ to early childhood education tells us nothing about how to balance that program against the myriad other programs that deserve our attention. A real deliberative poll on issues related to the budget would inform ‘citizens’ of the dilemma caused by conflicting legitimate demands and limited resources ... [and ask them to] pick and choose.”

Perhaps the most startling result of the poll is that over 95 percent of the 2003 participants were dissatisfied with the current situation and favored some form of change. Cynthia Farrar sees this as a clarion call for the reform she has long championed. “The results were eye-opening. Virtually everyone thinks change is required,” she wrote with another activist in a letter to the editor of the New Haven Advocate.

But if two hundred citizens are mustered and told to mull over a single issue, divorced from the larger context of political give-and-take, won’t they inevitably favor some sort of change? The Citizen’s Forum does provide arguments in defense of the status quo in its background materials, but Aniskovich worries that utopian dreams of reform appear more seductive than the pragmatic compromises of real politics. “Shining light on these issues might make people uncomfortable,” he wrote. “And the point of a deliberative poll is not to make people feel uncomfortable-it’s to make them feel good.” Dana Mack, another expert panelist at the 2003 Forum, also suspected that the surveys were skewed against the status quo, but she still saw value in the results. “Any format in which people are allowed to deliberate is superior to a pollster giving people limited choices to describe their opinions.”

As Mack suggests, critics who focus on questions of realism in the Citizen’s Forum may be missing the point. Much can be learned from the deliberations of ordinary citizens unencumbered by the political baggage that burdens legislatures. Without specific proposals and constraints, participants are free to discuss normative questions: how should disadvantaged young children be educated? Can towns share tax revenue without compromising their independence? Ultimately, such open-ended discourse might expose more meaningful revelations about public opinion than the bickering of the “real legislative realm.”

Farrar hopes the Forum will someday be replicated nationwide, wherever there’s a commitment by a coalition of high-profile organizations, press attention, and “the follow-through to ensure that the participants stay involved in the community and that the results get to the policymakers.” With Farrar’s help, James Fishkin will launch a coordinated deliberative poll on American foreign policy in ten cities in January, followed by a 50-city event. His grandest ambition is a national holiday dedicated to productive political discourse, detailed in a new book called Deliberation Day that he wrote with Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School. Ethan Leib, a student of Farrar’s, goes even further, calling for a “Popular Branch” of government structured upon pillars of deliberative polls.

The Deliberative Poll may never displace town meetings or traditional polling. But if institutions like the Citizen’s Forum can ensure that their samples are representative and avoid steering results towards the views of its elite supporters, it may find its niche as a source of political energy and a testing ground for new policy ideas. As one Forum participant put it, “The thing that’s made our country great is compromise-cooperation between different people. It’s very important to listen to other people’s viewpoints and see why they feel as they do, see the basic goodness of humanity. That’s what this event is about.”