Presenting Deliberation Day: A radical proposal to help voters make better decisions, write Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, and James Fishkin, Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University.
“In our soon-to-be-released book, we offer a new way of thinking about democratic reform, proposing a new national holiday—Deliberation Day. It would replace Presidents’ Day, which does no service to the memories of Washington and Lincoln, and would be held two weeks before major national elections.
Registered voters would be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of 15 and larger groups of 500, to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign. Each deliberator would be paid $150 for the day’s work of citizenship. To allow the business of the world to carry on and as many as possible to participate, the holiday would be a two-day affair.”
They note that, while sustained public conversations about issues, particularly around political campaign seasons, do take place, the overall level of public ignorance is appalling. Here is an entertaining anecdote:
George Bishop and his colleagues at the University of Cincinnati dramatized this point in their study of attitudes toward the “Public Affairs Act of 1975.” Asked for their opinion of the act, large percentages of the public either supported or opposed it, even though no such act was ever passed. In 1995, The Washington Post celebrated the “twentieth unanniversary” of the nonexistent act by asking respondents about its “repeal.” Half the respondents were told that President Clinton wanted to repeal the act; the other half were informed that the “Republican Congress” favored its repeal. The respondents apparently used these cues to guide their answers, without recognizing the fictional character of the entire endeavor.
They suggest that it actually makes sense for the voters to remain ignorant; the acquisition and analysis of adequate information about public affairs is time-consuming and competes with other priorities, and if there is no payoff because your vote really doesn’t matter, why bother? This argument is based on the idea that, usually, one does not see a “direct cost for an ignorant decision” in the political sphere, in contrast to the personal penalties suffered if one does not make an informed decision when buying a car or a house, for example.
While I think that the idea of a Deliberation Day holiday is an absurd way to remedy the situation, I appreciate the analysis. It points to the simple fact that impressing the public with the direct costs to themselves of supporting the present dysadministration, for example, is the most efficient way to regime change in 2004. Of course, nothing in the authors’ examination of the value of deliberation in the political process appears to me to be relevant on a national scale, especially since their central premise that an informed electorate might have genuine, enfranchised power is a political fiction on that scale. I haven’t read their book, but it sounds like it will be a useful study on modern disenfranchisement even though not proposing a useful solution. This is not surprising, since no one really has any useful solutions to the powerlessness of the masses.
