Deliberative Polling Within Deliberative Systems: Pathways for Reform

How can citizen deliberation be incorporated into a system of popular control? This paper draws on experience from Deliberative Polls and pilots for “Deliberation Day” to consider various scenarios that would satisfy criteria for the people exercising a form of popular control that is also deliberative. The paper will draw on the new “Law on Deliberative Polling” in Mongolia (and its applications), the decision in South Korea to employ a deliberation to make the final decision on two nuclear reactors, the upcoming national US Deliberative Poll during the presidential primary process and the development of technology to scale mass deliberation to pilot “Deliberation Day” (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). The paper supports the idea of “recursive deliberation” but emphasizes sites where the deliberation is balanced by competing arguments and diverse perspectives, rather than those that offer one-sided but reason-based advocacy. The proposed scenarios are evaluated in terms of four general criteria for popular control: inclusion, choice, deliberation and impact.