Marx at the Polls: Deliberative Mini-Publics and the Self-Emancipation Dilemma

Democratic theory has an uneasy relationship to political polling and experiments. On the one hand, survey techniques have been central to the emergence of a scientific understanding of public opinion, supplying indispensable data for social science research and democratic governance. On the other hand, as these methods have grown in sophistication and power, so too have concerns about elite manipulation and agenda control. These tensions are amplified by democratic reformers’ embrace of deliberative mini-publics—especially Deliberative Polls—which aim not merely to register preferences but to improve “the conditions under which the will of the people develops.” (Fishkin 2018) This raises a familiar but unresolved question: can surveys and experiments be used to foster democratic transformation without undermining citizens’ moral autonomy or substituting elite judgment for popular self-rule? This paper addresses this question through what we call the self-emancipation dilemma. Deliberative democrats largely agree that democratic change must be grounded in citizens’ own independent judgments rather than imposed by activists, experts, or reformers. Yet the very design features that insulate mini-publics from manipulation—random selection, controlled agendas, vetted information, and laboratory-like conditions—also risk severing these forums from the broader public they are meant to empower. As critics have argued, highly insulated deliberative settings may solve the problem of elite interference only by abandoning the mass public or asking nonparticipants to defer to the judgments of a small deliberative elite. We offer a fresh perspective on this dilemma by recovering an unconventional and largely forgotten proposal: Karl Marx’s 1880 Workers’ Inquiry. We reconstruct Marx’s survey as a citizen-led, respondent-driven emancipatory experiment designed to bypass movement leaders and partisan organizers while prompting workers to reflect on, and reinterpret, their own conditions. Marx held that the act of completing the survey could itself trigger class consciousness by generating shared awareness, solidarity, and a sense of collective agency. Crucially, this transformation was not imposed from the outside but generated internally, through workers’ updated self-understandings. Adapting Marx, we theorize emancipatory experiments as survey-based interventions that both register existing attitudes and initiate processes of self-transformation at scale. We argue that such designs complement deliberative mini-publics rather than replace them, helping to address three persistent challenges: vanguardism among deliberators, weak reflexive uptake by nonparticipants, and the disconnection between deliberative agendas and grassroots political life. Marx’s survey, we conclude, offers a neglected design template for reconnecting deliberative democracy to mass self-emancipation—one that preserves commitments to objectivity while resisting the narrowing of democratic transformation to controlled deliberative enclaves.