Deliberate This

For ten riveting minutes last Friday, CNN’s “Crossfire” dared to air a real debate, albeit by accident. “The Daily Show”’s Jon Stewart ambushed hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, charging them with “partisan hackery” and eviscerating them and the rest of the mainstream news media for abdicating their journalistic duties to the American public.

Stewart’s charges have real merit. The media is increasingly becoming a ready mouthpiece for the latest political talking points. This does the public discourse a disservice, lowering the bar for what passes as substantive debate.

But the real bad news is that the news media’s aversion to substance reflects not only their own superficiality, but ours as well. After all, if CNN thought that an in-depth exclusive on the Kerry healthcare plan would score big ratings, I’m sure they wouldn’t hesitate to oblige.

The deeper problem is that most Americans simply don’t have much reason to get informed about the issues. Since no one vote is ever decisive, we never have to pay any price for the decisions we make on Election Day. Despite the fact that this election has energized more Americans than any in recent memory, the sad truth is that when most voters troop to the polls on November 2 they will be pathetically ill informed.

In 2000, for example, Harvard’s own Shorenstein Center examined voters’ knowledge of then-governor Bush’s and Al Gore’s positions and found that on the average issue only 38 percent of respondents could accurately identify where the candidate stood, while 16 percent answered incorrectly and 46 percent admitted ignorance. Other studies have shown that 70 percent of Americans can’t even identify their senators or congressperson, let alone tell you how they stand on the issues. Voting a party line doesn’t seem to help either; when asked to identify the parties’ positions on key issues the American public fares worse than a random coin toss.

These are discouraging statistics. After all, democracy is not just a matter of majority rule. It is equally predicated on the principle of self-governance, the idea that we the citizenry can and should ultimately be calling the shots. But for all the rhetoric about patriotism in this country, too few citizens are equipped to engage in that single most basic act of self-governance—voting.

It’s all too easy to accept the status quo and cynically conclude that the American electorate just can’t do any better. But a recent book by Yale professor Bruce Ackerman and Stanford professor James Fishkin repudiates what conservatives like to call the soft bigotry of low expectations and proposes a radically innovative solution—a new national holiday they call Deliberation Day (which also happens to be the title of their book). Held two weeks before the presidential election, Deliberation Day would bring Americans together at thousands of sites across the country to discuss the key issues of the election. The day would be structured around moderated 15-person discussions and larger 500-person assemblies where experts would answer those questions raised in the small groups.

In their book, Ackerman and Fishkin marshal considerable evidence from past studies suggesting that introducing a national Deliberation Day along these lines may well produce powerful results. Fishkin, in particular, has long experience designing Deliberative Polls, which measure citizens’ knowledge of and opinions on key issues before and after they participate in a weekend of moderated deliberation. His research has shown that most participants not only demonstrate greater understanding of the issues after the weekend, but that that this increased knowledge leads a significant percentage, often between five and ten percent, to change their original opinions. If a Deliberation Day produced comparable shifts, the electoral significance could be huge. Ackerman and Fishkin even imagine a possible ripple effect scenario, in which the campaigns would ultimately be forced to rely less on sound bites and more on substantive policy proposals.

Deliberation Day may yet amount to just another ivory tower pipedream, but it’s already begun to generate considerable interest. Last Saturday PBS sponsored a trial run in 17 cities across the country. And tomorrow night the network will air a documentary special on the project.

But is it realistic to imagine that we might see Deliberation Day introduced on a national scale? Ackerman and Fishkin believe it is. Alongside all the democratic theory and hard political science, the authors are careful to address the practical nuts-and-bolts problems certain to bedevil any potential implementation of their idea. For example, the cost of staging a national Deliberation Day is carefully budgeted to include everything from the $150 honorariums doled out to incentivize participation, to the cost of providing free bussing for all citizens to the designated sites. Altogether, the authors estimate that pulling off a Deliberation Day with 50 million participants would cost less than $2 billion, or under $40 a head—hardly an unreasonable price to pay to help shore up our democracy.

When rhetoric and reality diverge as much as they do today, the public must have all its wits about it. Deliberation Day is no panacea. But it is a serious attempt to address an ever more serious problem. Democratic self-governance used to be thought an eccentric idea; perhaps it’s high time we began to think outside the box once again.

Sasha Post ’05 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.