Associate Professor

Dept. of Communication
University of Washington

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There are two problems in American politics. The first problem is that the public doesn't believe that the government represents its interests. The second problem is that they are right. When elected officials fail to represent the public's interests, government policies will not solve our most serious social problems. When the public loses trust in its elected officials, it becomes difficult for the government to govern, and citizens withdraw from the political process. By Popular Demand carefully examines these two problems and suggests how to address them.

One underlying difficulty is recording fully-informed and reasoned public judgments. Such views only develop after a period of deliberation among citizens themselves. Conventional opinion surveys can obscure or misrepresent public interests that emerge through face-to-face discussion of alternative perspectives and arguments. Even when deliberation does not shift the balance of public opinion, it can still change its weight. Statistical aggregation of individual policy preferences is not the same as coordinated collective action, and deliberation can sometimes create the strength of conviction and perception of shared interests that leads to group-based political engagement.

The basic purpose of democratic elections is to provide voters with a just such an opportunity for collective action. In reality, the average voter in a typical election has only scraps of low-quality information. The most powerful voting cue-candidate party affiliation-appears in only some general elections and no primary elections, and a declining number of voters identify with the two major political parties. Even when voters make decisions based on changes in the economy or other objective conditions, few have accurate understandings of the connections between those outcomes and specific political institutions, let alone individual elected officials.

Between elections, the American public expresses its political views through numerous associations and public meetings. A fully democratic public voice, however, must be representative, deliberative, policy-relevant, and influential. Current forms of pubic expression all lack one or more of these qualities. Town meetings, public hearings, talk radio, and other ad-hoc gatherings rarely bring together representative groups of citizens, and they seldom result in careful discussion. Carefully designed face-to-face discussions, such as the National Issues Forums and the 1996 National Issues Convention, often produce genuine deliberation, but they lack a powerful connection to the public's voting decisions.

By Popular Demand introduces a political reform that enables the public to discern its underlying interests, record its voice, and link this voice to collective voting choices. Government institutions could bring together randomly-selected panels of citizens to deliberate on candidates, ballot measures, and legislation. Each of the five proposed citizen panel designs follows a similar process: over four-to-five days, panelists meet with expert witnesses, deliberate among themselves, and reach judgments about candidates and issues. Afterward, election officials communicate the panel recommendations to voters through Internet sites, bulk-mailed voter guides, and information printed directly on ballots. If properly designed and implemented experimentally, these citizen panels could reach deliberative judgments, provide valuable information that voters would use, and, as a result, improve the quality of representation and restore public trust in government.