When the People Speak, James S. Fishkin
Trilemma of deliberation, argues for Deliberative Polls of random samples.
Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck
History of choosing officials by lot; proposes a chamber drawn by lot alongside elected.
Against Democracy, Jason Brennan
Voters are mostly ignorant or partisan; democracy as practised is unjust; epistocracy.
The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan
Voters are biased; democracies give them the bad policies they want.
Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière
Democracy is the rule of anyone at all; why elites have always attacked it.
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
1830s America: equality, local associations, the tyranny of the majority.
The Shortest History of Democracy, John Keane
Three ages: assembly democracy, electoral democracy, today's "monitory democracy".
Digital Deliberation
What is deliberation, and why does it matter?
definition, the case for and against
How is it done in person?
citizens' assemblies, deliberative polls
What changes when it goes online?
benefits, what's difficult, Fishkin's trilemma
What tools exist?
Polis, Talk to the City, Stanford Online Deliberation Platform
What exists in the UK?
Involve, Shared Future, Sortition Foundation, House of the People
“The process by which individuals sincerely weigh the merits of competing arguments in discussions together.”Fishkin, When the People Speak, p. 33
quality rests on
information · balance · diversity · conscientiousness · equal consideration
a vote
a "raw" opinion
deliberation
a "refined" opinion that has considered competing arguments
a debate
each side tries to win
deliberation
people weigh arguments, are interested in a "synthesis", are open to changing their minds
Why it matters
Against deliberation
Against Democracy, Jason Brennan
- "Hobbits are mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics. Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics."
- Corruption: "High-status individuals talk more, are perceived as more accurate and credible, and have more influence, regardless of whether the high-status individuals actually know more." (Mendelberg, cited by Brennan)
The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan
- A single vote almost never decides an election, so a voter's error costs the voter very little.
Citizens' assemblies
50–150 people; stratified lottery
learn from experts and stakeholders
deliberate in facilitated small groups over several weekends
vote on recommendations; secret ballot
British Columbia in 2004: members spend a year on electoral reform; the proposal goes straight to a referendum, gets 58%, and fails (60% needed).
Ireland between 2016 and 2018: 99 members recommend changing the abortion law; the 2018 referendum passes it with 66%.
Climate Assembly UK in early 2020: 108 members over six weekends, commissioned by six parliamentary committees, run by Involve with the Sortition Foundation and mySociety; advisory only.
France's Citizens' Convention for Climate, between 2019 and 2020: 150 members make 149 proposals; Macron promises to pass them but only 24 are fully applied; promised referendum never happens.
Deliberative Polls
James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak
random representative group of a few hundred people
first questionnaire on issue (before)
balanced briefings, small moderated groups, questions to competing experts
second questionnaire on issue (after), same questions, answers confidential
Texas energy polls (1996–99): support for paying more for renewables rose from 52% to 84%; by 2007 Texas led the US in wind power.
First held in Britain, 1994, on crime (When the People Speak, p. 96).
More than 100 polls in over 50 countries. Since 2020 often online, with an automated moderator (Stanford Online Deliberation Platform).
Physical & Digital
| In physical spaces | Online | |
|---|---|---|
| Selection | stratified lottery (room mirrors population) | algorithmic lotteries (Flanigan et al., Nature 2021; used by the Sortition Foundation); proof of personhood |
| Information | balanced briefings; experts from competing sides | open briefings; recorded expert sessions |
| Facilitation | trained facilitation, equal turns | speaking queues; automated moderator (Stanford platform) |
| Synthesis | note-takers record each table; organisers draft, members vote on the recommendations | AI topic report linked to quotes (Talk to the City); group statement members critique and rank (Habermas Machine) |
| Time | learn, deliberate, decide, over several weekends | asynchrony: weeks of discussion, at any hour |
| Private judgement | confidential questionnaires (before/after for Deliberative Polls) | online questionnaires (anonymous to other participants) |
| Mandate | agreed upfront | Taiwan's Join: 5,000 signatures in 60 days; UK Parliament petitions: 10,000 signatures get a response, 100,000 are considered for debate |
Digital deliberation
Scale to millions, not just a few hundred
Join from anywhere
Join at your pace/time
AI: summaries, translation, moderation
Digital problems
Online polls tend to be SLOP: self-selected listener opinion polls.
Poorer, older, less educated people are less online.
In the online world, people tend to be trapped in echo chambers.
Bots, fake accounts, platform oligarchy.
Fishkin's trilemma
James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak, ch. 2, “The Trilemma of Democratic Reform”, p. 46
Attempts to realize any two will undermine the achievement of the third:
- Deliberation: people weigh arguments
- Political equality: every citizen's view counts the same
- Mass participation: bulk of the population
Polis
https://pol.is/
issue statement
people write short statements and vote agree, disagree, pass
groups people who vote alike, then highlights the statements that bridge the groups
People cannot reply to each other.
Open source, from The Computational Democracy Project.
vTaiwan, Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI, Demos in the UK.
vTaiwan
Proposal
Polis maps where people agree
stakeholders and officials discuss, livestreamed
Legislation
Started by g0v, after the 2014 Sunflower occupation of Taiwan's parliament.
At its peak: 28 issues, 80% led to legislative action, 200k users (~1% of Taiwan).
Tech regulation such as ride sharing (Uber), house sharing (Airbnb), equity crowdfunding.
Faded after COVID.
Successor: join.gov.tw (requires officials to respond once a proposal gets enough support).
Audrey Tang
- Left school at 14; ran a software company by 19; known for open-source work (Perl, Haskell)
- 2014: reverse mentor to minister Jaclyn Tsai after the Sunflower occupation
- 2016: Minister without Portfolio: open government, social innovation, youth participation. Taiwan's first transgender and non-binary minister
- 2020: COVID mask map showing live stock at about 6,000 pharmacies; “humour over rumour”: false claims answered with memes within hours
- 2022–24: first Minister of Digital Affairs
- Radical transparency: recordings or transcripts of official meetings published, free of copyright
- Open office hours: anyone could book a meeting with the minister, and those transcripts were published too
Good Enough Ancestor · 22 min
youtube.com/watch?v=idudNrLy8ek
join.gov.tw
- Taiwanese government's online participation platform.
- Anyone can post a policy proposal.
- With 5,000 signatures in 60 days, the relevant ministry must respond within about two months.
- Draft regulations are posted for public comment.
- A student's 2017 proposal to ban plastic straws passed the threshold; restrictions began in 2019.
Community Notes
Wojcik et al. 2022
volunteers write notes on posts on twitter.com
a note is shown only if raters who usually disagree both rate it helpful
Both Community Notes and Polis use matrix factorisation. Polis sorts people into opinion groups; Community Notes places each rater on a sliding scale (roughly politically left–right).
Began as Birdwatch in 2021 at Twitter. In 2025 Meta adopted X's algorithm to replace its US fact-checkers; TikTok launched Footnotes.
People who see a note are significantly less likely to reshare the post.
Over 90% of notes are never shown; most are shown after the post has already spread.
Decidim & CONSUL Democracy
Decidim
- Built by Barcelona City Council in 2016. The name is Catalan for "we decide".
- Proposals, participatory budgets, debates, surveys and assemblies.
- Used by Barcelona, the Catalan government, Helsinki, Zurich, Lucerne, the French Senate and National Assembly, and the EU's Conference on the Future of Europe.
- Since 2019 run by an independent association; no longer depends on Barcelona's politics.
- June 2026: agreement with New York City, the first local government outside Catalonia to formally partner with the project.
CONSUL Democracy
- Built by Madrid City Council for its "Decide Madrid" site in 2015.
- Anyone can make a proposal. If it gets support from 1% of residents over 16 (about 27,000 people), it goes to a city-wide vote.
- Participatory budgets: residents proposed and voted on how to spend up to €100 million a year.
- Used by over 100 institutions in 35 countries, including Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre.
- The left-wing city government that built it lost the 2019 election.
Stanford Online Deliberation Platform
https://stanforddeliberate.org/
video discussions, small groups of ten
AI moderation, speaking queue, 45 seconds per turn
each group works through an agenda of proposals with pros and cons
each group picks its two best questions for the experts
Nudges for people who haven't spoken.
Flags for uncivil language.
Instant transcripts.
Rated as high as or higher than human moderators.
Built by Fishkin's Deliberative Democracy Lab and Ashish Goel's Crowdsourced Democracy Team.
Talk to the City
https://talktothe.city/
takes a large set of comments: Polis statements, survey answers, interview transcripts
a language model pulls out the individual claims and groups them into topics and subtopics
produces an interactive report; every point links back to the original quotes
Summarises; does not try to reach agreement.
Built for the people running a consultation.
Every claim and topic is linked to the original comments it came from. Click a point in the summary and you see the exact words people wrote.
The Habermas Machine
Google DeepMind · Tessler et al., “AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation”, Science, 2024
each person in a small group writes their opinion on a policy question
the model drafts several group statements that try to capture the common ground
participants rank them; the top one is shown
participants write critiques; the model drafts a revised statement
Named after Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher of deliberation.
People preferred its statements to a human mediator's 56% of the time. Groups also moved closer together.
Participants were recruited in the UK, partly through the Sortition Foundation, including a small "virtual citizens' assembly".
Built for one study, the Science paper in 2024. DeepMind said it had no immediate plans to release it publicly.
UK organisations
Involve
Charity · since 2003 · involve.org.uk
Designs and runs citizens' assemblies and panels for government and Parliament. Example: Climate Assembly UK, 2020: 108 citizens over six weekends.
Shared Future
Community interest company · sharedfuturecic.org.uk
Local citizens' juries and assemblies, participatory budgeting. Example: Bude's community jury on rising sea levels: 34 citizens aged 16 to 86.
Sortition Foundation
Selection and campaigning · sortitionfoundation.org · 858.org.uk
Runs the lotteries that pick assembly members. The 858 Project: replace the House of Lords with a House of Citizens.
House of the People
Grassroots campaign · houseofthepeople.uk · timetoassemble.org
Local assemblies agree a five-issue Community Charter and pass it up to a national House. First sitting July 2025: almost 100 members chosen by lottery.
More things to consider
What makes a space good for deliberation? Public sphere, platform rules, stakeholders.
Schneider, Governable Spaces; Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Proof of personhood; selection algorithms
Mandates; response thresholds; bridging
Open-source substrate (code, data, models); legal substrate
How can we develop reliable, reproducible infrastructure for digital deliberation?
More books
Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, James S. Fishkin
Fishkin's newest: deliberation reduces polarisation; adds an AI-assisted moderator.
Open Democracy, Hélène Landemore
Argues that elections shut citizens out of power, proposes large assemblies chosen by lot.
Debating Democracy, Jason Brennan & Hélène Landemore
Brennan argues for less democracy, Landemore for more, each replying to the other.
Plurality, E. Glen Weyl & Audrey Tang
A case for technology that helps diverse people cooperate.
Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider
Online communities are run like small fiefdoms; how to design them democratically.
Democratic Innovations, Graham Smith
Compares assemblies, participatory budgeting, direct legislation.
Wiki Government, Beth Simone Noveck
How government can draw on citizens' expertise online, from her Peer to Patent project.
A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, Jürgen Habermas
Sequel to his 1962 classic: how digital platforms fragment public debate.