Over about 15 years Fishkin has experimented with a process similar to Deliberation Day called \u201cDeliberative Polls\u201d or \u201cDeliberative Polling.\u201d This process brings together small groups of local citizens to deliberate about some local or state issue, followed by a poll among the participants regarding preference regarding the issue under discussion. For example, the Journal of Community Practice<\/em> (article by Francis J. Schwigert) reports on such an event in Minnesota in 2010 concerned with proposals for financing highway upgrading following the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis. In deliberative polling, the issues tend to be of this sort\u2014relatively local and specific. <\/p>\n Clearly, Deliberation Day would be much broader and more complex than the deliberative polling events\u2014by several orders of magnitude, one can argue. The \u201cD-Day\u201d would be national, involving potentially millions of participants, deliberating over several issues with national rather than local impact. <\/p>\n Concepts behind deliberative democracy go back to political and legal philosophies\u2014such as those of John Rawls and J\u00fcrgen Habermas. There is not space here to develop these philosophies except in a very cursory manner. Rawls\u2019 \u201cthought experiment\u201d for ethical organization of a state is based on an \u201cOriginal Position\u201d and a \u201cVeil of Ignorance.\u201d Under these conditions, participants debate the rules for an ideal state (the original position), but they are all ignorant concerning what their real-life statuses will be in this new state (the veil of ignorance). This is an idealized situation not intended to represent a real-life political discussion. Habermas, on the other hand, has proposed a system of decision-making for real-life issues involving argumentation among equally situated discussants whose goal is to reach agreement in a completely open yet structured way, an agreement mutually acceptable to all parties affected by the final decision. Participants must have completely free and equal access to the means of communicating with all other participants, and must have full knowledge, information, and training in presenting arguments. The closest to a real-life version of this sort of deliberation may have been the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in post-Apartheid South Africa and Rwanda after the 1994 massacres. <\/p>\n The general idea behind deliberative democracy goes back to the direct democracy as practiced in the assemblies of classical Greece over two thousand years ago, specifically the assembly in the city-state of Athens. The current form of this idea is best expressed by political sociologists, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Landemore and Hugo Mercier, in a 2012 publication, who described it this way: \u201cThe argumentative theory of reasoning defines reasoning as a specific cognitive mechanism that aims at finding and evaluating reasons, so that individuals can convince other people and evaluate their arguments.\u201d (The journal is An\u00e0lise Social<\/em>, Vol. 205, pages 910-934). It is believed that in the clash of arguments for and against a position, the truth, or at least the better conclusion, will emerge. This is the position upheld over a century before by John Stuart Mill in his short but famous book, On Liberty<\/em>. <\/p>\n How would Deliberation Day work in practice? There are many obvious difficulties that would have to be overcome, of course. There is the question of adding another national holiday. In his recent revisions of the proposal, Ackerman has suggested moving the current Presidents\u2019 Day holiday from February to the October date two weeks before the national election, to avoid adding another day for closing schools, banks, and state, federal, and local agencies, as well as businesses. The cost and organizational needs for setting up thousands of local citizen meetings, and finding enough moderators and party representatives for all those meetings represent other obstacles. <\/p>\n Critics of the proposed holiday have raised these kinds of practical questions. One could see, for example, the criticisms raised by Richard Posner, the highly respected judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and Senior Lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School. In the journal, Legal Affairs<\/em> of January \u2013 February 2004, Posner is skeptical about the benefits of Deliberation Day in view of the costs, including the indirect costs of lost productivity over the nation. He is also skeptical about the proponents\u2019 claim that undecided voters would be attracted to the event. Cass Sunstein, who was mentioned in the first CEPA blog, along with two colleagues in an article in the California Law Review<\/em> in 2007 reported on a study of an effort to run an actual Deliberation Day. Because of geographic factors, participants in the local group meetings in the study tended to be homogenous in their political leanings (conservatives and liberals tend to be respectively concentrated in certain towns and neighborhoods). As a result of the discussions, conservatives became more conservative and liberals became more liberal\u2014a result termed \u201cgroup polarization,\u201d similar to the well known phenomenon of \u201cGroupthink.\u201d Like-minded participants reinforce each other rather than broaden their perspectives. <\/p>\n CEPA intends to be concerned with public argumentation in all fields of endeavor, not just in politics. The ideas and proposals related to deliberative democracy and Deliberation Day may be germane to our concerns from time to time, however. It is therefore appropriate to have some familiarity with the concept. Readers are encouraged to follow up on the various sources noted in this entry for more information concerning this topic.<\/p>\n
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