Deliberative Polling: Changing the Tides of Democracy | Alice Siu | TEDxStanford

[Music] foreign I think all of us well most of us may think that to many democracies around the world are in crisis many of us are thinking what do we do about this thankfully our deliberative democracy lab has an answer now our lab is run by James fishkin he pioneered a method called deliberative polling and the leader of deliberative democracy we have been working around the world to answer a key question what would the people think under good conditions now you wonder what good conditions are we think of them our times where we can sit think talk learn from each other and we may all have an opportunity to do that so we think but in reality we actually don't and I will tell you why we have three problems facing us the first one rational ignorance in its name and itself we choose when we want to ignore something and when we want to pay attention to something and for many of us we have family we have friends we have kids we have school we have work we need to binge on Netflix we need to catch up on that reality show and so we rationally choose not to pay attention to the ballot propositions or what candidate is running for what office or what um judge needs to get elected and it's not because we don't care it's because we decide that there are more important things for us to do and from there our next problem Phantom opinions Phantom meaning something that doesn't really exist and the best example and the classic example of phantom opinions is a survey that was done in 1975 by George Bishop at the University of Cincinnati he did a survey on the 1975 public affairs Act a regular survey that any of you would May answer on the phone or online and he got people that agreed and disagreed with the ACT but the one curious point about this experiment was the ACT did not exist it was a fake act he did a face he did a survey and thousands of people responded to the survey to say they agreed or they disagreed with this act and what does this tell us this tells us that us as humans we are embarrassed to say well we don't know something and we are embarrassed to tell people that who are asking us on the phone whether you agree or disagree with something that they don't know and it is problematic because if you think about it many governments around the world rely on surveys that are done every single day and can you imagine all of the terrible policies that are getting enacted based on a survey that someone does and all of us here are just embarrassed to say that we don't know and that brings us to a third problem communication with those that are like us and this is not a problem per se because in Psychology years of research have told us that we just like to be around people like us but it becomes a problem when technology now has enabled us to only focus on what we like we've all heard about Echo Chambers we've heard about silos and you know these are buzzwords that we think about but it becomes problematic because years ago years and years some of you know many of us may not have been born yet there were only three television channels a few radio stations and every day at 6 PM we would all watch Ted Koppel or baller Walters or Walter and honkite read the Evening News to us and we know that the majority of the population will actually hear the same headlines every single day that means that the person standing next to me in the grocery store or the gas station will have heard the same thing or the likelihood is pretty high but now today as we stand next to someone at the convenience store we're pretty sure that we have no idea what that person's news feed has given them that morning and the unknown about what other people around us are paying attention to scares us and that is what is causing so many problems in our society about people wanting to talk to each other or willing to talk to each other and now enter our method of deliberative polling we use a sample of a microcosm of any population a country many countries together or a small City we bring them together to fill out a small survey about critical issues we're talking about they get sent briefing materials that are vetted by a wide spectrum of people and then they engage in small group discussions and plenary sessions with experts to get their questions answered and to think about their opinions and why and the reasons behind them then they fill out a post survey we get to compare what has changed before and after deliberation and I can tell you we've done this over 50 countries around the world 100 plus projects varying levels of government many of decisions were binding changing many lives and now as I deep dive into one example in particular for all of us today a U.S example from 2019 it's called America in one room the image you see actually is from a front page New York Times article where the spread was of 526 faces that he attended the American one room event in Dallas Texas we flew everyone across the country to Dallas Texas we paid for the hotel their transportation their food we flew in spouses and children if they asked us to and they gathered for four days to talk about five different topics immigration Health Care foreign policy climate and economy and they were in small groups talking to each other and understanding what each other's experiences were about and we had then Presidential candidates and policy experts help answer their questions in between and now what did this do we found that Republicans after actually softened their views on immigration and don't worry the Democrat slide is um some of the policy proposals that we asked people to talk about included whether we should have more visas for high and low-skilled workers whether we should actually Force undocumented immigrants to return home to their home country before getting their status determined what you see behind me is dramatic changes of opinion how does this happen it happened because they were in groups together and discussing what actually the reasons were behind what they thought they had time to think about it and discuss with each other and actually consider what other people were thinking on these issues these changes are shocking to us as the organizers we did not expect this at all but it just showed that if you give someone an opportunity to do and this have an opportunity to discuss they are able to change their minds and Democrats also changed their minds on policies that some would traditionally think are just stuck in that liberal mindset many people decided that Ubi baby Bonds were just not that supportive anymore afterwards so many of the discussions focused on Wow is this really implementable can we actually achieve what our goals are by having these types of policies people actually become more moderate in their mindset after deliberation and something that we all think about affective polarization we found that after deliberating in this deliberative poll together for four days Republicans actually view Democrats in a better light Democrats viewed Republicans in a better light they felt warmer to each other bear in mind they were not you know hugging and kissing afterwards but they came to like each other they came to realize that they're shared and lived experiences were not so different they each had family members that were struggling they each had family members that needed health care and those problems were really spanning across the aisle and we learned this in a podcast series that I did where I interviewed a series of participants from America in one room one 70 year old woman who lived in Texas all her life actually blamed or cited the event as the reason why she uprooted herself from Texas and moved to Cary North Carolina she said that after the event she could no longer sit still and no longer be around a place where she could not be curious and that she could not interact with others another interview I had was with a single mother mother of two she had not touched politics before she had no idea she was on Snap she was very low income and she said to me that her son turned 18. and she was actually able to carry on a conversation with her about who to vote for about what policies in their local community would be important to think about and she credits the event because it armed her it equipped her with the ability to have these conversations and she felt so proud and so engaged as a citizen that she was able to help her 18 year old son make these critical decisions as a new registered voter this and so many more examples one up here from Mongolia Mongolia actually is the first country to pass a law on deliberative polling um they require that at any time they want to make Constitutional Amendments that they have a national deliberative poll and they did so in 2017 they convened a representative the sample of the country together to discuss a number of possible amendments and parliament passed a handful of amendments in 2019. and in Texas in the 1990s when climate change was nowhere to be found in the headlines the public utilities commissions throughout the state carried on deliberative polls for their consumers and they asked the consumers what type of energy would they want because the Public Utility Commission to invest in as a result of this in the 90s Texas was among the last in wind power and now in the 2010s at the time Texas is the number one in wind power in the country and all credited to the series of deliberative polls that were done in Texas here in Bulgaria a number of deliberations were had but one particular was had about policies towards the Roma which is the Gypsies and a minority in the country there was a lot of discussion about whether and how Roma people would be integrated into Bulgarian Society one of the policies was to remove and close down Roma schools and integrate them into the broader society as that would be the best way to really bring people together the deliberation was tough it was hard there were so many stereotypes about Roma people but in the end the deliberation concluded that they should close down the Roma schools and integrate people to society the Prime Minister spoke at the event and indeed that was what was done and the last example here and on this very day South Korea is holding a deliberative poll nationally about how to reform their electoral system talking about whether to have closed party lists or open Party lists or single member districts versus multi-member districts and this is happening right now ahead of their 2024 elections and what we are doing now at our lab is trying to bring deliberation to scale I talk about all of these events they are microcosms they bring in a few hundred people at a time and what we want to do is to bring deliberation to society we've built a AI assistant deliberation platform with the crowdsourced Democracy team here in management science and engineering it allows for an unlimited amount of people to deliberate on the platform in small groups at the same time we are hoping that this will allow not only people to deliberate physically together but also online we've used this platform in 30 different countries in Over 20 Languages and it has enabled people in Peru to deliberate when they're in remote parts of the country enable many countries in Africa to use their mobile phones to deliberate while on their tuk-tuk and traveling to work this is something we are hoping will create a deliberative society when we all turn 18 or when we all became citizens no one actually told us what the Playbook was to become a good citizen we were just told that you know every so often you go and vote and that you would get some ballot guide in the mail but no one taught us how do you think critically about what to vote for and what not to how do you actually engage with people that disagree with you we are trying to provide a platform an opportunity for people to engage not just every so often but regularly and to allow people to build those skills that we so sorely need to have a deliberative society thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 3,803

Keywords: Democracy, English, Global Issues, Government, Grassroots, Research, Society, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:54670]

Id: 3CTJXS9WA1E

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023