Luis Fraga moderates a discussion on the vulnerabilities in our political and electoral processes and correctives for them with eminent panelists James Fishkin, Martin Gilens, and Jane Mansbridge.
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Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. With the decline in civil discourse across party lines, the erosion of legislative norms, and the increasing distrust in our political institutions, democracy in the United States is in urgent need of repair. But what got us to this point? And what can we do to fix it? Today on Human Centered, we're bringing you another episode in the CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. This episode, which originally webcast November 19th, 2020, is titled Reforming Democratic Institutions and Practices, and it features panelists James Fishkin, the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, both at Stanford University. And he was also a CASBS Fellow in 1987-88 and again in 2001 and 2002. Martin Gilens, Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA and a 2015-2016 CASBS Fellow. And lastly, Janie Mansbridge, the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values Emerita at Harvard University and a CASBS Fellow in 1997-98 and again in 2001-2002. Moderating the conversation is Luis Fraga, the Reverend Donald P. McNeil Professor of Transformative Latino Leadership as well as the Joseph and Elizabeth Roby Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Fraga guides a discussion of the increasingly visible vulnerabilities in our political and electoral institutions. Together, the panel explores the current state of affairs and how we can reform local and federal institutions to help better inform citizens and expand both public trust and participation in our democracy.
Luis Fraga: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Luis Fraga. I'm a professor of political science and director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Good afternoon, or good evening, or good morning, depending on the part of the world that you're in. Welcome to the 10th episode of CASBS's webcast series entitled Social Science for a World In Crisis. I want to acknowledge the co-sponsors of this episode, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University and the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford. You've read the bios of our three panelists that are extensive, and the event promo provides links to their extended bios. So I'll quickly introduce them so we can jump into this very, very important discussion. First is Martin Gilens, Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare, and Chair of the Department of Public Policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. Welcome, Martin. Marty, if I may. Second is Jane Mansbridge, who is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Values emerita at Harvard. Welcome, Jenny. And third is James Fishkin, the James M. Peck Chair in International Communication and the Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford. Jim, welcome to our session today. I'm delighted to say that all four of us are former CASBS fellows, a lovely, lovely place to do work. And if you ever get invited please make sure and accept the invitation. As you know, today's conversation is on reforming democratic institutions and practices, an area on lots of people's minds well before the recent election, now during the election and its final certification, and certainly for the future of the United States. Here's how we'll proceed. Each of our panelists will I'll speak for about 5 to 7 minutes or so with some introductory comments, and then we will take your questions. I'll use the privilege of the chair and ask the first question, but then we want our attendees to send in questions through Zoom's question and answer feature. We ask that you keep your questions concise and on point. Given the expected volume of questions, we won't be able to answer all of them, but be assured that the panelists will read them after the event concludes. So let's begin. We're going to start with Marty Gilens. Marty?
Martin Gilens: Oh, thank you, Luis, and thank you to CASBS for organizing this event and for everyone who's joined us today to listen to it. I want to sort of briefly kind of give my take on a sort of bird's-eye view of the failures, failures, or maybe I should say a little more charitably, shortcomings of American democracy. And I also want to sort of outline a few of the reforms that I think could make our democracy more functional and more democratic. So I see two big problems at the heart of American politics. The first is polarization. Which leads to gridlock and means that very little gets done. Pressing problems simply aren't being addressed. And the second is the dominance of moneyed interests in our politics, the role of affluent individuals, the wealthy, as well as organized interest groups. And what that means is that what does get done tends to be strongly tilted towards the preferences and the interests of those who already have power and influence. And as a result of these two fundamental problems, the rich and corporations in the United States have thrived over the past, say, four decades or so, while at the same time the middle class and the poor have seen stagnant wages, increased healthcare costs, deteriorating public services, underfunded schools, and so on. And these failures, these sort of social problems and failures of government, not only impact people's lives in important ways, but they also sort of undermine trust in government, lead to cynicism towards politics, belief that government is the problem, and resulting support for disruptor sort of outsider type of candidates, like the one who's still clinging to power in the White House. All right, well, what can we do about these problems? Let me suggest— I'm just going to name some of the possible reforms, and we can talk about them in more detail later. The first thing that stems directly from the analysis is to make government more responsive to all of its citizens. And there's sort of three main categories of reforms that might help in that regard. The first, and arguably perhaps the most important, being campaign finance reforms. So reforms that can reduce the power of moneyed interests in shaping government policymaking. The second, which needs to accompany that, would be lobbying reforms. So reforms that can sort of slow the revolving door between Congress, lobbying organizations, unlink the activity of lobbying government policymakers from raising funds for their campaigns, which of course is another way of empowering the sort of moneyed interests in this country. And then finally, voting reforms. So ways to make voters more representative of all citizens by making voting easier, things like automatic registration, Election Day holidays, which, you know, most advanced democracies have. And adequately funding our election infrastructure to eliminate the long waits and what are very often very unequal waits to vote for minority voters. So make government more responsive and more sort of equally responsive to citizens is the first thing. The second thing, to reduce polarization. So any of the reforms that would make government more responsive to citizens would also have a tendency to reduce polarization since citizens are still considerably more centrist than the sort of activists who are engaged in politics or the— our elected representatives in Congress. Clearly, things we can do that make not only government in general but the parties more responsive to voters will help to pull them back toward the center and again away from sort of activists and interest groups that are associated with each of the parties. Another thing we can do is to make elections more competitive, which again will help to pull candidates and therefore officeholders toward the middle of the political spectrum. So things like eliminating gerrymandered one-party districts where candidates really only have to appeal to members of their own party, and even at that, to the sort of more extreme and activist members of that party who turn out in primary elections. And that leads to a sort of third reform that could help to reduce polarization, which is voting reform, so the way we sort of organize our electoral system. And in recent work that I've done with Ben Page, We advocate abolishing primaries altogether and instead moving to ranked-choice voting in general elections, even in multi-party— sorry, multi-candidate districts, which may also turn out to be multi-party with the ranked-choice voting system. And that, again, would be a mechanism that would force candidates to appeal to sort of the broad range of constituents in their area rather than only members of their party. And finally, while I tend to sort of shy away from anything that sort of seems partisan in my recommendations, I do think that we have to address another sort of failure in American democracy, and that is that we have a system which is currently tilted fairly strongly and significantly toward the Republican Party. So the 47 Democratic senators now represent about 15 million more Americans than the 53 Republican senators. And of course, the Senate has long been tilted toward smaller states and more rural states. Typically, Democrats get a larger percentage of votes in the U.S. House than they do seats in the House. And of course, we've seen how the Electoral College has handed the sort of loser of the popular vote the White House in 2 of the last 6 elections, in both cases Republican candidates. These are not easy things to reform, but they can be done. We can expand the Senate by admitting Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. We can sort of make an end run around the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Compact. By reducing partisan gerrymandering, we can bring representation in the House of Representatives more in line with the actual votes across the country for the people who serve in that body. So again, just kind of sketching out sort of a range of possibilities, but clearly Our government as it's sort of structured today is not working well for the majority of Americans. And I think we're seeing some very serious consequences of those shortcomings, which I look forward to discussing more shortly. Thank you.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Marty, for that wonderful beginning. Our next panelist is Jenny Mansbridge, who will speak to us. Jenny?
Jane Mansbridge: Well, I agree with Marty both on the goals that he proposes and on the means. But I think they're going to need a social movement to bring them about. Today I want to talk a little bit more about polarization because today polarization in our country today results from two deep structural causes that are not going to go away soon. First, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1984, he set off, of course, an exodus of white, southern white conservatives from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. Making the Republican Party far more right-wing and both parties more homogeneous. And those parties now are in separate and almost not overlapping camps. And second, and this is less well known, that era that we look back on as the era of bipartisanship was actually a period of Democratic Party dominance. I've got a graph from Francis Lee's I hope I can do this. I hope I can do it. I didn't want to try to get slides and so forth, but this is Frances Lee's— there we go— a graph from Frances Lee's wonderful book, Insecure Majorities, and it shows— do I have it right? It looks backwards. I think it's a mirror. Something's going on with my video so that it's coming out wrong. But at any rate, this is the old days back here. That's when the Democrats were in power. And you can see over 48 years, and this is the Senate, the Democrats got in power only one time, 48 years. The rest, they were dominant. And then in 1980, it suddenly becomes much more competitive. Up, down, up, down, up, down, knife-edge, knife-edge competition. So, the incentives change. Back when the Democratic Party was dominant, members of the minority party had incentives to make nice or they wouldn't get their rivers, their harbors, all their— the things they needed for their constituents. But— and the Democratic Party itself was divided, so the liberals in the Democratic Party needed to ally with liberals in the Republican Party. The conservatives in the Democratic Party needed to ally with the conservatives in the Republican Party. And that's how things got done. But come 1980, when it became more, much more competitive, the incentives changed. And when those incentives changed, that meant that it was to the interest of each of the parties to destroy the other party, destroy the character of their candidates, say that the nation was doomed. Party came to power because you had to get in power. That was incredibly important. And so we see that right now in Georgia. We've got a knife-edge competition going on. So when the stakes get that high, the knives come out. And as the parties change, so did the affections and sentiments of the citizens. So in 1960, only 4% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans would have been unhappy if their children married into the opposite party. But by now some 40 to 60% of Republicans and Democrats would be unhappy if their child married someone in the opposite party. So that's the new normal, and it's exacerbated by social media. What can we do about it? Not a lot, I'm afraid, but I— we can try, and I'm going to suggest quickly 3 ideas. First, we can use the citizens themselves, bring them together to deliberate Jim will talk about that in a moment. Secondly, we can find ways of trying to connect the representatives with their constituents and administrators with citizens in a way that's much more responsive, mutually responsive, than we've got so far. And I call this recursive communication. The ideal is recursive communication, not two-way communication where I just say something to you and you say something back to me, but Iterated over and over, back and forth communication where I learn from you and I come back and you learn from me and I come back. Now Michael Nepplow and his colleagues have got a— been trying a way of doing this where they bring together 175 constituents drawn randomly, bring them to the internet, have them talk with their representatives for an hour on an important subject like, say, immigration. And the representative learns and listens, the constituents learn and listen, the constituents love it, they learn They become more politically active. And if the representatives were actually to do that, the Congress and the House, twice a week for 6 years, they could cover a quarter of their constituents. So that would be a real recursive process. Each of us would have a chance at that. Now, the third thing I want to talk about is the possibility of teaching negotiation to our legislators. And our, on the legislative staff. 40 years of study shows that you can learn how to do negotiation well, produce agreements that will get, be more stable because they'll have, they'll better meet the needs of the people underneath. And what are the two principles behind good negotiation? First, try to find the interests behind the positions. Someone comes to you with a demand, find out why they want it, ask questions, listen hard. And maybe you can come up, once you understand what they really want, maybe you can come up with a possibility, a counter proposal that meets their needs at less cost than what you, what they've been demanding. So that's the first one, try to get the interest behind the positions. And the second is just bring more issues onto the table so that you can trade things that are high priority for you, but low priority for me. Get a whole package of things like that, and then you can go forward. So this kind of learning really does produce better negotiation. And what we've done is to actually institute a program in Congress and in the states, but hosted by the Library of Congress, where faculty and materials from the Kennedy School are being put forward by American University. And staff at the— in the legislative staff are taking this, 150 people so far. Wildly popular, both sides of the aisle, both members of Congress and the staff. And the reason it's popular is because people think they're learning from it. They're learning how to do this better. So that's another thing that we can do. These are just 3 things off the top of my head. I think we— not off the top of my head, out of my learning. But I think we can use our imaginations to try to fight this stuff that's structural. It's underneath. We can't wish it away. We're going to be living with polarization for long time. Thank you.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Jenny, very, very much. Jim?
James Fishkin: Well, I'm delighted to be here virtually back at the Center. The Center is the place where I thought of the idea which back in 1988 hit me like a thunderbolt, and I've been electrified by it ever since, and everything I've done has been connected to it since. And indeed, I want to thank Jenny and Luis who both helped me on the— with the— through the advisory group of one of our latest projects, America in One Room, which I want to talk about. But first, let me say something about the basic idea. It's so simple, I'm almost embarrassed, but the problem is so fundamental that we often overlook it. What is the problem? Democracy, in my view, is supposed to have— make some connection between the will of the people and what's actually done. But we strangle the will of the people through propaganda, manipulation, campaign advertising, disinformation. It's all been made worse through social media, one-sided argumentation. The people don't really get to think and form the will of the people. They just have impressions of sound bites and headlines. Sometimes for the inattentive, they're non-attitudes or phantom opinions, but sometimes they're just tuning into their side of the argument, whether it's from MSNBC or Fox News or whatever the news source is, and they may not hear the other side. So, it's very hard to transform public opinion as a whole, but you can find out what the people— and here's the unusual aspect of my question— what would the people think under good conditions for thinking about an issue? Now, that might sound sort of airy-fairy and utopian, but in fact, it leads to a practical research program. If you get a particular set of issues together, you prepare the people with balanced materials, you recruit good samples, and you allow them to deliberate. And we've developed a program which I call deliberative polling, which has been applied 110 times in 30 countries and has solved problems around the world as an input to policy. Now, the most recent iteration of this we called America in One Room, where NORC from the university— at the University of Chicago recruited an excellent random sample of 530, 526 people who came to a big hotel near Dallas, Texas in September before— on the eve of the primary season, and they deliberated in depth and under the supervision of the advisory group, two of whose distinguished members you see before you, about the trade-offs in five big issues, including immigration, healthcare, the economy and taxes, foreign policy. I mean, a really broad set of issues, 49 policy proposals. And we inadvertently discovered something about polarization. Which is now my current preoccupation as well, because when the people deliberated together, on the 49 policy proposals, we identified— this is 4 days of deliberation, and we had a control group from NORC. On the 4 days of— on the 49 policy proposals, we decided 26 represented extreme partisan polarization, where the Republicans were on one side, the Democrats were on the other, 15% of each sample— of each took the most extreme possible positions, and you would think those opinions were intractable. Well, in fact, the— there were massive changes of opinions. For example, Republicans who wanted to send all the undocumented immigrants back to their home countries, 80% wanted that before deliberation, only 40% afterwards. Democrats also changed as much as 40 points. There were lots of changes like that. Democrats also changed as much as 40 points on the most expensive progressive proposals. And, for example, Cory Booker's baby bonds was supported by 60% before deliberation, only 20% after deliberation. Well, we got these big changes of opinion. On these highly partisan proposals because people opened up and they were considering both sides of the argument. They were considering the reasons. They weren't just being triggered by the talk shows and they were thinking in depth. We actually went back to this sample at the election time and the New York Times, by the way, did us a favor. They published the photos of all 526 or so at the time. And they also published these results which showed these massive changes of opinion. And then when we went back just before the election, we discovered— to the treatment group and the control group— we discovered that the deliberators paid a lot more attention to the campaign than the control group. They thought the COVID policy was a much bigger failure than did the control group. Both in terms of its public health and its economic effects. And while the control group, the NORC control group, had the gap between Biden and Trump almost about right, only about 3.5 points they had in the control group, in the treatment group, it was 39% for Trump and 59% for Biden. And we're now, we're analyzing in every way possible How could such a big effect— now, that's not meant to be predictive. This was a what-if. This was an experiment. And it may be that the unique situation with the COVID crisis led to more changes of opinion than you would under any other circumstance. Nevertheless, it showed that we think we sensitized these people to become much more active observers and participants in the public dialogue and the campaign. We created more engaged citizens. And a lot of the movement was from independents. You know, there's a myth about the— you know, all of the literature about the myth of the independent voter. Well, the independent voter actually came to life in this case. That is, and of course, the partisans also, there was some change among them, but among the independents, they actually came to life and they thought the country was in crisis, something needed to be done about it, and this this was their change in opinion. Well, we're now engaged in opportunities to spread the deliberative process. We've got experiments in the schools and with young people and with civic groups. We've even got an automated moderator that will spread the deliberation to large numbers. And we're planning to employ that in Canada this year and in Chile. And then in the United States. And we're going to be coordinating further iterations of America in One Room. In fact, one of the topics we're working with Jenny's Harvard colleague Larry Lessig on an Electoral College series of deliberations. But we're also planning to work on reconvening America in One Room as a kind of continuing deliberative panel And we think we can raise the money for that, refreshing it, having it meet on Zoom online, and continuing phasing people out, phasing people in, so that we can get the deliberative views, the considered judgments of the public, and make it an input into policy. We made it an input into policy in Mongolia. It's required by law before you can change the constitution. We've now changed the constitution. In Bulgaria, we used it on desegregating the Roma-only schools. They're now desegregated. In Texas, we used it to bring wind power to Texas, where now Texas is the leading state in wind power when it was last among the 50 states when we started. It can be an input to policy. And so, it's potentially a route to a kind of advisory democratic reform playing a role in the policy process. And so I think that if we can succeed in that, we can bring public will formation to democracy. And without a public will, democracy is in trouble. After all, you could end up with technocrats replacing democracy or autocrats replacing democracy unless you can show that you can solve the people's problems And the best way to solve the people's problems is to make some connection between what's done and what they really want when they think about it, because then you can invoke those thoughts. So that's what I have to say. Thank you.
Luis Fraga: Thank you very much, Jim, and thank you to all three of you for providing us such, I would say, provocative ideas that push us to think in ways that we're not usually accustomed to thinking. I have a question to pose to all three of you, and then we have at least two questions from our attendees. I encourage all of our attendees to submit a question through the question and answer function on Zoom. My question is as follows: Well appreciate, well understand all of your comments regarding the challenges to institutions and practices of American democracy. Very much appreciate your comments regarding the dysfunctional aspects of current structures and practices of American democracy. Reconcile that for me with the fact that in our most recent presidential election, we had a demonstration of faith in American institutions as indicated by extremely high levels of voter participation. We had a level of voter participation that some are describing as not seen since 1864. We had it both on the left and on the right, or at least Democratic supporters and Republican supporters. So, in a sense, the public is saying through the electoral process, we believe in these institutions, or we believe in the importance and value of the vote. Help me reconcile that with the fact that we have all of these challenges existing, which are real, in our institutions and practices of government.
Martin Gilens: Well, let me start by saying that I do think that the success of this recent election, both in terms of turnout and also in terms of the mechanics of enabling that to happen in such a smooth way under such challenging circumstances, is very important and a huge testament to, I guess, the robustness of at least our electoral institutions, if not our democracy more broadly. But let me offer you a somewhat less sanguine interpretation. So, you know, one thing is that people turn out to vote not only because they— or maybe not even as much because they have someone that they, you know, believe will make their lives better on the ballot, but because there's someone on the ballot who they think will make their lives worse. And so, you know, that sort of negative appeal is a strong impetus. To turn out. And I think that's not all of what happened in this election, but it's certainly some substantial part of it. And of course, the enormous amounts of money that are spent on elections have, you know, are increasingly aimed at getting, you know, one's base to turn out precisely because we do have such a polarized political system and there's so few people who are kind of up for grabs, if you will, at least using the kind of techniques that campaigns have used on that sort of large scale. And so, you know, this election at least doubled the amount of money that was spent in any previous election. I mean, it's just like off the charts. So I do think part of the reason for this robust turnout was that the stakes were high, people understood that, and that the elites who still are the largest funders, even with the growth of sort of small donor democracy and, you know, the internet and so on, still those like small donations are swamped by what millionaires and billionaires spent in this last election. And so, you know, so they also saw the stakes and poured money into it. So there's a bright side, but there's also a dark side to what we just saw a few weeks ago.
Jane Mansbridge: Yeah, I agree. I think that the question of why you vote is extremely important. And if you're driven by fear, if there's fearmongering, whipping up people frightened running to the polls because, oh my God, the world will come to an end if, you know, our side doesn't win. That's not necessarily healthy. I would be much more for something like Australia has a small fine for not voting, and it means that everybody votes. And that means that everybody talks about voting and everybody expects their neighbors to vote. And I think that's a fairly good system that brings out a great turnout, but they don't do it by fear. Right.
Luis Fraga: Jim?
James Fishkin: I agree. Participation is a key democratic value, but it's not the only democratic value. We need political equality, and in my view, we need deliberation, and we also need, going back to the founders' concerns, some protection against tyranny of the majority. So those are the four democratic values fundamental, and wrestling with how you get all four is something that I've written quite a lot about, But I think that that's the challenge in actual democratic institutions. And I think that if we go just to maximizing participation, we maximize mobilization. And mobilization without people understanding and thinking about how they're casting their vote is not a democracy that prizes public will formation. We need the right combination of these values. But I certainly was happy to see the turnout, and I'm filled with admiration for the people who worked on making the election work, risking COVID and the rest. And I'm glad that the efforts to subvert the vote counting process and the potential interfering with the voting machines and the rest. None of that happened. And so a successful election is good, necessary, but not sufficient for what we should be aiming for. And what we need to regain the public's trust and legitimacy in the democratic process— democracy is in low regard all over the world because it seems to produce deadlock and conflict And you know, I've even— we've even tried deliberative polling at the local level in China successfully. And so I see when I go to China, not recently though, when I go to China, I see them thinking, well, we can apply a scientific method to find out what the people want. But what we— and I say, you really need democracy. And they say, well, I'm not so sure we need your kind of democracy. And I said, yes, you do. And I managed to say that and not get into trouble, but I've always said it.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Jim, Jenny, and Marty. We have a question from one of our attendees. Is critical thinking disappearing to the point that misinformation has a very hard time being detected? And what can we do to encourage people to be more engaged in an informed way?
James Fishkin: I think critical thinking has to be fostered, but it needs a social context to really thrive, which is why we try— we're trying to put deliberative democracy efforts in the schools and in civic groups. It's a lot harder to think critically by yourself because if you're just examining yourself, you may not really be exposed to the competing arguments and thoughts. So we need to provide more and more social context where people will, in a mutually respectful way, learn to listen to each other. So that leads to education reforms, reforms of civic life, and it's very complex in a world of social media, but I think we need— we need experimentation with that. We're trying to do our part, but there should be a vast effort in that way. We can't just expect people to sit at home and be critical thinkers without a social context.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Jim. Let me pose another question from our attend— one of our attendees. This is for Marty. For the ideas you mentioned for spending more money on education and infrastructure, how realistic is it for those ideas to be implemented in conservative states like my home state of Texas? And Texas is actually my home state. It's where I was born and raised. In those states, residents see the goal of government as— many of those residents— as emphasizing less taxes. There's no state income tax, for example, and less regulations with minimal government interference.
Martin Gilens: I mean, clearly that's going to be a challenge, but as we saw even in this election, you know, places like Texas are sort of tending blue, and presumably that does reflect sort of liberalization of attitudes towards government. But I would say whether it's in Texas or elsewhere that the sort of more fundamental issue is that citizens have lost trust in our government, right? That the notion that like government's going to be something that improves their lives rather than just imposes regulations or taxes them has been something that the Republican Party, of course, has sort of promoted that view for decades. But the Democratic Party has bought into it as well. And so Clinton arguing the era of big government is over. And even Obama saying not that long ago that he's not a— what did he say? Something like not a crazy big government liberal. So I think, you know, this current of, you know, government can't be looked to to solve our problems. It's only going to increase problems. And if that's the case, then of course, the less government, the better, and the lower taxes, and let people do it on their own. But that certainly wasn't always the case. You know, in the '50s and '60s, I think people, you know, viewed government as a positive influence across a wide range of areas. And even still today, things like education— I mean, I'd be shocked if the vast majority of citizens of Texas don't think that we should be— that they should be spending more money on public education. But it's not just education. There's lots of areas like that. So I do think there's an issue with citizen views. But then there's also a question of translating where there is support for greater government engagement into actual policy that reflects those kinds of unequal influence that I was describing earlier.
Jane Mansbridge: I think also our own profession of political science is somewhat at fault because we focus very, very much on legislatures and not very much on administrations. There used to be a whole— it still is to some degree— a whole profession of people interested in public administration, but political scientists don't pay very much attention to that, and there aren't lots and lots of really creative ideas of how we can make government in the sense of the kind of government citizens experience in their, whenever they go to a government office, how we can make that kind of government really responsive to citizens and unwasteful and so forth. And I think there are many, many things we can do, but we're not thinking very creatively about that. Somehow administration seems very boring and politics seems really exciting. And so we're not thinking about the way that government actually interacts with citizens. So what I was talking about when I talked about recursive communication, listening on both parts, I think that administrators, we can figure out lots of ways in which administrations respond much better to how citizens are experiencing the laws that affect them.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Jenny. Jim and Jenny, another question from an attendee. On the issue of polarization, to what degree does social media contribute to it? One of you already referred to that. And what are your thoughts on partisan alternative platforms such as Parler as an alternative to Twitter? Can we get an America in One Room type social media alternative? That's an idea for you, Jim, to get the funding for that and establish it and become extremely wealthy as a result.
James Fishkin: Well, I don't want to become extremely wealthy, but we are actually partnering with Snapchat, who have done, commissioned at their expense, not our expense, an Academy Award-winning team of documentary makers who've done 8 short documentaries, which you can see on our website or join Snapchat and see that, called America in One Room. And they're just extraordinary. And that's our effort to reach the next generation with the idea of deliberative democracy. And Alice, who I work with, just wrote me today about kids in New York who saw the Snapchat and organized a deliberation in their school. And she's been helping them, but it's sort of spreading spontaneously. Anyway, they're very talented documentary makers, and I would I urge you to see that. So, but we think that just scratches the surface. Social media could be used constructively, but right now it's just, it's so much, it's used to facilitate communication among the like-minded without any filtering. The filter bubbles don't have any further editorial filtering and people just share whatever instant rumor or thought they have. and that is not conducive to deliberation, but in its current form, I think.
Jane Mansbridge: Also, Facebook could find ways of convening deliberative assemblies of citizens on Facebook. We've got a couple of citizens— students at the Kennedy School right now who are trying to work out how that could happen. And they could do the kind of thing that Michael Neblo is doing, facilitating groups of citizens on Facebook talking with their their representatives. So there's quite a lot that can be done in that regard.
Martin Gilens: I would add to that, that while the sort of polarizing nature of social media is clearly problematic, that that's not the source of our political polarization in this country. And it's very clear that partisan polarization is something that was elite-led and still is mostly something that occurs at the elite level. So if you look at, say, the members of Congress, you can see there's been like a hollowing out of the center. And we've— there's just, you know, two big humps of conservatives and liberals with virtually no overlap. But if you look at the population of American citizens, it looks the opposite. Most people are still piled up in the middle with, you know, small peoples at both extremes. So, so while fixing social media is is incredibly valuable, but that's not the origin of the problem, and we're going to have to address it in other ways as well.
Luis Fraga: Thank you very much, all three of you. A question for any one of you. Do you think delegating certain political issues that do not require economies of scale down to the states would be a useful way of addressing the sense that one side must win? It seems to me that addressing contentious issues at lower levels of government allows for more diversity of political approaches in a way that might lower the temperature a bit.
Jane Mansbridge: I completely agree. And I, and I think even in regard to masks, where many of my friends are terribly upset about what happens in other states, that if we'd had a federal mask order back in March, there would have been huge negative reaction across the country for that. So I think awful as some of the results have been, they would have been even more awful if we hadn't had states taking more of a role. Now I would go even further to go within the states to letting certain, you know, counties make certain kinds of decisions and perhaps decisions about Hunting, if everybody agrees, and this is the thing about negotiation, you know, if you can agree on the principle, like let's say we want the fish to reproduce, well, different people could come up with different ways within different areas of allowing the fish to reproduce. It doesn't have to be exactly the same mechanism across the board. So, I guess I think that decentralization is a mechanism for reducing tension.
Luis Fraga: Marty or Jim?
James Fishkin: El Paso is facing a terrible public health crisis. The judge, who is the chief administrator— judge is used in another way in Texas— doesn't have the power to impose a mask mandate, even though he's got mobile morgues piling up. I mean, so in that way, a statewide mandate a statewide prohibition against local decisions has been terribly destructive. And I think if, you know, Dallas or Austin were experiencing the same crisis that El Paso is, they would have reacted differently. I mean, it's really, really frightening.
Luis Fraga: Another question that is described as a provocative question. One that requires all of us to think outside the box. Leo Strauss wrote that modern political science fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns. The panelists' suggestions all sound like fiddling to me. How do we change the system in fundamental ways. Marty?
Martin Gilens: Well, I guess I'd say first that not insignificant number of political scientists would probably agree today with at least the thrust of that critique. And in fact, there's been a movement within the discipline over the last couple of decades now, I guess, toward a more sort of engaged and bigger picture kind of social science. And I think that all of the people on the Zoom today are part of that engagement with big pictures and important issues. And so that'd be the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is that I think political scientists or not, people are aware that, like, Rome is burning, so to speak. There's widespread agreement that democracies across the world and certainly in the US are not working well. And then as far as, you know, fiddling goes, well, I guess one way you could put it is, you know, if American politics is an orchestra, then it's composed of like lots of different musicians. And, you know, if the fiddler is out of tune, we need to address the fiddler. And we maybe we also need to address address, you know, the timpani player who's like not in, you know, in tune, in time with everybody else. But it's not like there's going to be one solution that we can say, you know, this is what we need that will fix all of our problems. So in some sense, I think it's just realistic to think that we need to address lots of different issues. We need to address people's, you know, levels of understanding and engagement and information, and we need to address how those views and preferences get translated or not into government policy and so on. So yeah, it'd be great if there was like one, you know, mechanism that could solve it all.
Jane Mansbridge: Yeah, but there is one. There is one big, big thing, and that's the inequality. And when Leo Strauss wrote those words, there wasn't anything like the kind of inequality we've seen. This huge surge in inequality in the United States And Marty's proposals for getting money out of politics and so forth go directly to that issue of inequality. And I think that is a Rome— that's part of Rome burning. And I think that's a very big solution to it, or a way of attacking it.
Luis Fraga: Great. Question for Jim and perhaps for Jenny. Deliberation appears to be an incredible mechanism to resolve some kinds of polarization. But it appears so hard to instigate deliberation on a large scale, in part due to the design of platforms we use to communicate at scale, such as Twitter. How might we invite more deliberation across political boundaries at scale?
James Fishkin: Well, I referred to— I mean, it's a big challenge, but I referred to our development with Stanford Engineers and Ashish Goel in Management Science and Engineering developing this platform which we're now starting to use online. I call it the automated moderator, but we're looking for a sexier name for it. It actually has my collaborator Alice Hsu's voice, so I call it Alice, but she doesn't know whether we should call it Alice, but it facilitates a small group discussion on— and enforces civility, access to the microphone in the queue, and it has the group develop a key question or concern which can then— so she's been using it around the world and it works great. We just used it last week in Stanford. We're using it, but we used it in Tokyo. We used it in Hong Kong recently. We're now going to use it in both Canada nationally and in— for groups around the country who will feed in comments on the agenda for— it's sort of a deliberative crowdsourcing process. And then we're going to do a national deliberation. We're putting it in the schools. We're using it with the Close Up Foundation to get it into the schools. So we're hoping to spread the deliberative experience and the deliberative process. And when we tried it last week with Stanford students who first had human moderators who were these incredibly talented teaching fellows, and then they had the automated moderator for the second round. The evaluations came back, I was just looking at them. The automated moderator did just as well as the teaching fellows, and I'm telling you Stanford has fantastic teaching fellows. So, you know, we think we could spread this and scale it. And we've got algorithms to recruit the people via social media. We would like to, in the Chilean project, which is sponsored by the Senate and sponsored by CNN, and in fact several other television networks, which will happen in the spring, our spring, there will be a national deliberation about pensions and healthcare and some of the constitutional inputs, and we're planning to then spread it to the broader Chilean population with this because it works as well in Spanish as it does in English, just as it works in Japanese. So we will be— we're experimenting with how to spread it. And of course, if we're experimenting with it, there will be plenty of others experimenting. Jenny mentioned her students there who probably will. So I think that we should use technology constructively in that way.
Luis Fraga: Janet?
Jane Mansbridge: Yeah, and don't forget the multiplicative effects. I mentioned that if you were to do the Michael Neblo thing with the representatives talking with constituents, just giving 2 hours a week, that after 6 years, a quarter of the constituents would have been engaged. Well, that means that over time, large numbers of people would have been engaged, and that has multiplicative effects. It isn't just the effect on that one constituent. That one constituent talks to, in the work they've done, at least one and a half other— I don't know what the half looked like, but one and a half other people. And then those people talk to one another. And of course, if you really had this kind of thing going where you could expect to— your parents expect to, your friends expect to interact with your representative, that then the schools would teach, how do you do that? Let's have some mock deliberations. And it wouldn't just be a little sort of fancy exercise. It would be because, you know, because your friends and your parents' friends and so forth, they have had these conversations with their members of Congress. So you would— so there's this multiplicative effect in which the more people deliberate, the more they deliberate with their friends.
Luis Fraga: Great. A question that had been submitted earlier: so much of the political divide seems settled along the lines of, in the United States, of rural communities on one side and urban-suburban on the other. What types of bridges can be strengthened or built to improve understanding and build commonalities between these two subsections of Americans?
Martin Gilens: Yeah, I think that's a really important observation. And I think it ties into what Jenny was just mentioning earlier about inequality. That, you know, the strength of that divide rests at least in some substantial measure and the fact that rural communities are doing so poorly in this country. And, you know, jobs are scarce and populations are declining, whereas the urban areas is where all of the economic growth has been occurring. And so, yeah, I think it's going to take not just sort of a social or cultural bridging, but an economic— you know, there's fundamental reasons kind of behind those divergent understandings of, you know, of government and policy and indeed of the world.
Luis Fraga: Jenny or Jim?
Jane Mansbridge: Yeah, I think that place-based investments are incredibly important. Until fairly recently, almost all place-based investments have been tax incentive driven so that you try to bring a company who's located in a place over to B place, which is a sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul. What you can— could do is you could, for example, invest in schools and you could invest in health clinics and so forth in rural areas in a place-based way. So again, it would have these multiplicative effects. If you began to create health clinics and community colleges in rural areas, companies would want to move there. Their students would— the people would be more educated, the people would be able to have to look at to go elsewhere, but also to stay put and find good jobs. So I think that we need to think more strongly about place-based investments.
Martin Gilens: Wonderful.
Luis Fraga: Jim, any comment?
James Fishkin: Well, I think that dialogue across geographical divides is very important for mutual understanding. And it's quite possible And so if you just look at those pictures of the people in America in One Room, you know, they represent the diversity of America and they actually talk to each other. And I think that they found that they have a lot more in common than they could ever have imagined. And I think that the deliberation— we're in an era, in a Zoom era now. We're thinking that our next project might even be called America in One Zoom. But, you know, so we get everybody across it. In this era, geography is less important. People can work together within reasonable adaptation of time zones. People can work together across great geographical barriers. We may find that the habits of America have changed so that geography becomes less important. We can get collaborative teams where people are living most anywhere, as long as they have a house, a roof over their heads, which— and they— so, I mean, right now we have to get through the COVID crisis and the economic crisis, but we don't really know the patterns of life that are going to emerge when we get out of this. And maybe geography will be less important, and if land and, you know, housing and the rest— I mean, I live in the Bay Area, on the Stanford campus. Obviously, housing, the costs of housing are a great barrier to anybody doing anything here. But people in Montana or someplace like that, the housing is very inexpensive. So, startups can thrive in a lot of places. There could be a lot of economic entrepreneurship. That could be democratized geographically in our future.
Luis Fraga: Thank you. Another question from an attendee: I'm increasingly convinced that the United States would benefit from an exchange program for youth to get to live with a family in a different U.S. community for a semester or two. I'm thinking of something that's analogous to what the American Field Service started after World War II. To build connections between American and German youth. But if I understand this question correctly, it refers to distinct communities within the United States. Thoughts, comments, reactions?
Jane Mansbridge: Great idea. Mm-hmm.
James Fishkin: I like it too.
Martin Gilens: Yeah, I love it. I do worry a bit that, you know, those people who would be upset if their child married a person of, you know, from a different party, might also not be willing to let their child spend time in the home of someone who might have different political views. But hopefully there's enough people who don't fall in that category that a program like that could work.
Luis Fraga: A question that was submitted before: Will you consider the topics that you're discussing briefly from a comparative and global perspective? Jim, you did this to a degree already, talking about your experiences outside of the world. Any other thoughts about how to contextualize what's happening within the United States outside of the United States as a way of better understanding what is happening within the United States?
James Fishkin: Well, you— one kind of answer would focus on how democracy is under threat around the world, and it is potentially under threat here in terms of legitimacy, the fact that it produces deadlock, dissatisfaction, and support for populist— if not populist, even authoritarian solutions. And so that's a big danger around the world. What I— on the positive side, what I would say from the more narrow perspective of our experience is that What I've learned around the world is that almost anywhere I go, the people are very smart. We have done the same deliberative polling process in Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi, Senegal, and we just— a little bit of adaptation of oral administration of the questionnaires, video versions of the briefing materials, and the people are very smart everywhere, even because I was told you couldn't do this in places where the educational levels were low. And so I think that, you know, we have political science colleagues who've made a good living by questioning whether, you know, by saying the people aren't very smart, they don't have a capacity for self-government. I think we just need to experiment with our operating system and make it more congenial for users and for citizens and enable, bring to life the collective intelligence that is there to solve our public problems. And, you know, I've got one student who classified, used machine learning to classify the transcripts, the dialogues, the reason-giving capacity of the Ghanaians and the Californians in two different projects, and the Ghanaians did just as well. In fact, by certain criteria, they did better than the Californians, so in terms of a random sample gathered. So the public, you know, we have to realize that, yeah, the people have great capacities, and the whole point of democracy is to unleash those capacities.
Jane Mansbridge: Yeah, and I think we can learn now that we're living in a much more globalized world, we can learn so much from one another. So Brazil starts participatory budgeting and it spreads around the world. Iceland and Finland starts a wonderful thing of crowdsourcing. Other— East Belgium now has got these ongoing citizen assemblies, also drawn from randomized groups, but now part of their established democracy, commissioned by the government and now part of the established democracy. All of these experiments are being tried around the world, and we can learn from one another because we are so much more connected.
Martin Gilens: Yeah, I completely agree. I think Americans have tended to be somewhat blinded, thinking of this as a very unique place across all different kinds of policy areas, healthcare and so on. But there is actually a fair bit of experimentation even within our own country that is informed and can be informed by others' experiences. So we see places like Maine and many cities that have adopted voting systems like ranked-choice voting that are used in places like Ireland or Australia. You know, we know that multi-party democracies tend to do a better job of translating citizen preferences into government policy and engaging with citizens. And so, you know, there are many lessons to be taken, and I do think that there are some that are being taken, but there's just a wealth of experience, which Jenny was saying, that we should be drawing on much more even than we do.
Luis Fraga: Marty, could you briefly explain ranked-choice voting to all of us?
Martin Gilens: Sure. So the idea is that within one election, someone who goes to the voting booth would rank each of the candidates that they're interested in. They may not want to rank them all, but whatever candidates appeal to them. And the idea is that in the kind of system that we have where there's two parties, it's virtually impossible for any third party to get going because people feel like they're wasting their votes if they are voting for a candidate that can't possibly win. With ranked choice voting, people can put the person that they care about most first. And if that person gets too few votes to be a contender, then the votes of their supporters get transferred to like their second choice candidate. And so you can feel like your vote is going to make a difference. And if you prefer, you know, the Green candidate, but your second choice is the Democrat over the Republican, you don't have to choose. Whether to vote for the Democrat or the Green candidate, you can rank them and in a sense express your full range of preferences. And this is a way to give third-party candidates, centrist candidates who might appeal to some, you know, some voters on the left and some voters on the right, a way to kind of move up in the rankings. And if it's used in a multi-party system, candidate system where instead of voting for, say, one representative for the House, for example, there might be like 4 or 5 or 6 from your district. Then again, they could be spread across a variety of parties, a variety of perspectives within the same party, and allow voters to have a sense that there's some candidate that they're voting for that actually aligns pretty well with what they want. And they're not just forced to choose kind of the lesser of two evils.
Luis Fraga: There are communities in the United States who have used, who use ranked-choice voting, are there not?
Martin Gilens: Yes, a number of cities have done so for a long time, and Maine has for its federal elections for the last couple of election cycles, and it's a little bit more complicated, but it seems that in those places, people like it, and, you know, they're able to deal with whatever degree of complexity is involved in having preferences across numerous candidates rather than just, say, two.
Luis Fraga: Jenny?
Jane Mansbridge: Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which I live, has ranked-choice voting and has had it for a very long time. I used to oppose ranked-choice voting because it undermines the two-party system, and I think that a two-party system gives clearer alternatives to people, so I used to oppose it. Now, with the extraordinary polarization that we see and with the causes of polarization so embedded, so difficult to change, those two causes that I talked about, the competition of the parties and also the homogeneity of the parties, because of those two reasons, the polarization has gotten out of control and we need to take, I think, somewhat drastic measures. And ranked choice voting would help because both, both because it would produce more alternatives, but also the way it works is you're aiming to get everybody's first vote, but you think you might not get 50% of the vote. And if you might not get 50% of the vote, that means you're going to need some of those other votes down the, down the ballot. Once those candidates are eliminated, those ballots will be redistributed to the other candidates. So you're you don't want to, you don't want to really be too nasty to the other candidates because those voters are not going to like you. They're not going to put you anywhere. They're not going to put you second and they're not going to put you third, and so you're not going to get the second and third votes that might help you to get that majority. So there are these internal dynamics to a ranked-choice voting system which undercut polarization.
James Fishkin: It also represents all the preferences that people have. So, your third choice preference, your fourth choice preference, it might come into play, or certainly your second choice preference. And if the point about the democracy is to represent the will of the people, why not represent the will of the people on all the— for all the preferences that the people have And of course, if they don't have preferences for some, then they don't have to fill those out. So I think it's actually, it's actually a great innovation, much better than a runoff system where people have to show up a second time, because very often those are low turnout elections, except for the French presidential election, or maybe in Georgia. But a runoff system will change the electorate. So, it's a kind of instant runoff system. So, I think it serves fundamental democratic purposes.
Luis Fraga: Okay, we have a final question from our audience. If you had to choose one change in our system of voting that you think would have a major impact to address the issues that have been discussed— polarization, preference, distribution of preferences, and so forth, would it be ranked choice voting? Would it be mandatory voting? Direct democracy? What do you think would have the greatest short and long-term impact in strengthening democracy in the United States?
Jane Mansbridge: Well, I think that ranked choice voting would have the most important short-term effect, and I think universal voting, a small fine for not voting, would have the most long-term effect.
Martin Gilens: Great.
James Fishkin: I like ranked choice voting, but I also think we have to think about reforming the Electoral College. I mean, for the— I mean, to have cases where the national popular vote may or may not carry, but for a few thousand votes either way, is just too arbitrary, and this is going to recur. We have to either have the courage to try to make a constitutional amendment or institute the national compact. And I've been trying to get real discussion of the Electoral College, and some of my colleagues have said, "Ah, requires a constitutional amendment. We can't even consider that." And then I point to the 19th Amendment and how long it took women to get the vote and how often people said, "Men will never give up that power." And they did. And it took took every kind of persuasion and mobilization available, and those women were— should be saluted this entire year. But in another way, for a different kind of reform, we should get rid of this 18th-century trap that we have in the Electoral College. That's my personal view.
Luis Fraga: Marty?
Martin Gilens: I would have to go with campaign finance reforms as the single most important reform.
Luis Fraga: Great. Well, a big thanks to our panel for the conversation. How about a round of applause for everyone who participated, who submitted questions, and who spoke to us? I also want to thank again the event's co-sponsors, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard and the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford. A heads up, Details about the next episode, or the next event, in CASBS's series Social Science for a World of Crisis, and how to learn more about the series, is coming on your screen in just a few seconds.
James Fishkin: And thanks to a great moderator.
Martin Gilens: Absolutely.
Luis Fraga: Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Marty. Thank you, Jenny. Thanks again to the panel, and thanks to everyone, everyone, for joining us today. It shows how interested people are in these fundamental questions of how to strengthen and broaden American democracy. I'm encouraged by seeing this level of interest across a broad cross-section of our public. Again, thank you to the panel and thank you to our sponsors and thank you especially to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. At Stanford.
Narrator: That was James Fishkin, Martin Gilens, Jane Mansbridge, and Luis Fraga discussing reforming democratic institutions and practices. You can learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by visiting the CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter, we're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human-Centered feed, and of course more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at CASBS. So be sure to subscribe in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human-Centered team, thanks for listening.