Deliberations

Day2-Q&A Image credit openDemocracy. Most Europeans wouldn't know it, but 400 citizens from across the EU are gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels this weekend to participate in Tomorrow's Europe, a Deliberative Poll exercise in the parliamentary chamber. A prepoll of a larger random sample of Europeans has already taken place, but this group will answer some big questions about the future of Europe. It's a massive logistical undertaken by Jacques Delors' pro-EU Notre Europe think-tank with the blessing of the European Union itself. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten little media attention. I'm getting information from the dLiberation blog at openDemocracy. Only a handful of bloggers in Europe have mentioned it this week. From French network TF1 are the following video recordings, mainly in French: Introduction (includes short interview of Jim Fishkin) Plenary session 1. Plenary session 2. Plenary session 3. Plenary session 4. Of course I am a proponent of deliberative methods. But take a look at the people attending in the image above or the videos. While in the introduction a speaker suggests that one might be sitting next to "un pécheur de Marseilles", they all look like school teachers to me. The organiser delegated a polling company to randomly select 3500 citizens from across the EU for the initial survey. Let's assume that is a truly random and stratified sample that reflects the demography of each country. But how were the 400 attendees to the DP selected from those 3500? The media release states that they are selected scientifically. Of course, they weren't conscripted, so they would have had to self-nominate from the sample. Are they still a microcosm? No, they are not. They would be just the ones who were confident and affluent enough to go to Brussels for a long weekend. Most importantly, they would have been the ones who believed in the whole process. And this gets to the nub of my argument here. As I've written before, most of us just travel in circles of agreement. Instead, I've spent a bit of time visiting blogs of libertarians, nationalists and independent thinkers. Oh, and visit any newspaper or media outlet on the web that covers anything remotely deliberative and take a look at the flaming comments. A large chunk of people believe that deliberative democracy is elitist and a leftist plot against their civil liberties. If they were invited to contribute to a Deliberative Poll, they'd laugh it off as a waste of time. They wouldn't participate, but then they'd tear it down because they don't believe that it's representative!! So the dilemma is to find a way to include such people in the conversation in such a way that they don't feel threatened. If a process could do this, then the legitimacy of the output would stand on much firmer ground.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky on 14 October 2007 at 08:58 PM | Link