Table of Contents

1: Democratic Aspirations
2: The Trilemma of Democratic Reform
3: Competing Visions
4: Making Deliberative Democracy Practical
5: Making Deliberation Consequential
6: Deliberating Under Difficult Conditions
Appendix: Why We Need Only Four Democratic Theories

About the Author

James S. Fishkin is author of a number of books including Democracy and Deliberation (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995), Deliberation Day (with Bruce Ackerman, 2004). His Deliberative Polling process has been conducted in countries ranging from China and Bulgaria to Denmark, Britain, Australia, Italy, Hungary, and the US. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow
of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has also been Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. He holds both a PhD in Political Science from
Yale and a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge. He holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he teaches Communication and Political Science and Directs the Center for Deliberative Democracy.

Reviews

`Review from previous edition After many years of perfecting the art of deliberative polling from his place as director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, Fishkin offers fresh evidence of the promise the model holds for democracy. The goal is to find out what people would really think if they could share concerns and hear from experts - opinions change, and people learn about one another Organization, technology, and incentives
make it possible to become more thoughtful democratic citizens. Wonderful research; strongly recommended.'
Choice
`intriguing...a portrait of public opinion that is more thoughtful than top-of-the-head responses to pollster questions.'
Politics Daily
`He makes a persuasive case for his experiments in When the People Speak. The descriptions of the differing debates and outcomes of a long list of assemblies is continuously interesting and often fascinating.'
Open Democracy
`James Fishkin is an impressive individual ... Fishkin has done what (to my knowledge) no other democratic theorist has attempted, namely, to design his own democratic institution--the deliberative poll (DP)...'
Perspectives on Politics