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James S. Fishkin:
The Hungarian Deliberative Poll I am proud
to be part of the collaborative team working on Hungary's
first Deliberative Poll. With Deliberative Polling®,
we are borrowing an ancient idea-of selecting people
by lottery or random sampling and then getting them
together to learn about an important issue and then
decide what they think. In ancient Athens, such microcosms
made important public decisions. Now we are adapting
this process for the television age.
I call it a Deliberative Poll. An ordinary poll gives
a snapshot of what the people are thinking even when
they are not thinking very much or paying much attention.
A Deliberative Poll tries to show what people would
think if they had good information and really thought
about the issue.
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The process begins with a good random
sample of the population. After it takes a survey of the
conventional sort, we invite them to come to a single
place for a couple of days of discussion with good information
and an opportunity to consider competing points of view--both
in small group discussions and in plenary sessions with
competing experts and policymakers.
By the time the participants gather together, they will
already have started to become more informed. That is
good. In Britain, where we did the first deliberative
poll in 1994, a woman told me that she wanted to thank
me. She was the spouse of a participant. She said that
in thirty years of marriage, her husband had never read
a newspaper, but from the moment he had been invited,
he had started to read "every newspaper every day and
he was going to be a lot more interesting to live with
in retirement."
We don't expect all the participants to read all the newspapers,
but we do expect them to listen to each other, and to
competing experts and to become much more well informed.
We expect the views that result at the end to be the public's
considered judgments. They will be views worth listening
to, because they will reflect careful thought and good
information.
When George Gallup effectively launched the public opinion
poll in the 1936 U.S. Presidential election, he hoped
it would bring the democracy of the New England town meeting
to the large scale nation state. His idea was that newspapers
and radio would send out the competing views of experts
and policymakers and the public would think about them
and talk them over and then its views would be reflected
back by the public opinion poll. He said it would be as
if "the whole country was in one great room."
The difficulty is that with a "room" on a national scale,
most individuals in it were not paying much attention.
Each individual opinion is subject to what social scientists
call "rational ignorance." Each can see that his or her
individual vote or opinion is unlikely to make much difference
and most people have other, more pressing demands on their
time. Hence the low levels of public information about
public policy are not surprising in countries all over
the world.
However, the Deliberative Poll puts "the whole country
in one room" in a different way. It is a room on a human
scale--a few hundred people where each can see that his
or her vote makes a difference. In the Deliberative Poll
individuals have every reason to become more informed
and to pay attention. Instead of "rational ignorance"
we get considered judgments, instead of "top of the head"
impressions of sound bites and headlines, we get opinions
based on deliberation.
I do not know what conclusions the Hungarian sample will
draw about policy toward the Roma. Whatever the conclusions,
they will be worth listening to. In Deliberative Polls
conducted in countries as diverse as the US, Britain,
Australia, Denmark, Canada, Bulgaria, Taiwan and China,
the one thing I have learned is that the people are very
smart--if only they have a reason to pay attention and
get engaged in the process. |
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Előszó
A MAGYAR AGORA a huszonegyedik századi média köztere és népgyűlése, ahol mindenki a nyilvánosság előtt mondhatja el a véleményét a közügyekről, és mindenki szembesülhet azzal, hogyan gondolkodnak ezekről mások. A Magyar Agorán szemtanúi lehettünk azoknak a pillanatoknak, amikor "közvélemény" születik.
A projekt - Magyarországon először - a Deliberatív Közvélemény-kutatás módszerét ültette át a gyakorlatba: az Egyesült Államokban kifejlesztett, majd az elmúlt évtizedben világszerte nagy hatással alkalmazott technika a nyilvános konzultáció új modelljét valósítja meg.
A projekt munkatársai
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Deliberatív Demokrácia
A deliberatív demokráciában központi szerepet játszik a nyilvános vita. A deliberatív demokráciaelméletekben a nyilvános vita a közjóról alkotott eltérő elképzelések köré szerveződik, a benne résztvevő állampolgárok egyenlőek, és a vita során önmagukról alkotott felfogásuk és nézeteik is formálódnak. A nyilvános vitában az állampolgárok nem pusztán kinyilvánítják már meglévő preferenciáikat, hanem a mérlegelés és fontolgatás során alakítják ki álláspontjaikat.
Deliberative Poll a világ körül
A deliberatív demokrácia meghatározását, feltételeit és értékeit övezo tudományos viták nem gördítettek akadályt a gyakorlati próbálkozások útjába. Húszon felül van az eddigi deliberatív közvélemény-kutatási kísérletek száma, amelyeket Észak-Amerikában, Európában, Ausztráliában szerveztek.
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The Center for Deliberative Democracy
Research papers
In the press
First Online Deliberative Opinion Poll
Video from Past Deliberative Polling Events
Video clips
Australia Deliberates
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| A vitahétvége alapján készült tanulmánykötet borítója |
A tanulmánykötet borítója
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