Of Scale and Straw Men: A Reply to Fishkin and Luskin

I am grateful to James Fishkin and Robert Luskin for taking the time to consider and respond to my remarks on the dangers of relying on the news media to form a bridge between participants and non-participants in deliberative events. Clearly we are in agreement that there is a difference between deliberations as experienced by participants and a television audience. However, Fishkin and Luskin have misrepresented my aims and claims about that difference, and thus their response is less telling than it might have been, directed as it is at a man of straw.At the outset, let me emphasize that the purpose ofmyresearch note was not to subject deliberative polls to a thorough critique: one case study would indeed have been an inadequate foundation for such work. Rather, the case study was a device used to highlight a feature common to many attempts to put deliberative democratic principles into practice, not just the deliberative poll (DP). The underlying issue is, to state it again, one of scale: millions of people cannot strictly deliberate together. Walzer proposes a maximum number of twenty individuals, although the literature on small groups suggests that the actual limit may be between five and seven, both which seem disturbingly small for purportedly democratic processes. Even if the deliberative limit were several hundred, however, the scale issue still arises and causes problems for the democratic legitimacy of such events: how can their decisions be binding on others when those others have not had the opportunity to have their views transformed by the encounter with the better argument?