Deliberative polls

Sorry about clogging up the blog, but I can't resist; too many interesting articles.

"Deliberative polls" are sometimes held to be a solution to the problem of "uninformed" voters. Here's a description of how they work:

A leading practitioner is James Fishkin of Stanford University. He starts by canvassing views from a large sample of people. Then a smaller subset (normally around 300-strong) receives briefing materials from the opposing advocacy groups. Moderators lead small group discussions which then draw up questions for experts and policymakers. If the samples are statistically representative, that should, so goes the theory, give a credible picture of what the entire population would think, were it as well-informed.

Such polls have covered aboriginal rights in Australia and traffic jams in La Plata. A Chinese jury is looking at land rights. In Fujisawa in Japan a poll on local-government planning will start in August.

Discussions and briefing often lead to a shift away from populist viewpoints. In a recent poll in Britain support for making party manifesto promises legally binding plunged from 41% to 18%. In recession-hit Michigan a discussion raised support for bigger taxes (from 27% to 45% for income tax, for example). By contrast, support for cuts in corporate taxes rocketed 27 points to 67%: the more people thought about the issue, the more they wanted a better business environment and a lower deficit. But some results are discomfiting (at least for those with this newspaper’s views). A pan-European poll in October 2007 found that support for European Union membership for Turkey and Ukraine fell by a fifth as the discussion progressed.

The article goes on to note that "in 2005 the local authorities in Zeguo, China, used the technique to apportion a 40m yuan ($5.9m) infrastructure budget. In 2008 the approach was extended to the township’s entire kitty. On May 10th the Central Party School, a hatchery for Beijing’s top cadres, will start a pow-wow on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. In a country where rulers are edgy about the masses getting too much power, the carefully channelled discussions of a deliberative poll could prove a useful safety valve." What do you think? Is more deliberation a way of improving democracy (or introducing it in China) or merely of channeling the masses towards more "elite" viewpoints?