Deliberative Polling Abstract Alice Siu, Associate Director at Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy, describes the center’s focus on enhancing democracy through deliberative polling—a process designed to capture informed public opinion. Deliberative democracy complements traditional representative democracy by allowing citizens to discuss important policy issues before decisions are made, aiming to improve the accuracy of representation. The center conducts these sessions globally, discussing various topics in structured environments to minimize distractions. This method has proven impactful, as demonstrated when Japan used deliberative polling post-tsunami to guide national energy policy decisions. Deliberative polling fosters deeper understanding and participation, ranging from small family discussions to large-scale national debates. Transcript I am Alice Siu. I am the Associate Director at Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy. And first question would be, what does the center do? The center is dedicated to studying democracy and public opinion through a process called deliberative polling. Our center is really trying to understand what public opinion would be if people had time to think about it. So what is deliberative democracy? The best way to think about this is perhaps thinking about what we have now. Today, most of the time, people represent us. Whether in local offices, local city councils, your senators, congress, people, even your president. They’re representing us in this representative democracy. But deliberative democracy isn’t saying that we should get rid of what we have now. It’s more of asking for a compliment of giving people an ability to deliberate and share their voices before your representatives actually make these important decisions. So what we’d like to do with deliberation is allow average citizens to get together and have a discussion and really understand what these important public policies issues are so that when your representatives get to it, they can actually represent you accurately. Unfortunately, we all don’t have a lot of time. We have kids, we have school, we have work. Therein lies the problem. What our center has been doing is creating this process of deliberative polling, which basically takes people out of their everyday normal lives, brings them either in person or online so that they can have a structured environment where they don’t need to be distracted with all the things that are going on in their life, and focus on talking about these important public policy issues and talk about it with strangers, and try to understand what these issues mean to them. We’ve been doing this in over 30 countries around the world, in countries like Brazil, China, in Europe, in the UK, in Italy, and in the U.S., and we’ve tackled a large number of topics. Education, economy, climate, anything you can really think of. The topic doesn’t matter, it’s really the process. The process that we are implementing starts with having representative and random samples of people because we find that having a good sample of your population is really important in accurately representing your public. Then we have surveys. We have small group discussions, and we have large plenary sessions with experts to help answer questions. Then we repeat that process until we get to the end and have a final survey where we look at whether those opinions have changed after discussion. And we’ve been doing this so many times, over a hundred plus times in varying levels of government, and we’ve had lots of different impacts around the world. In 2012, there was a huge tsunami in Japan where the nuclear reactor had issues, and the country of Japan really had no idea what to do. So the government there commissioned a deliberative poll and asked the public what the public wanted to do with the future of Japan’s energy choices. And afterwards, the government decided to implement some of the results from the event. Now, deliberative democracy is very broad, and we can talk about it for many, many hours and days because deliberative democracy kind of can exist in small scale and in large scale. On small scale, you could be having these types of really engaged deliberations among your family and friends and practicing what it means to have good civil discussions. And on the large scales are things like what we do on deliberative polling with hundreds and thousands of people at a time. So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about deliberative democracy and implementing something like deliberative polling. Watch the Full Series on Deliberative Polling by the Stanford Democracy Lab x Rustic Pathways Introduction to Deliberative Polling Video Lessons (case studies & more) For current climate action educational programming, please check the Climate Leaders Fellowship.