FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

“deliberative polling,” a system first developed by the Stanford professor James Fishkin. What might this look like in practice? The first step would be to gather together a representative sample of the public. Then this “civic jury” would weigh various courses of action on policy questions with the help of briefing materials provided by interest groups on all sides of an issue. The group would report its viewpoints both at the beginning and at the end of the deliberation process, and the shifts in their thinking would be taken as a direction for policy makers. The idea is not so different from a big company whose leaders decide to establish a diverse working group of employees from across its ranks to research and advise the company on a particular problem. Because the company was transparent about meaningfully seeking the counsel of the working group, the rest of the employees are more likely to get on board with the eventual decisions that are made. One enormous advantage of this system is that media organizations would have a field day on the findings and would likely interview participants to determine what they found most convincing and compelling. Countries as diverse as Iceland, Mongolia, and Ireland have adopted versions of these gatherings to suggest constitutional amendments. Unlike prospective civic juries, Congress does not much look like a representative set of Americans on any of a host of dimensions: age, gender, wealth, education, race, and so on. But it’s...