February 9th, 2009

Democracy, Partisanship, and Deliberation

by James Fishkin
Reaction Essay
February 9th, 2009

James Fishkin offers several models of what democracy is supposed to do. He weighs each in turn and proposes that deliberative democracy — defined as a process that “contain[s] some claim to representativeness with good conditions for deliberation” — is the one most worth having. Partisanship squares badly with it. What we need, he argues, is not more independents among the general voting population, but more independence among partisan voters.

Read: Democracy, Partisanship, and Deliberation

* * *