Repairing the town hall

Lately, interest groups and the alienated have turned town halls on health care reform into made-for-mass-media shouting matches.  Jim Fishkin writes in the New York Times about a scientific method that ensures more people are heard.

"The Congressional town-hall-style meeting, which developed as a cost-effective way for time-pressed members to hear from constituents, also rests on an illusion: that a district of 650,000 potential voters can be represented by the unscientifically self-selected who decide to show up. Instead, these amorphous, unpredictable meetings have become open invitations for interest groups and grass roots campaigns to capture the public dialogue.

"But there is a way of organizing town halls that would offer lawmakers representative and informed feedback about their constituents’ major concerns: a deliberative poll. Whereas ordinary polls represent the public’s surface impression of sound bites and headlines, deliberative polls bring together a scientifically selected microcosm of a lawmaker’s constituents under conditions conducive to thinking about issues. In effect, an entire Congressional district really can be put in one room."

Deliberative Polls are town hall meetings in which more than the shouting is heard.  To learn more about Deliberative Polls, how they work, and how they have been used, use the links on this page and visit the Center for Deliberative Democracy homepage at Stanford University.

-- Bill Corbett