Dialogue Is an Antidote for Populism

The New York Times

Dialogue Is an Antidote for Populism 

At a forum in Athens, leaders discussed challenges to democracy that they said stemmed from both internal and external forces.

Another proponent of public consultation at the conference was James Fishkin, a professor of international communication at Stanford University, who is known for creating a method called deliberative polling: bringing together samples of the voting population, and inviting them to deliberate and discuss issues together.

The method, he said, has been exercised more than 150 times around the world — and in Mongolia, led to electoral reform at the national level.

“Our democracy is not working as well as it should, because there’s no room for the will of the people,” Prof. Fishkin said in an interview at the Athens forum. “People feel like nobody cares, nobody listens to them, and that if they try to speak up, somebody’s going to yell at them.”

But when they’re invited to have a “civil, moderated” discussion with a diverse group of people, “they end up moderating their extreme views,” because they sense that they have “opinions worth listening to,” and “that democracy could work well,” he explained.