Feb. 7: Lunch Seminar with James Fishkin - "Consulting the Public Thoughtfully"

The National Center for Digital Government at the Taubman Center at the Kennedy School of Government is sponsoring a Lunch Seminar with Professor James S. Fishkin of Stanford University's Center for Deliberative Democracy  entitled "Consulting the Public Thoughtfully: Online and Face to Face Deliberative Democracy."  The event takes place Monday, February 7, 2005, 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. at Bell Hall (5th Floor, Belfer Building).  This seminar is co-sponsored by the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks.  For further description, click "read more."

In this seminar Dr. Fishkin will discuss competing strategies for
consulting the public that achieve values of deliberation and political equality. He will focus on parallel "Deliberative Polls" that used national samples for face to face and online deliberation about foreign policy.

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in Political Communication at Stanford where he is also Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy.  He works on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy as well as on theories of distributive justice. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.
He is the author of a number of books including Tyranny and Legitimacy (1979), The Limits of Obligation (1981), Justice, Equal Opportunity and the Family (1982), Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995). He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling-a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria and other countries. While Deliberative Polling events are typically televised, face to face discussions, he has recently conducted the first online version in collaboration with the Political Communication Lab at Stanford
and MacNeil/Lehrer Productions.