When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation

ISBN-13: 9780199604432 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 256 str.

James S. Fishkin

Opis

All over the world, democratic reforms have brought power to the people, but under conditions where the people have little opportunity to think about the power that they exercise. In this book, James Fishkin combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice and shows how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive our modern democracies. When the People Speak outlines deliberative democracy projects conducted by the author with various collaborators in the US, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

Recenzje

James Fishkin is an impressive individual ... Fishkin has done what (to my knowledge) no other democratic theorist has attempted, namely, to design his own democratic institution—the deliberative poll (DP)...

O autorze

James S. Fishkin is author of a number of books including Democracy and Deliberation (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995), Deliberation Day (with Bruce Ackerman, 2004). His Deliberative Polling process has been conducted in countries ranging from China and Bulgaria to Denmark, Britain, Australia, Italy, Hungary, and the US. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has also been Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. He holds both a PhD in Political Science from Yale and a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge. He holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he teaches Communication and Political Science and Directs the Center for Deliberative Democracy.