We thank James Fishkin for his generous and insightful review. He is right that our book constitutes the “launch”—rather than the culmination—of a larger research and reform agenda. Thus, we acknowledge the limitations he identifies in what we have done so far, and appreciate his suggestions for moving forward.
We do, however, want to address Fishkin’s main criticism, which hinges on the problem of scale, as our deliberative town halls move from dozens to hundreds, to (possibly) thousands of participants. He worries that we face a dilemma between scaling up and lapsing into Bernard Manin’s notion of “audience democracy,” wherein citizens are mere spectators of a show put on by elites. Scaling our events, however, is likely to be less audience-like than it might seem. For Manin, the key problem with audience democracy is that representatives control the discursive agenda, not that they spend a plurality of the time talking. Our participants could observe that it was the constituents who were driving the agenda. Moreover, even in our larger session of 175, the majority of participants got something very close to their question or comment addressed, because their concerns clustered into a fairly small number of topics. In all other respects, the participants’ experiences (and their salutary effects) were similar to those of the smaller events.
This discussion highlights a difference in our approaches between who can be regarded as interlocutors versus audience members. Those chosen to participate in Deliberative Opinion Polls (DOPs) get to be interlocutors in a deep sense; members of the general public, however, are not interlocutors at all. Indeed, they are not really even members of an audience, since they only observe aggregate support for policies, rather than the deliberation generating that support. In our town halls, participants are interlocutors in a more limited way, but they get to observe and engage the reasoning of their representatives and fellow citizens. Like DOPs, our town halls try to provide decision makers with more deliberative public input. But from the public’s perspective, our main goal is not to stand in for them or convince them by proxy, but rather to give more of them access to a richer representative relationship. In this sense, we scaffold on existing institutions of representative government, rather than build new ones on the outside.
Most importantly, we contend that audience democracy can serve deliberative goals. On our account, deliberative quality is a property of the larger political system, rather than something that must be fully realized at each site in the system. The alleged “dilemmas of scaling” are only dilemmas if we insist on devolving all deliberative desiderata to each step in the democratic process. We seek to build a more “directly representative democracy.” Representation involves elements of audience democracy, but, for Madisonian reasons, we maintain that representative institutions are essential to the deliberative quality of our politics; they are not merely concessions to the practical limits of direct democracy. By helping those institutions work better, deliberative town halls can contribute importantly to the quality of democracy.
