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Deliberative Polling: Part of the toolbox of democracy, or part of the ever growing toolbox against democracy?

“The idea is to determine not what public opinion is, but what it would be if people had time and the opportunity to deliberate. Once this is known, then an effort is made to share it with the public in the hope of nudging people toward what they, in fact, otherwise would want.”

By Sasha Izard
Aug 23, 2025


An article appeared on the front page of the summer 2025 issue of Orders of the Day, the Publication of the Association of Former MLAs in British Columbia Summer 2025 issue. It was titled:

“Presentation to the Committee on Democratic Reform – Engagement, participation and electoral reform in BC”

The article is by Max Cameron of the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

The title of the article, certainly piqued my interest, as did some of the content:

“The federal government and several provinces including the Province of BC, have introduced legislation intended to enable governments to respond to threats to our prosperity and sovereignty.”

What was being referred to was quite vague, but did sound like some of the less democratic legislation that has been put forth as of late. I read onward: “Canada and British Columbia in particular remain vulnerable to divisive, anti-system politics.”

Again very vague, but I did want to know where the professor was going with this.

The next section of the article was titled “Democratic innovations are not silver-bullet solutions”.

“Our strength as a province and as a nation depends on the active engagement and participation of the public in the extraordinary decisions – and sacrifices – that will have to be made in the coming months and years. Yet our institutions are insufficient for this purpose. It is not that they are broken – they are not. But they are not well-suited to generate the active participation and citizen engagement in public deliberation that will be necessary to sustain the unity and strength we need as a country and as a province. For that, we need to supplement existing arrangements with participatory innovations.

British Columbia has been a leader in the field of participatory innovation. The pioneering BC citizens’ assembly on electoral reform has been replicated in many other jurisdictions. There are other participatory democratic innovations at our disposal, including participatory policy conferences, citizen juries, deliberative polling, and participatory budgeting. These are not substitutes for representative parliamentary institutions. They could, however, easily replace or supplement more problematic democratic practices such as divisive referendums and NIMBY-prone town hall meetings.

Democratic innovations are not silver-bullet solutions, but they can strengthen the public sphere, reinforce democratic institutions and practices, and foster a civic culture. Unlike referendums, which polarize opinion and make achieving change more difficult, participatory innovations build trust, civic engagement, and durable consensus in support of policy and legislation.”

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Reading this looked less to me a lesson in democracy (rule by the people), but rather a means of supplanting it and reinforcing the power and agenda of the state (and likely corporate interests) over the public. It seemed hauntingly familiar. Only a week or so earlier, Saanich’s mayor and council put an end to out of chambers town hall meetings out of a fear of clapping, despite the mayor not even having been present at the last town hall meeting where staff observed clapping; something I wrote about in a letter published in the Saanich News. This absurd action is rendered even more absurd by the mayor himself being on record clapping at council meetings on numerous occasions before and after, a remarkably brazen hypocrisy/double standard toward the public.

LETTER: Saanich residents clap back over loss of town hall meetings – Peninsula News Review

Things got even more absurd when at the last council committee of the whole meeting, where the District paraded before the public another award they received, for policy they haven’t actually implemented, and the mayor clapped, while the public, only allowed to clap at that point, were after left to sit for the rest of the meeting in mute silence out of fear for being framed in the press for clapping again. The report attached to the award on the Saanich agenda for the Aug 18 Committee of the Whole appropriately contained other than the heading, a single blank page and nothing else.

Fear of clapping was an excuse used to clamp down on democracy (open topic public input to council) which was reduced to 3 hours a year unrecorded. This fear of open topic public input reminded me of the supposedly “problematic democratic practices” that included “NIMBY-prone town hall meetings” that could be easily replaced and supplanted, as mentioned in the UBC Professor’s article.

“Divisive referendums” also included in this category reminded of Saanich’s unwillingness to use referendums when they wanted large cash borrowings as we saw in the AAP processes, which were also recently in the news. Needless to say the professor’s article struck a chord with me, an eery one, and not a good one.

The term that really struck me however was “deliberative polling”. It sounded remarkably familiar. Was it among the type of techniques being used on the public, for ‘public engagement’ e.g. unrecorded “open houses”, instead of things like democratic referendums – when governments want to advance what they know will be a naturally unpopular agenda?

I decided to find out.

I emailed the professor :

Hello Max Cameron,

In your article you suggested that “deliberative polling” is one of a number of “participatory democratic innovations at our disposal”.

What is “deliberative polling”?

Thank you,

Sasha Izard

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Cameron promptly replied:

Hi, Sasha.

Thanks for your interest. Here is a description: https://participedia.net/method/deliberative-polling.

All the best, Max

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The following is an archived snapshot of that article dated to July 8, 2025:

Deliberative Polling® – Participedia

“Deliberative Polling® is a unique form of political consultation which combines public opinion research and deliberation to identify how public opinion on an issue might appear if citizens were better informed.”

Problems and Purpose

Deliberative Polling® is a unique form of political consultation that combines techniques of public opinion research and public deliberation to construct hypothetical representations of what public opinion on a particular issue might look like if citizens were given a chance to become more informed. As a polling method, the Deliberative Poll seeks to account for the preferences and opinions of citizens both before and after they have had an opportunity to arrive at considered judgements based on information and exposure to the views of fellow citizens.[1] The technique was first developed by Professor James Fishkin of Stanford University in 1988, and has been adopted by local and regional governments across the world – including Canada, the United States, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Brazil and China.[2] In these diverse settings, it has been used as a more accurate means of polling the public, as a method of developing citizen preferences on difficult issues, as a mode of selecting candidates to run in competitive elections, and as a policy tool to direct political officials in public planning efforts.

A method related to deliberative polling are Citizen Dialogues.

Fishkin initially designed the Deliberative Poll in response to perceived defects of modern public opinion polling methods.[3] Fishkin’s main problem was with high levels of citizen-ignorance on many public issues that required substantive background knowledge in order to take an informed position. In these scenarios, citizens have an incentive for ‘rational ignorance’ – that is, they have an incentive to remain ignorant about an issue because the costs (such as time, energy, etc.) of educating themselves outweigh the benefits of doing so. When the incentives for rational ignorance in the general population are high, traditional sample surveys of mass public opinion will often turn up ‘non-attitudes’ or so-called ‘phantom opinions’ on many public questions. This means that ordinary polling techniques will offer, at best, a snapshot of public opinion under conditions where the public has little information, attention, or interest in a given issue.[4]

Given the problems for accurate opinion sampling under conditions of rational ignorance, Deliberative Polling is meant to offer a representation of what the public would think about a specific issue under ‘ideal conditions’ – that is, under conditions in which citizens have access to fair and balanced background information, are able to account for the different opinions of fellow citizens, and can interact with expert panels of policy-makers to understand the tradeoffs of different policy positions.[5]”

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Although claims have been made about the accuracy of this process, the amount of qualifiers used in its description leads me to severe skepticism of it. This seems less to me about accurately gauging public opinion in order to act on it in a democratic fashion, than being a useful means of forming public opinion according to a preconceived agenda that could even include predetermined results, and being easily able to massage or spin such created messages as part of public relations campaigns to achieve intended results.


In other words: social engineering and manufacturing public consent are very easily attainable with such methodology. Of course various governments are going to be fond of using such techniques to achieve their purposes, often in preference to democratic referendums that could run contrary to their agendas. Are the results of the methodology of “Deliberative Polling” scientifically, as opposed to politically useful? I doubt it.

The concept of deliberative polling reminded me of push polling: Push poll – Wikipedia

The professor is from UBC. The UBC Sauder School of Business humbly refers to those involved in it as “thought leaders”.

Business Insights & Thought Leadership | UBC Sauder

I sent the professor another email:

Thank you for your response.

I read your link.  From reading the description of Deliberative Polling(R), it looks like a model for manufacturing public opinion, rather than accurately gauging public opinion.

Why is it that you think this is a democratic innovation that could be useful for participatory democracy?

How do you see such “Deliberative Polling” being applied in British Columbia in order to serve the interests of the public?

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The professor replied:


Hi Sasha,

The idea is to determine not what public opinion is, but what it would be if people had time and the opportunity to deliberate. Once this is known, then an effort is made to share it with the public in the hope of nudging people toward what they, in fact, otherwise would want.

I think we should have used something like this in the last referendum.  It would have resulted in a much better debate and it might have helped people to see that electoral reform could be quite beneficial.

Cheers, Max

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While I agree that the referendum in BC in regard to electoral reform (presuming that is what the professor was referring to), was not done well, I consider this to have been done on purpose. The last thing the NDP in my view wants is serious electoral reform, lest they get likely supplanted in the seat count by the BC Greens.

In the same article the professor offered a number of potential electoral reforms, some of which seemed much less democratic, one of these being “public funding of slates” for local government.

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Conclusion:

Previously I wrote that it was the number of qualifiers involved in its description that made me deeply skeptical of any claims of accuracy in regard to “Deliberative Polling”.

The professor’s response on this issue is a perfect case in point:

“The idea is to determine not what public opinion is, but what it would be if people had time and the opportunity to deliberate. Once this is known, then an effort is made to share it with the public in the hope of nudging people toward what they, in fact, otherwise would want.”

The whole concept of nudging, clearly a part of all this, is an entire can of worms, another subject that needs an article of its own. So-called nudging is a part of the field of behavioural analytics, and behavioural engineering that governments have and continue to engaged in.

I asked the professor one last question:

Do you think this is the idea behind the process of the Victoria-Saanich Citizens Assembly on Amalgamation?

He replied: No, that is a citizens’ assembly. https://participedia.net/method/citizens-assembly

A comparison of “Deliberative Polling” and the methodology of the recent Citizen’s Assembly that recommended amalgamation between Victoria and Saanich, also deserves an entire future article on its own.


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References:

Deliberative Polling® – Participedia (Archived snapshot July 8, 2025)

The persuaders : the hidden industry that wants to change your mind : Garvey, James, 1967- author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Social engineering (political science) – Wikipedia

Noble lie – Wikipedia

Manufacturing Consent – Wikipedia

The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects by Marshall McLuhan
The Medium Is the Massage – Wikipedia

About – Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions

About – Participedia

Maxwell Cameron – Department of Political Science

“He founded the “Andean Democracy Research Network” to monitor and report on the state of democracy in the Andean region which received funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Martha Piper Fund, SSHRC, IDRC and the Ford Foundation. He participated in a research excellence cluster on the “global challenges to democracy.” He has served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in which capacity he co-created the Institute for Future Legislators. He has also served as Acting Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and as a Trustee of the Board of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.”

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine – Wikipedia

Push poll – Wikipedia