The Poll with a Human Face: The National Issues Convention Experiment in Political Communication

The Poll With a Human Face: The National Issues Convention Experiment in Political Communication. Maxwell McCombs and Amy Reynolds, eds. Mahwah, NJ, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 265 pp. $49.95 hbk. Deliberative polling, the pet cause of University of Texas scholar James S. Fishkin, has been lauded as a nostrum for democracy whereby representative adults are assembled, provided information, allowed to deliberate, and are thus transmogrified into informed citizens mirroring public opinion as it should be. The enterprise has also been vilified as an academic gimmick-heir to sundry methodological and theoretical defects-that yields representations of opinion no better, and maybe worse, than conventional survey research. The National Issues Convention, convened in January 1996, represented a bold attempt to produce a nationwide deliberative poll during a presidential campaign. A sample of 466 American adults was recruited by the National Opinion Research Center for the expenses-paid trip to Austin, TX, for three days of deliberation. NIC advocates thereby hoped to shift the focus of campaign strategy and press coverage from partisan issues and horserace frames to an issue-oriented citizens' agenda-an aim shared by proponents of "public journalism. " The NIC-through no fault of its own-- mainly failed at this aim. Yet, given the high hopes and broad claims of the social scientists who orchestrated this event, surprisingly little research has been published exploring the nature of the deliberation and its outcomes. This volume-edited by Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas and Amy Reynolds of the University of Oklahoma-redresses this lack. The articles here assembled-each accessible to students and scholars at all levels-- range from broad encomia to more measured assessments, from hard research to anecdotal description. Although Fishkin has promoted an innovative strategy for cultivating deliberation, his own notion of public opinion is strikingly conventional. Public opinion is defined primarily as the distribution of responses to a sample survey; deliberation is characterized as a formal, structured process; the direction of opinion change is the central dependent variable. Shifts in cognition or changes in the quality of opinion seem to fall outside the definition. In the first chapter, "Bringing Deliberation to the Democratic Dialogue," Fishkin and coauthor Robert C. Luskin assert that the NIC effected substantial opinion change among its participants-although they concede that shifts among a sample of nonparticipants were even larger. Their solution is to argue that participant change should be more systematic and motivated (p. 29)-a claim they fall short of demonstrating. Nor do they establish that the NIC produced citizens who were actually more aware of contrasting perspectives or more sophisticated in their considerations-although participants surveyed afterwards did report that they learned much from each other and came to respect differing viewpoints. As Rob Daves, director of the Minneapolis Star Tribune's own 1996 deliberative poll, shrewdly observes in his chapter, "Deliberative Polling-Fitting the Tool to the Job," "significant, dramatic opinion change either did or did not occur after the NIC, depending on one's perspective" (p. …