Ackerman, Bruce and James Fishkin. "Deliberation Day". Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol.10, No.2 (2002): 129-152.

Ackerman, Bruce and James Fishkin. "Deliberation Day". Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol.10, No.2 (2002): 129-152.

• The authors jokingly propose Deliberation Day, "a new national holiday. It will be held one week before major national elections. Registered voters will be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of 15, and larger groups of 500, to discuss the central issues raises by the campaign. Each deliberator will be paid $150 for the day's work of citizenship, on conditions that he or she shows up at the polls the next week. All other work, except the most essential, will be prohibited by law" (129).
• A more robust description of Deliberation Day as an activity is available from page 135 to page 138. The potential benefits derived from the event are further explored from page 139 to page 147.
• John Stuart Mill argued against the present electoral practice of secret ballots, he argued for the preservation of public voting, arguing that being forced to declare support for a candidate and be judged for their decision would encourage voters to vote for the public good rather than their private interest (129).
• As public franchise expanded in the 19th Century, more voters were vulnerable to violent or economic reprisals for their voting decisions, prompting the transition to the secret ballot so that the poor could vote without fearing for their jobs or wellbeing (130).
• The contradiction at the heart of democratic practice is that representatives are supposed to represent the interests of all citizens, not just the majority which elected them, but there is no encouragement for citizens to vote based on the public interest, rather than their private interests, nor to be well-informed about issues (131).
• James Madison's solution to this issue was to assume that part of the responsibility of the elite representatives in government would be to moderate and filter the most specific and extreme opinions of their supporters. This effort has been undermined by modern public opinion polling, and the 'sound-bit' commodification of political solutions, both of which drive politicians to mirror public opinion -- including its imperfections (131-133).
• The difficulties facing any attempt to reverse the drive of technology and change the interactions between voters and political candidates would be immense so this paper instead proposes ways to increase the public spirit of the voter population (133).
• Most of the American voting population is ignorant of most policy issues, partially because of a phenomenon known as 'rational ignorance', where the time costs of developing an informed viewpoint greatly exceed the difference a single vote makes. Manipulating incentives would change this situation, such as supplying $150 for those who participate in the process of becoming better informed voters (133).
• The result of deliberative polling, a process where voters are tested on policy positions before and after a serious of discussions in small groups, have revealed that policy positions change considerably after discussion with peers. These results encourage the prospect of public debate increasing civic behavior (133-134).
• The author divides the possibilities of opinion into four quadrants, with an elite-mass axis and a deliberated-raw axis. The goal of Deliberation Day is to achieve Quadrant 1, where the mass opinion is informed and deliberative, whereas the present situation is closer to Quadrant 4, where mass opinion is raw. Quadrant 2 is an informed elite opinion, close to Madisonian democracy (150-151).