James S Fishkin

About

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is a Professor of Communication and a Professor of Political Science (by courtesy). He is also the Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge. His academic work focuses on deliberative democracy, public consultation, and the development of Deliberative Polling®, a practice that employs random samples of citizens to explore how opinions change when they are more informed. His research has stimulated over 100 Deliberative Polls across 28 countries, influencing government and policy decisions worldwide. Fishkin is the author of several books, including 'Democracy When the People Are Thinking' (2018), 'When the People Speak' (2009), 'Deliberation Day' (2004), and 'Democracy and Deliberation' (1991). He is recognized as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has held various academic appointments and honors, including fellowships at Stanford and Cambridge. His work primarily aims to enhance democratic processes through informed citizen engagement and deliberation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Economics
• Psychology
• Chemistry
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Public economics
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on “America in One Room”

  American Political Science Review · 2021 · 217 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This paper is positioned at the intersection of two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. It analyzes results from a national field experiment in which more than 500 registered voters were brought together from around the country to deliberate in depth over a long weekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre–post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, depolarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on America in One Room

  2020 · 66 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This paper is positioned at the intersection of two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. It analyzes results from a national field experiment in which more than 500 registered voters were brought together from around the country to deliberate in depth over a long weekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre-post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, de-polarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Does Deliberation Increase Public‐Spiritedness?

  Social Science Quarterly · 2020 · 35 citations

  Objective This article investigates the hypothesis, dating back to de Tocqueville and Mill, that deliberation helps make citizens more “public‐spirited,” increasing their support for policies that benefit the community, even at some possible cost to themselves. The hypothesis has previously occasioned much speculation but little empirical investigation. Methods We employ data from a series of regional Deliberative Polls in Texas, gathering random samples from seven different service areas for we…

  DOI

• Deliberative Distortions? Homogenization, Polarization, and Domination in Small Group Discussions

  British Journal of Political Science · 2022-04-07 · 30 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Deliberation is widely believed to enhance democracy by helping to refine the ‘public will’, moving its participants' policy attitudes closer to their ‘full-consideration’ policy attitudes – those they would hypothetically hold with unlimited information, to which they gave unlimited reflection. Yet there have also been claims that the social dynamics involved generally ‘homogenize’ attitudes (decreasing their variance), ‘polarize’ them (moving their means toward the nearer extreme), or…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can Deliberation Have Lasting Effects?

  American Political Science Review · 2024-02-06 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Does deliberation produce any lasting effects? “America in One Room” was a national field experiment in which more than 500 randomly selected registered voters were brought from all over the country to deliberate on five major issues facing the country. A pre-post control group was also surveyed on the same questions after the weekend and about a year later. There were significant differences in voting intention and in actual voting behavior a year later among the deliberators compared to the co…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Fred D. Miller

  Bowling Green State University

  184 shared

• Jeffrey Paul

  University of Manitoba

  182 shared

• Richard Epstein

  New York University

  121 shared

• George Mason

  Royal North Shore Hospital

  101 shared

• Carmen E. Pavel

  100 shared

• Carrie‐Ann Biondi

  Bowling Green State University

  100 shared

• Daniel Jacobson

  Bridge University

  100 shared

• Jacob S. Levy

  Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

  100 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Yale

  1970

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Yale

• Ph.D., Philosophy

  Cambridge

Awards & honors

• Eyes of Texas Award, University of Texas at Austin (1996)
• Visiting Fellow Commoner, Trinity College, Cambridge, Englan…
• Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sc…
• Erik H. Erikson Prize, International Society of Political Ps…
• Jacob Cooper Philosophy Prize, Yale University (1968)

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Ann Hsingh-117
• Jon A. Krosnickh-95
• Robert Weisbergh-77