Deliberative Opinion Poll - Criticisms

Criticisms

Briefing materials
It is hard to ensure that briefing materials provided to participants are balanced and accurate. It is suggested that an advisory committee with a wide range of people are to be constituted; however, it can be challenging to obtain a balanced advisory committee at the first place. In this sense, it gives room for a biased and/or incomplete presentation of information.

Lack of representativeness
Deliberative polling requires those randomly sampled to gather at a single place to discuss the targeted issue(s). Those events are typically one to three days while online deliberations can take up to four to five weeks. Even though scientific random sampling are used and each person has an equal chance of being selected, not every selected individual will have the time and interest to join those events.

Indeed, in real-world settings, attendance is low and highly selective, and there can be self-selection biases. Data supports such concern as only 300 out of 869 respondents took up the invitation to participate in actual deliberative meetings. What is more important is that those who attended and those who did not differed significantly, and some groups in society are found to be significantly more likely to attend public meetings than others. In general, those who participate tend to be those highly motivated and opinionated.

As both group dynamics and personalities of participants can play an important role in producing different outcomes of discussions, deliberations can inhibit the types of results Fishkin envisions.

Moderators
Although moderators are trained to minimize imbalances in deliberations, there is little empirical data on how well they actually facilitate discussions. In fact, studies have found that facilitators’ styles can make a significant difference in outcome.

Besides, such careful moderation of discussions might create captive audiences in which participants behave differently from what is likely to occur in real-world settings.

Public involvement
Due to the limited number of participants, the general public might not be better informed as expected. Such problem cannot be solved by televising the events because the public might not even expose themselves to those specific programs. In fact, spillovers from public meetings to broader social discourse are moderate at best.

In addition, in spite of potentially balanced and structured public meetings, televised coverage and the discussions themselves may produce a situation in which the voices of the most vocal groups were amplified and the perceptions of majority opinions in turn did not reflect real opinion distributions.

Fail to measure broad public reactions
Although the researchers claim to be interested in measuring change in public opinion instead of reaching an agreed verdict, such method has been used as inputs into policy-making process. Indeed, deliberative polling in Texas has led to the largest-ever investments by Texas in renewable energy, conservation subsidies for low-income consumers, and lower prices for customers buying renewable energy. More recently, Fishkin again claims that deliberation polling should be used in key policy issues like energy. Nonetheless, it is suggested that results derived from such public meetings might not reflect lay audiences’ views, and using them "as gauges of public reactions may produce policy choices that are diametrically opposed to public preferences."