Joe Klein makes an interesting argument in the latest TIME for an increased use of ?deliberative democracy? in public life.
It ought to raise a red flag, though, when the first example he cites is the budget process used in the coastal district of Zeguo ? in communist China. One suspects that ?getting rid of authoritarian one-party rule? is not one of the democratic options upon which people are permitted to deliberate.
Perhaps an even worse example follows:
In Texas, [Stanford professor James Fishkin] ran a deliberative-democracy process for a consortium of utilities, from 1996 to 2007, which gradually transformed the state from last to first in the use of wind power. “Over that time, the percentage of people ? and these were stakeholders, utility customers ? willing to pay more for wind went from 54% to 84%,” he says.
Wind power? Really? Where were the experts explaining its true impact?
