Abstract
Deliberative and participatory approaches to democracy seek to directly include citizens in decision-making and agenda-setting processes. These methods date back to the very foundations of democracy in Athens, where regular citizens shared the burden of governance and deliberated every major issue. However, thinkers at the time rightly believed that these methods could not function beyond the scale of the city-state, or polis. Representative democracy as an innovation improved on the scalability of collective decision making, but in doing so, sacrificed the extent to which regular citizens could participate in deliberation. Modern technology, including advances in computational power, machine learning algorithms, and data visualization techniques, presents a unique opportunity to scale out deliberative processes. Here we describe Polis, an open source web application capable of collecting and synthesizing feedback from people in a scalable and distributed fashion. Polis has shown itself capable of building shared understanding, disincentivizing counterproductive behavior (trolling), and cultivating points of consensus. It has done this in the context of journalistic and academic research, and directly as part of decision-making bodies at local and national levels, directly affecting legislation. These results demonstrate that deliberative processes can be scaled up beyond the constraints of in-person gatherings and small groups.
Highlights
This paper describes the methodology and application of Polis, an open source web application for gathering and synthesizing people’s opinions
A diagram of the vTaiwan policy-making process, from identifying issues and explaining them to the public, to online deliberation facilitated by Polis, face-to-face dialogue and eventual law
While ballot initiatives give voters the right to vote on individual issues, these measures themselves are presented as binary options, failing to capture the nuanced perspectives constituents might have in relation to the matter at hand
Summary
This paper describes the methodology and application of Polis, an open source web application for gathering and synthesizing people’s opinions. A set of real-time analyses and visualizations are produced which illustrate how the participants break down into opinion groups, what comments distinguish these groups, and where there is rough consensus between groups (see Figure 1 for an overview of the entire process). These methods are closely related to those of the Inglehart and Welzel cultural map (Inglehart, 2005) and DWNOMINATE (Poole, 1985), which attempt to summarize group opinion at scale over time
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