Deliberation Day by Bruce Ackerman & James S. Fishkin

Author:Bruce Ackerman & James S. Fishkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Summing Up

There will be substantial start-up costs, and some blunders in the early days. But hopefully, these will be forgiven—Deliberation Day won’t get off the ground without a groundswell of popular support, and this renewed commitment to popular sovereignty should survive despite the failure of some states and localities to follow through effectively the first time around. After a couple of shakedown cruises, the process should begin to settle down as schools and other sites get accustomed to their DDay routines. Despite the novelty of the enterprise, we estimate in Appendix A the costs of each main component of the enterprise after the shakedown period. The hard-edged numbers we assign to each activity shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but they do provide a sense of the orders of magnitude involved. For now, it will be enough to review the main points in our argument.

The most important is our decision to appropriate an existing holiday for Deliberation Day. This allows us to eliminate two big-ticket items from our cost estimates. Since facilities are already vacant, there is no resource cost in using them. Since Americans are already taking Presidents Day off, our invitation to deliberate does not involve a loss of the economic product of an ordinary day’s work. These are crucial points—if we had proposed a brand new holiday, these items would have added up to dollar sums in the tens of billions.

The costs that remain seem much smaller, if only by comparison. Divide them into two broad categories. The first involves the management of individual facilities—preparing the buildings for DDay, running the school bus system to pick up people without cars, welcoming citizens in the morning, assigning them to rooms, intervening to maintain order, providing lunch, and checking out deliberators at the end of the day. Some of this work might be discharged by volunteers—citizens willing to show up early and greet the crowd and stay late to help with the processing of stipends while spending 9 to 5 talking with their fellow deliberators. But we have provided for a substantial corps of paid administrators, police, and workers to get the job done.

The second set of tasks involve long-term planning: arranging for facilities and workers for the next holiday, developing the reservation system that links citizens to sites, establishing ongoing relations with the civic organizations that name moderators, and so forth. This requires the establishment of a permanent, but small, bureaucracy in each state and on the national level.

Most of the costs in the first category will increase with DDay turnout; many in the second will not. Appendix A puts them all together and suggests that a DDay with thirty million participants will cost about $1.25 billion dollars, moving to $2.5 billion as attendance reaches the seventy million mark.

To gain a sense of proportion: During the 2000 electoral cycle, the administrative costs of running national elections were about $1 billion.57 An additional $3 billion was spent by all candidates for federal office.58 Since most of this money is spent

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