Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Democratic Discussion, Kinder R. Donald, Don Herzog

Book Chapters

In this piece one of the country’s most accomplished survey researchers joins forces with a major democratic theorist (they happen to be colleagues at the same institution, the University of Michigan)—and together they try to reconcile what might seem irreconcilable: survey research findings about voter ignorance, on the one hand, with John Stuart Mill’s ideal of government by discussion, on the other. Read them carefully to ascertain the basis of reconciliation, for it is subtle: they extrapolate from John Dewey’s concept of “contingent social practices.” That is undoubtedly a mouthful, but it implies—as you will see—that the relative political sophistication …