討議民主主義手法としてのDPの意義と課題

―神奈川DPから見えてきたこと―

抄録

Deliberative Polling was first developed by James S. Fishkin in 1988 to overcome the deficiency of representative democracy. Two democratic values, political equality and deliberation, were achieved in ancient Greek city-states. However, as the scale of society increased, it became quite difficult to keep the balance of these two values. Modern states are designed to pursue political equality by sacrificing deliberation. This is the fundamental flaw of the modern states and is the major cause of inability to cope with emergent problems in public arenas. Deliberative democracy is the institution to achieve these two values in complex modern society. DP is designed to incorporate deliberation into the opinion poll. By doing so, it is conceived to achieve the two democratic values at the same. Since the inception of the method, DP has spread to over nine countries involving more than forty projects. The first DP in Japan was carried out last December in Kanagawa prefecture. This article discusses the lessons learnt from the first DP experience in Japan.