James S. Fishkin

James S. Fishkin (born 1948) holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where he is professor of communication and (by courtesy) professor of political science. He is also director of Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. Fishkin is a widely cited scholar on his work on deliberative democracy. As a way of applying this concept he proposed Deliberative Polling in 1988. Along with Robert Luskin (no connection to Karl Rove's attorney of the same name), he has collaborated on applications of Deliberative Polling in 21 countries.

Fishkin received his BA degree and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He holds a second Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University, United Kingdom. He is the current director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a visiting fellow commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The deliberative opinion poll takes a representative random sample of the people and brings the people together at a place to deliberate about an issue. The people are provided briefing materials which are made in concert with all interested parties and done in a way so as to represent each position in a balanced way. The people are asked to register their considered opinions after a day or more of deliberation. Taken as a vote, the decisions made by such arrangements have been alternatively used to elect candidates in primaries (Greece) or recommend policy decisions (China, Texas) etc. It was the basis of the "Power and the People", a Channel 4 program on which Fishkin was a consultant that aired in the UK (1994–1999).

More than 70 such deliberative polls have now taken place around the world, including in Argentina, Canada, Brazil, the United States, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Northern Ireland, Poland, Croatia, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia