Meredith Robinson-Yakelis, a teacher from York County, says she is liberal but used to work for a Republican state representative. She attended the three-day American In One Room deliberative poll in the hopes elected officials will listen to what Pennsylvanians want their government to do.
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Meredith Robinson-Yakelis, a teacher from York County, says she is liberal but used to work for a Republican state representative. She attended the three-day American In One Room deliberative poll in the hopes elected officials will listen to what Pennsylvanians want their government to do.
Update: This story has been updated to reflect the accurate participation of Pa. legislators and staff.
A teacher, a stay-at-home mom, a pharmaceutical company communications manager and more than 170 other Pennsylvania voters gathered in Philadelphia last week to tell elected leaders what policies they support and, in a surprise to some attendees, to have their own political views challenged and changed in the process.
Meredith Robinson-Yakelis, a teacher from Windsor in York County, said she attended in order to network and in the hopes of sharing her views with lawmakers.
“I was hoping that maybe some of the higher up elected officials might be listening to what we’re saying and have to offer as our ideas,” she said.
They just might have been listening. The bipartisan list of VIPs in attendance at the three-day event included Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro and Speaker of the Pennsylvania House Joanna McClinton, and Republican state Sen. Joe Picozzi. A staffer from state Sen. Doug Mastriano’s office planned to attend but cancelled last-minute.
Except for Shapiro’s opening remarks, the officials were present to answer participants’ questions about public policy.
The event was “Deliberative Polling,” a process for gathering public opinion developed (and trademarked) by Stanford University political science professor James Fishkin. Part of his goal is to improve how well elected officials represent the views of their constituents.
“ Aren’t we supposed to, in a democracy, make some connection between the will of the people and what’s actually done? Well, this is part of that conversation,” Fishkin said.
After three days of small group discussion, Q&As with elected leaders and expert panels — with Friday and Saturday’s programming lasting 11 hours — participants responded to a survey about the issues they studied through the weekend.
Fishkin’s team is analyzing the data and plans to release results in a few weeks, along with a full academic write-up of the methodology. That should, in theory, show what policies an informed and representative sample of Pennsylvania voters supports in the areas of education, health care, immigration, foreign policy and election law.
Leading to change
Fishkin said his model helped Texas energy companies decide in the late 1990s to pursue renewable energy, especially wind farms. Mongolia passed a law in 2017 requiring deliberative polling on potential amendments to the country’s constitution, two of which have since passed.
Whether Pennsylvania’s deliberative poll leads to real institutional change as it has in other places remains up to the state’s elected officials. Fishkin said he only presents the findings and releases the data publicly.
Some participants came with specific policy concerns. Glenda Tobin, a York mother who moved to the area from Maryland for its school system, said Pennsylvanians need better access to healthcare.
“ There are a lot of people out here who actually need all of the funding for Medicaid and the services it provides, and Medicare as well,” she said.
The project’s financial backer and organizer, a group called Helena, also will not lobby or otherwise pressure lawmakers to take action based on the poll’s findings, according to CEO Henry Elkus. The group only asks lawmakers to engage ahead of the event, to attend and to commit to looking at the data when it’s released.
”The ultimate end is that we can point to a bill or we can point to an action that was taken at a state or federal level and say, ‘Hey, that was because a representative sample came together,’” Elkus said.
He first launched nation-wide deliberative forums in 2019 under the project banner America In One Room. Last weekend was the group’s first state-level deliberative forum. Fishkin said America In One Room is the gold standard of deliberative polling.
Helena’s role is to raise money for the deliberative polls and to manage the logistics to put them on, Elkus said. This event was put together in two months, after receiving funding “in the low seven figures” from a foundation interested in civic affairs and depolarization, he said.
The costs cover the process of finding participants, providing travel and accommodation, paying for experts, providing a stipend to make up for participants’ missed work days, and for polling and data analysis.
Because he did not have permission from the foundation, he could not share its name or the exact amount donated, Elkus said. Neither Helena nor the funder have any editorial control over the event, he said.
Knock-on effects
Stay-at-home mom and “strong conservative” Katya Madison said she had shifted — or “depolarized” — her political beliefs on Saturday afternoon.
Depolarization is the political science term for when people soften their identification with just one political or social group and become more welcoming to ideas and to people from other groups.
After spending a weekend talking about policy with 175 other Pennsylvanians, Madison, who lives in Christiana Borough, said she shares more values than she thought with people who are politically different.
“ We had a lot of people in my group from different backgrounds and I know that they’re on different sides of the political spectrum,” she said. “I was really, really surprised to see the kinds of things that we actually agreed on.”
This is a common effect of the deliberative forums, Fishkin said. Moderated and fact-based conversations between people from different backgrounds often reduce bias against people with opposing political views, no matter where a person starts from.
In some of his studies, Fishkin said he found the forums produced changes in participants’ political positions that persisted for at least a year, influencing how participants vote. It’s a result he calls “remarkable.”
He also studies how people’s views shift over the course of each forum, and those results for the Philadelphia event will be released as part of the polling data.
Madison said she arrived at the forum with the “preconceived notion” that people on the left were aggressive, a stance she developed while in college. That view was reinforced by politicians and commentators she agrees with, she said, adding that she hadn’t made a point to hear much from the other side.
“ I would say there were some motivations that I thought the other side had that aren’t necessarily true,” Madison said.
Errors in briefing documents likely have limited impact
The 60-page briefing document written by Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab included several factual errors. Fishkin reviewed several identified by WITF and said findings from the event are still valid.
“We are, however, confident that in totality, the materials provided to participants were reliable and allowed for a fact-based civil dialogue, which is at the heart of the Deliberative Polling process,” he said in a statement.
In several places, the document struggled to accurately describe Pennsylvania programs or proposals. It incorrectly stated the Pennsylvania Promise initiative, an effort backed by Shapiro to improve college affordability, was launched last year. In reality, it never passed out of the legislature.
The document also incorrectly said Pennsylvania has an Office of New Americans, another Democratic-backed proposal which the Legislature has not passed. There were other errors in the election section describing how some procedures worked.
WITF also shared the errors with Robinson-Yakelis. She said she noticed a few of them at the time, but believed they did not affect deliberations. Conversations her group had during the forum always focused on the ideas behind the legislation, she said, rather than the details of whether it was already in place or not.
Research assistants at Fishkin’s democracy lab drafted the document. A committee of experts reviewed it and made suggestions, then an AI program was used to simplify the language to make it more accessible to a broader audience. That is when the errors were introduced, according to a statement from the event organizers.
Fishkin said he will review the process to make sure similar errors are not introduced in the future.
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