Final Report (all chapters)

complexity would be to convene deliberative panels at different locations at roughly the same
time. Information technologies (such as e-mail, online chat, voice-over-IP, and teleconferencing)
would enable deliberative panels at different locations to communicate with the experts. And
while it would obviously be impossible to assemble as many expert groups as deliberative
panels, it is quite reasonable to assume that the agency could at least assemble several such
panels.
Another distinctive attribute of deliberative panels is an Internet-based information
clearinghouse, which would serve as a repository for all the educational materials (brochures,
technical summaries, scientific publications, instructional videos, and so forth) and be made
available to all participants and to the general public. The clearinghouse would also keep track of
all questions put to the experts by the lay panelists and their answers. This feature would allow
lay participants to learn from each other, and would drastically reduce the volume of questions
the experts could expect to receive. Finally, the clearinghouse would serve as a repository for all
recorded conversations among participants in each deliberative panel. Unlike other sources of
information, recordings of actual deliberations would be made available to a general audience
only after the consultation process had been concluded, and only in anonymous form.
12.1.2 Considerations of Feasibility
Deliberative panels are not entirely new, of course. In the last 20 years, there have been
various efforts, mostly involving local matters, to engage the public in policy-making. We have
discussed some of these initiatives in chapter 10. The most suggestive precedent to our proposal,
however, is not a proposal aimed to enhance public participation, but a project designed to study
the impact of jury deliberation on monetary awards in personal injury cases. This project is
remarkable, among other things, because it demonstrates that it is quite possible to convene a
very large number of deliberative panels in a limited period of time. The study in question was
based on 500 mock juries, each consisting of six citizens, with a total participation of more than
3,000 individuals – an impressive number by any measure, and certainly more than adequate to
ensure representativeness in a process of public consultation. 2
Running 3,000 people through 500 mock juries turned out to be a surprisingly
straightforward task, partly because the organizers limited the time for deliberation to only 30
minutes. Each session lasted one-and-a-half hours. It took the study authors only five
consecutive weekends (consisting of a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) to complete the study. On
each day, the group ran eight sessions, each including four simultaneous juries. Recruitment
started approximately three weeks before the first weekend. Assuming recruitment costs of $35
per person, financial incentives to participate in this effort of $100 per participant, and including
personnel costs, convening 500 mock juries would cost approximately $450,000 dollars.
These figures demonstrate that the logistics of organizing and running even a large number
of deliberative panels are not overly complex, that the time required for conducting a process of
2
Schkade, Sunstein, and Kahneman, "Deliberating About Dollars: The Severity Shift."
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