Locating Consensus for Democracy - a Ten-Year U.S. Experiment, is several books in one. It weaves together the following story threads:
The first is the story of the unexpected findings of a ten-year in-depth survey research project, conducted by the book's author, Alan F. Kay, using balanced teams of top pollsters and issue experts. This massive project produced overwhelming evidence that the legislation and policy choices most supported by Americans are stable, consistent, pragmatic, principled and, on issue after issue, startlingly at odds with views of national leaders!
The second thread is the reaction. Confronted repeatedly with credible and substantial evidence of the disconnect between their views on governance and the desires of the people, Gingrich, Bush, Gephardt, Gore, Clinton, Perot, and virtually all of congress and the mainstream news media -- just turn away. They do not want to know that the reasonable preferences of supermajorities (67+%) of Americans differ from the desires of one or another special interest that officials across the political spectrum routinely enact into law. Both politicians and media editors ignore or dismiss poll results that contradict their basic political views.
The third thread is the story behind the story. After several successful careers, mathematician, entrepreneur Kay undertook this unique project and continued it year after year despite the considerable time and money drain. The Washington Post labeled him, "America's Patron of Polling." Kay was impressed at how positive, reasonable and coherent the public's policy desires turned out to be. He was fascinated by how the project's remarkable results were teased-out, verified, and repeatedly confirmed. At the start of the project Kay considered himself a "pretty good elitist". He emerges a "deep populist". Originally scheduled to last about a year, the project was kept going because, Kay admits, he "fell in love with the American people".
A fourth thread is the emergence of public interest polling as a unique concept defined by processes, methods, and goals that are different in many ways from typical polling. Public interest poll sponsors must truly want to know the public's desires for governance (policy, legislation, regulations) when respondents are presented with a wide variety of choices, fairly and accurately worded. Findings are tentative until tested by wording variations, by respondent exposure to pro and con arguments, by consilience with previous findings and by obtaining the reasons behind highly supported policy proposals. This complex process often requires a series of surveys.
Here is a most remarkable and important conclusion: once consensus findings are established by the admittedly expensive methods of public interest polling, it turns out to be true empirically that such consensus findings can be readily and inexpensively duplicated by any competent pollster, without including information beyond the minimal context needed to make a question in any poll intelligible to respondents. This means that the consensus findings of public interest polling do not apply just to those tiny percentages who have gone through a deliberation process but to the entire public.
A fifth thread is the story of how public interest polling, while hardly yet perceptible, is beginning to bring sanity to the dysfunctional US political system. In time, a movement to conduct and disseminate high quality polling promises to temper the disgust of Americans with politics. Hope rises that the US might be on the way to getting what has for eons eluded every country -- responsive, satisfying, honest, governance. Utopian as it might seem, that ideal no longer need be viewed as out of reach.
A sixth story thread, somewhat peripheral to the main purposes of the book, may be the most interesting. It is a collection of simple, common sense rules and examples of how to tell a good poll from a bad poll, found throughout the book but especially in the sections entitled "The Games Pollsters Play," (pp. 40-52), "The Dirty Little Secret of Conventional Polling", (pp. 234-238), and in Chapter 13, "High Profile Polls that Misled the Nation".
Prominent pollsters, political scientists and even politicians have acknowledged the importance and credibility of this book, as demonstrated by the favorable comments under back cover and continuing in inside flap. See particularly the comments of Alger, Becker, Boulding, Chittick, Cranston, Dean, Desai, Doble, Drayton, Elkin, Fisher, Franklin, Greenberg, Harwood, Hollander, Hubbard, Lewis, Mathews, Miller, Ortmans, Smyre, Steeper, and Yankelovich.
Alan F. Kay was co-founder of a military research & development firm (1954-1963) and founder and CEO (1966-1979) of AutEx, Inc., a supplier of computerized communications networks to industry, including the first commercially-available E-mail. Beginning in 1978, Kay was an investor and board member in several start-up companies pioneering energy efficiency and pollution clean-up technologies. In 1987 he founded Americans Talk Issues, which established the science of public interest polling, and is now a project of The Alan F. Kay and Hazel Henderson Foundation for Social Innovation. Kay received a PhD from Harvard University in 1952.
