Leaders who appear to be following opinion may in fact be creating it.53 Whether or not one considers this leadership or manipulation, it undermines claims to popular control.

Towering over presidents and state governors, over Congress and state legislatures, over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out, in the United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble before it.27

The root of deliberation is weighing.43 And the root idea of deliberative democracy—admittedly a very simple and commonsense notion—is that the people should weigh the arguments, the competing reasons, offered by their fellow citizens under good conditions for expressing and listening to them and considering them on the merits. A democracy designed

The people lack any real opportunity to think in depth about what they really want done. Instead they have competitive political sports and distractions. It is a kind of limited democracy with barely the pretense of engaging the will of the people.1

Candidates and parties want to win. If voters become informed about the complexities of serious issues that is only a by-product, and one that is rarely achieved.

In our long journey of bringing power to the people—through mass primaries, referenda, recall elections, direct election of senators in the US, public opinion polls, and other forms of public consultation—we have empowered a public that generally lacks the information and attention that would be required for applying the value of deliberation in

There is vote suppression, distortions of campaign finance, a largely uninformed public, vast sums of money spent to mislead and manipulate public opinion, efforts to spread fake news on social media, and a public that is increasingly likely to talk mostly to the like-minded, and consult mostly news sources it agrees with.

By Competitive Democracy I mean the notion of democracy via electoral competition. Most influentially, this approach was championed by Joseph Schumpeter and more recently by Richard Posner and others.58 This approach to democracy is in fact the one that is most widely accepted around the world.

How much more powerful and consistent could we expect the influence of public opinion to become if it were built on really solid foundations—if it were the product of the entire society thinking about the issues and coming to a considered judgment?