Deliberative opinion poll

Zeguo township budget polls, China, mid-to-late 2000s Evidence that deliberative polling is not only a tool for established democracies. In the coastal township of Zeguo, James Fishkin's team selected a representative sample of residents to weigh which public works projects should be funded. The exercise then grew beyond ranking projects into a process that helped determine the township's budget each year. It happened inside a one-party system, which limits how far the model travels, but it remains one of the clearest cases of random-sample deliberation shaping actual spending.