Judgment Analysis in Policy Formation: A New Method for Improving Public Participation y

recent years the public has made increased demands both for more information from its policy makers and for more impact on the policy making process. Although the public can acquire far more information than ever before as a result of newly enacted "sunshine laws " and "freedom of information laws, " the public's impact on policy formation remains restricted because of the limitations in con-ventional methods of communication between citizens and public officials. For example, although the outcomes of referenda and elec-tions are always clear, the underlying reasons for overt agreement or disagreement in citizens ' votes are often quite obscure. The use of opinion polls as a means of more precise public communication is severely limited since issues are usually treated in isolation, rarely providing an opportunity to evaluate their relative importance or to confront the complex tradeoffs among public and private objectives. Another form of communication between citizens and public officials, Abstract Effective communication between citizens and public officials is essential to a representative democracy, but conventional methods of communication are inade-quate for the process of complex policy formation. Such inadequacy is due, at least in part, to known difficulties of understanding and describing cognitive processes. A new method, derived from social judgment theory, which enhances the quality of communi-cation between the public and its representatives, is described and illustrated