Peck Chair in International Communication in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where he is professor of communication and (by courtesy) professor of political science.
He is also director of Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy.
Fishkin is a widely cited scholar on his work on deliberative democracy.
As a way of applying this concept he proposed Deliberative Polling in 1988.
Along with Robert Luskin (no connection to Karl Rove's attorney of the same name), he has collaborated on applications of Deliberative Polling in 21 countries.