How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?

Abstract

The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.

Scaling up Deliberation: Testing the Potential of Mini‐Publics to Enhance the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens

“…Second, exposure to opposing viewpoints had a positive effect on empathy for the other side, but it dampened the knowledge gains. In our concluding section, we discuss the implications of these results, such as tension between providing factual information and foregrounding political disagreement in deliberation (Esterling et al 2015; Guess and Coppock 2018; Mutz 2006; Nyhan and Reifler 2010) and offer new insights to political psychological theories of how different information cues about citizen forums may influence voters’ decisions.…”

A randomized trial of a lab-embedded discourse intervention to improve research ethics

“…The five items on this scale were developed in ref. 37 and indicate perceptions that laboratory members make valid arguments, whether everyone has an opportunity to speak, whether laboratory members listen to one another, whether laboratory members understand the respondent's own views, and confidence in the ethical practice of fellow laboratory members. The third scale measured climate and the amount of laboratory disagreement, which is a measure of the constructiveness of within-laboratory communication, with three items indicating the frequency of disagreements in the laboratory in general and specifically, about authorship and about data management.…”

Encountering Dissimilar Views in Deliberation: Political Knowledge, Attitude Strength, and Opinion Change

“…A recent study further indicates a curvilinear relationship between outcomes of deliberation and the amount of disagreement at play. The quality of discussion and levels of satisfaction maximize when discussants’ ideologies differ to a moderate extent and diminish in circumstances of homogeneous beliefs or sharp contradiction (Esterling, Fung, & Lee, ).…”

“…Aside from contextual influences, individual predispositions—the tolerance of disagreement—also contribute to differences in people’s reactions to disagreements. While some have higher needs for cognition and tend to actively seek out alternative arguments, others are more averse to views that challenge their own beliefs and prefer interacting with views that resonate with their own opinions (Cacioppo & Petty, ; Esterling et al, ).…”

“…Much of the existing research focuses on the impact of a deliberative environment in an aggregative sense, namely the extent to which a deliberative body gathers a spectrum of diverse perspectives (Luskin et al, ; Sunstein, ). An exception is Esterling et al (), which captures the ideological difference with other discussants from an individual’s ideological point. I also emphasize that people may perceive different levels of opinion dissimilarly despite being in the same group.…”