Deliberation

Examines whether increasing women's representation changes how communities talk about and decide climate-related forest policies in Malawi.

Would public meetings generate more civic engagement if they were simply structured to be more engaging? This question was tested using an original survey that included an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey embedded a randomized experiment in which each participant viewed a short clip of an actual school board meeting.

In this article, the authors introduce a novel statistical method to measure persuasion within small groups. Construct & Measurement: "Persuasion" is defined as an individual's systematic preference change resulting from interpersonal interaction—separate from measurement error. The approach measures two types of persuasion: one in a latent (left-right) preference space and another in topic-specific policy spaces. Experimental Illustration: This method analyzes data from a large-scale randomized deliberative field experiment focused on US fiscal policy preferences. Participants were randomly assigned to discussion groups, allowing researchers to assess how group composition influences opinion shifts. Key Findings & Implications: Results challenge the "law of small-group polarization," which typically shows views moving more extreme through group deliberation. Instead, findings reveal systematic persuasion effects—aligning with deliberative aspirations—in both latent and policy-specific domains.

New findings question the role of rational deliberation in preference aggregation. Computational simulations reveal it creates single-plateaued preferences, not necessarily single-peaked ones as previously thought.

Divided societies often face conflict and inadequate public goods. This study tests two interventions to improve intergroup cooperation in Lebanon: cross-group expert appeal and structured discussions between Sunnis and Shias.