A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
The potential of deliberative reasoning: patterns of attitude change and consistency in cross-cutting and like-minded deliberation
Authors: Himmelroos Staffan, Christensen Henrik Serup
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Publication year: 2020
Journal: Acta Politica
Journal name in source: Acta Politica
Volume: 55
First page : 135
Last page: 155
ISSN: 0001-6810
eISSN: 1741-1416
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0103-3
Previous studies have found that deliberative practices such as
mini-publics produce opinion changes among participants. Nevertheless,
the underlying mechanisms and whether these conform to deliberative
ideals have received much less attention. This is problematic since
research on public opinion and political psychology suggests that
political opinions often are unstable or driven by prior notions. For
this reason, we examine the underlying mechanisms of change in opinions
and attitude consistency. We do so with data from an experiment with two
deliberative treatments—cross-cutting and like-minded discussions—as
well as a control group, where no deliberation took place to be able to
determine whether deliberation actually cause the observed changes. The
results suggest that participants in cross-cutting deliberation are more
willing to change opinions, even when they have prior experiences with
discussing the topic at hand, which is in line with deliberative theory,
but attitude consistency is largely unaffected by the deliberations.