Sunday, November 18, 2007
Is deliberation dangerous?
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Heading back to the debate in Appalachia
- Redistricting process must be taken from pols
- A shutdown remains a very real possibility
- U.S. Navy Vets case argues for campaign limits
From the RoundTable blog
Though there's been scant evidence of it lately, America is supposed to be a deliberative democracy. Some scholars want to steer the nation back toward that ideal by having an annual "Deliberation Day."
But researchers for the Joint Center, a collaboration between the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution, found that deliberation can be dangerous.
In an intriguing experiment, the researchers created a model Deliberation Day in two Colorado cities. One -- Boulder -- is predominantly liberal. The other -- Colorado Springs -- is predominantly conservative.
Citizens in each community gathered to discuss global warming, affirmative action and civil unions for same-sex couples with their neighbors.
The results weren't that surprising: Deliberation by the like-minded groups 1ed to a hardening of views. Conservatives became more conservative, liberals more liberal. Though there were disagreements going in, a high degree of consensus emerged after the meetings -- even when group members anonymously gave their views.
And though, going into Deliberation Day, many individuals in the two cities shared common ground on the issues, after the discussion, there was less agreement.
"The simplest statement of our findings is that deliberation among like-minded people produced ideological amplification -- an amplification of pre-existing tendencies produced by group discussion," researchers wrote.
To me, the scary part of this study is the fact that, as researchers put it, their experimental design "corresponds more closely to the real world of social deliberation."
The Internet, for all the positive things it's brought to the world, increases the ability of like-minded people to talk only with each other.
The decline of mass media -- three commercial networks vs. hundreds of narrowly tailored cable or satellite channels -- increases the self-imposed isolation.
A survey conducted earlier this year by the Norman Lear Center and Zogby International found a growing cultural divide among liberals and conservatives.
According to the study, conservatives tend to favor action shows, business and sports programming, while liberals mostly enjoy drama, comedy, documentaries and arts and educational programming.
Conservatives mostly like country and gospel music, and especially hate world music. Liberals like a variety of genres: world, punk, Latin, hip-hop, blues, R&B, folk and traditional music. Rock music is liberals' favorite.
About the only common area of interest? Both liberals and conservatives tended to list football as their favorite sport.
A 2004 article by reporter Bill Bishop in the Austin American Statesman found that Americans are increasingly segregated politically even where they live.
The article reported that "geographic segregation by major-party affiliation at the county level increased by 47 percent" between 1976 and 2000. In 1976, only about a quarter of Americans lived in what Bishop termed, "landslide counties" -- counties where one party wins at least 60 percent of the presidential vote. By 2000, nearly half the nation's population lived in landslide counties.
So, to sum up, the most productive deliberation is the kind that involves a diversity of opinion and ideology. Such diversity is increasingly hard to find.
Here's a shameless plug: One of the few places left for finding that kind of diversity of opinion and ideology is in newspapers.
As one-newspaper cities have become the norm rather than the exception, newspaper opinion pages strive more than ever to present a wide range of views.
Here, we've extended that online with The RoundTable, our editorial page blog (blogs.roanoke.com/roundtable/). We've been doing that about a year now. Frankly, it could use a little help. Right now, the conversation is mostly between this staff and a few other people.
There's some interesting back-and-forth, but I'd love to see the conversation expand and evolve into the kind of deliberation that could help repair the intense political polarization that is dividing America.
It's not easy to step outside your comfort zone and expose yourself to ideas that challenge existing beliefs.
But the Joint Center's Deliberation Day experiment proves how vital it is for those who want this democracy to function as it was intended to take the leap. The RoundTable is as good a place to start as any.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
