Scholars know little about participation in consultative events such as town halls, and even less about newer modalities, such as telephone town halls. We study participation in such events with a large, randomized field trial in which Australian voters received varying invitations to a telephone town hall with their representative. In addition to invitations framed prospectively or retrospectively, a control condition provided no rationale for participation. Surprisingly, the control group had higher acceptance rates than retrospective for both events, and for prospective in May. After accounting for this, treatment groups remained on the call longer, significantly for prospective in July. We see no differences by gender, but the youngest cohort had higher acceptance rates in the prospective condition than in the control for both events.

Why do we care about listening? This special issue examines listening in various political contexts, illuminating its profound role in democratic communication. Listening is not merely a passive act; it expresses, relies on, and alters power. If we understand listening and ignoring to be acts of political power, then it bears asking what a specifically democratic practice of listening entails. The articles included in this special issue enhance our understanding of democracy today by analyzing the antecedents and consequences of political listening. They employ philosophical, observational, and experimental methods to investigate when and how listening takes place, the obstacles to effective listening, and its implications for democratic representation, deliberation, and policymaking. In doing so, they draw much-needed scholarly attention to a pervasive yet underexplored aspect of political communication. The studies in this issue provide systematic accounts of how and why listening matters, particularly during times of democratic stress.

Public deliberation grows increasingly prevalent yet remains costly in terms of money and time. Accordingly, some suggest supplanting talk-based practices with individual, "deliberation within." Yet we have little evidence either way on the additional benefits of public deliberation over its individual variant. We evaluate the benefits of public deliberation with a field experiment. With the cooperation of two sitting US Senators, we recruited several hundred of their constituents to deliberate on immigration reform. Participants were randomly assigned to either deliberate publicly in an online discussion, to deliberate individually, or to an information-only control. Across several measures, public deliberation yielded more benefits than individual deliberation. We find, moreover, little evidence to ground worries that differences in education, race, conflict avoidance, gender, or gender composition of deliberating groups will render public talk less valuable than individual deliberation.

Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond 'minimalist' notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for 'recursive representation', which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system.

Public deliberation grows increasingly prevalent yet remains costly in terms of money and time. Accordingly, some suggest supplanting talk-based practices with individual, “deliberation within.” Yet we have little evidence either way on the additional benefits of public deliberation over its individual variant. We evaluate the benefits of public deliberation with a field experiment. With the cooperation of two sitting US Senators, we recruited several hundred of their constituents to deliberate on immigration reform. Participants were randomly assigned to either deliberate publicly in an online discussion, to deliberate individually, or to an information-only control. Across several measures, public deliberation yielded more benefits than individual deliberation. We find, moreover, little evidence to ground worries that differences in education, race, conflict avoidance, gender, or gender composition of deliberating groups will render public talk less valuable than individual deliberation.

Peers influence students’ academic decisions and outcomes. For example, several studies with strong claims to causality demonstrate that peers affect the choice of and persistence in majors. One remaining issue, however, has stymied efforts to translate this evidence into actionable interventions: the literature has not grappled adequately with the fact that in natural settings, students typically select most of their peers. The bulk of causal evidence for peer influence comes from exogenously assigned peers (e.g., roommates) because peer effects are easier to identify in such cases. However, students do not form their most important ties for the convenience of scientific inference. In order to link theory and practice, we need to understand which peers are influential. We employ longitudinal, multiplex network data on students’ choices of and persistence in their majors from 1260 students across 14 universities to identify likely causal pathways of peer influence via self-selected peers. We introduce time-reversed analysis as a novel tool for addressing some selection concerns in network influence studies. We find that peers with whom a student reports merely spending time, rather than—e.g., close friends, study partners, esteemed peers—consistently and potently influence their college major choice.

Canonical theories of democratic representation envision legislators cultivating familiarity to enhance esteem among their constituents. Some scholars, however, argue that familiarity breeds contempt, which if true would undermine incentives for effective representation. Survey respondents who are unfamiliar with their legislator tend not to provide substantive answers to attitude questions, and so we are missing key evidence necessary to adjudicate this important debate. We solve this problem with a randomized field experiment that gave some constituents an opportunity to gain familiarity with their Member of Congress through an online Deliberative Town Hall. Relative to controls, respondents who interacted with their member reported higher esteem as a result of enhanced familiarity, a mediation effect supporting canonical theories of representation. This effect is statistically significant among constituents who are the same political party as the member but not among those of the opposite party, although in neither case did familiarity breed contempt.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeThis article refers to:Public Engagement through Inclusive Deliberation: The Human Genome International Commission and Citizens’ JuriesThis article is referred to by:Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Public Engagement through Inclusive Deliberation: The Human Genome International Commission and Citizens’ Juries” DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThe author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

In the wake of the rapid escalation of COVID-19 in the United States in 2020, Congress was charged with finding ways to effectively disseminate reliable information and encouraging compliance with public health measures in addition to designing policies that would be responsive to the unprecedented needs of those in their districts. Our team quickly transitioned and tailored the structure of our Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) as to best facilitate the necessary conversations between members of Congress and their constituents: whereas pre-COVID-19 DTHs focused on a single issue with a single member of Congress, the COVID-19 events often featured a bipartisan pair of members, participating alongside subject matter experts. These two-way conversations allowed for members to gain the critical information pertaining to how to develop policies that were responsive to articulated constituents needs and allowed constituents to express their opinions and feelings on COVID-19 related policies, Congress's handling of the pandemic, and the personal struggles they had faced as the effects of the pandemic transpired.

Description Two new books advocate for technological agency Two new books advocate for technological agency

The development of theories of citizens’ political communication has been hindered by a debate over whether such communication is best characterized as deliberative or non-deliberative. This article aims to overcome that impasse with a new account of citizens’ political communication informed by theories of message production and sense-making: the goals–sense-making–justification (GSJ) model. This model holds that citizens’ political-communicative behavior is influenced by multiple goals and cognitive plans, which generally vary in different contexts. This variation helps to explain why citizens’ informal political discussions during non-election periods rarely feature reason-giving—and so can be understood as non-deliberative—whereas such discussions during major-election campaigns often feature the reason-giving that is characteristic of deliberation. Moreover, the model demonstrates how cognitive plans developed in informal political discussions over repeated major-election cycles enable citizens to engage competently in reason-giving during formal deliberations.

Two new books advocate for technological agency.

Governments rely more and more on experts to manage the increasingly complex problems posed by a growing, diversifying, globalizing world. Surplus technocracy, however, usually comes with deficits of democracy. While especially true in liberal regimes, authoritarian states often face parallel dynamics. Recent trends illustrate how technocratic encroachment on civil society’s prerogatives can provoke populist backlash. Such cycles can build toward crises by eroding the legitimacy citizens invest in regimes. Surprisingly, by throwing both the need for and limits of expertise into sharp relief, the politics of COVID-19 create a novel opportunity to disrupt these trends. We assess how this opportunity may be unfolding in two crucial cases, the United States and China, and, more briefly, South Korea. We conclude by sketching some theoretical considerations to guide a geographically expanded and temporally extended research agenda on this important opportunity to slow or reverse a trend plaguing modern governance.

The core problem of the administrative state is not its own legitimacy, but its role in creating a more wide-ranging legitimacy crisis in American society. The particular problem is that while government administration is necessary in a complex modern society, the mere existence of something as powerful as the bureaucracy is an invitation toward a kind of power politics that undermines the legitimacy of American government as a whole. We can best address this problem by ameliorating the administrative state's deliberative democratic deficit, whereby deliberation in the public sphere fails to play a steering role over politics at large. Doing so requires incorporating deliberative democratic practices into the American administrative state.

Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by-products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we draw on a unique, multisite, panel data set of whole networks, with information about many social relationships, attitudes, and demographics. This evidence permits a stronger foundation for inferences than more common egocentric methods. We find that incidental processes shape discussion networks much more powerfully than purposive ones. Respondents tended to report discussants with whom they share other relationships and characteristics, rather than based on expertise or political similarity, suggesting that stimulating discussion outside of echo chambers may be easier than previously thought.

In the view of many, heritable human genome editing (HHGE) harbors the remedial potential of ridding the world of deadly genetic diseases. A Hippocratic obligation, if there ever was one, HHGE is widely viewed as a life-sustaining proposition. The national go/no-go decision regarding the implementation of HHGE, however, must not, in the collective view of the authors, proceed absent thorough public engagement. A comparable call for an "extensive societal dialogue" was recently issued by the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing. In this communication, the authors lay out the foundational principles undergirding the formation, modification, and evaluation of public opinion. It is against this backdrop that the societal decision to warrant or enjoin the clinical conduct of HHGE will doubtlessly transpire.

AbstractDemocratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. So talk of “the” civic culture erases non-dominant groups. Without a framework to integrate different approaches and account for group variation, we cannot assess decline, nor specify for whom. And without those, we are unable to intervene to make things better. We introduce a theory of civic culture as a system of norms that integrates the main approaches to measuring civic culture and does so in a way that leads to a principled framework for understanding racial, ethnic, and other group variation within countries.

Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by-products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we draw on a unique, multisite, panel data set of whole networks, with information about many social relationships, attitudes, and demographics. This evidence permits a stronger foundation for inferences than more common egocentric methods. We find that incidental processes shape discussion networks much more powerfully than purposive ones. Respondents tended to report discussants with whom they share other relationships and characteristics, rather than based on expertise or political similarity, suggesting that stimulating discussion outside of echo chambers may be easier than previously thought.

In ordinary language, people often treat emotion as the opposite of reason. Deliberative democrats, however, typically use “reason” in a rather different way. They regard arbitrary power, not emotion, as the opposite of reason. Emotion, then, is not at all contrary to reason. Critics who rely on ordinary language to claim that deliberative democrats denigrate emotion are likely to misconstrue how both reason and emotion are deployed. In fact, most deliberative democrats have always assigned emotion an indispensable role in their theories. That said, emotion’s role in deliberation needs more, and more systematic, elaboration. I identify twelve distinct roles for emotion in deliberative theory and practice, clearing the way for a more fruitful research agenda on the role of emotion in democratic deliberation.