Depolarizing Through Deliberation in Civics Education: A Case Study of Like-Minded High School Students

This article presents a successful example of fostering pluralism by reducing affective polarization through facilitated conversations. Drawing from the results of a Deliberative Polling experiment, this article finds significant depolarization and moderation as a result of deliberation on policy issues by like-minded high school students who predominantly self-identified as liberal. While critics of deliberation are concerned with like-minded participants becoming more extreme and living in echo chambers, this article shows that Deliberative Polling, even among like-minded individuals can depolarize. Deliberation of eighteen economic and healthcare reform proposals by thirty-eight groups of participants demonstrated no systematic trend of group polarization. A split-half experimental design allowed inference that deliberation was not just correlated with but caused decreases in both affective and issue polarization. Remarkably, deliberation not only moderated opinions on the issues deliberated, but also moderated opinions on related issues not deliberated. The deliberation procedures necessary to achieve such an outcome are discussed, including not setting consensus as a goal, providing supplementary information, and moderating discussions. After a literature review, the methods of the experiment are detailed, followed by a discussion of the results and a brief conclusion about future prospects for bridge building.