Why Do Deliberative Discussions Reduce Affective Polarization? Evidence from a Deliberation Experiment in Honduras

Deliberative democracy advocates argue that deliberation can strengthen democracy in part by reducing partisan hostility and affective polarization. Yet whether and why this holds remains under-examined. This paper demonstrates that deliberation can reduce partisan animus by promoting engagement with out-partisan policy perspectives. This engagement builds cognitive empathy, increasing positive affect and tolerance toward out-partisans. Evidence is from an experiment in Honduras. Deliberators were randomly assigned to defend policies with which they agreed (own perspective) or disagreed (out-partisan perspective). Deliberation reduced affective polarization and out partisan animus. These reductions were concentrated and more persistent in the out-partisan perspective group, while polarization increased modestly in the own-perspective group. The findings demonstrate that engagement with out-partisan policy viewpoints is an important causal mechanism driving deliberation’s impact while also highlighting the potential limits of deliberation and discussion in the absence of active engagement with out-group points of view.

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Eric Kramon is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). His research is motivated by the challenges facing contemporary democracies. He aims to shed light on these challenges and to contribute ideas — rigorously tested with methods attuned to causal inference — about how to foster democratic renewal. This work spans three main areas: clientelism and distributive politics; democratic accountability and renewal; and democracy and the judiciary. He has conducted field research in Benin, Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, and recently expanded his comparative focus to include cases in the Americas, including Honduras and the United States. He is the author of Money for Votes: The Causes and Consequences of Electoral Clientelism in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which received the African Politics Conference Group award for best book. His research has appeared in leading journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics, and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the International Growth Centre. He received my PhD from UCLA and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Prior to joining USC, he was on the faculty at George Washington University.

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