Latest news with #DeliberativeDemocracyLab
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Some good news about political polarization: It can change
PHILADELPHIA — Voters in one of the most divided states in the country moved closer together on immigration, climate change and voter ID requirements after spending just a few days together. A diverse set of nearly 200 Pennsylvanians from the state's big cities, far-flung towns and upscale suburbs found common ground on those and a number of other hot-button topics after meeting in a hotel in downtown Philadelphia last month as part of an audacious experiment: If people got offline and actually talked face-to-face, would they become less polarized? Political scientist James Fishkin, who leads Stanford University's Deliberative Democracy Lab, has tested that theory across the globe, and each time the answer has been yes. But every year in the modern era of hyper-partisan American politics, it has become a riskier bet to make. Even in President Donald Trump's second term, though — as wars rage across the globe, technology rapidly evolves and disaffected populists in both parties surge — the results came back the same. Good-faith conversation can still help turn down the temperature on even some of the most controversial issues in national politics. 'When people have strong views, they very often have never considered the other side. And a lot of political scientists say, 'Well, that's because they're entrenched and calcified and they're in their filter bubbles,'' Fishkin said. 'But they're not quite calcified. They are movable.' Here's how the experiment known as 'America in One Room: Pennsylvania' worked: Over the course of four days, voters broke into groups of a dozen or so people to discuss a wide range of policy proposals with a moderator who helped keep the peace. The voters were selected to represent the state's electorate demographically, politically and geographically. They heard from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a 30-year-old Republican state lawmaker and advocacy group leaders across the political spectrum. And throughout the event, they took opinion surveys, the results of which were shared with POLITICO ahead of their official release. Support for a national proposal to hand out more visas to so-called low-skilled workers doubled from only 25 percent of participants at the beginning of the study to 50 percent by the end of deliberations. The number of voters favoring a plan to work with other nations to adopt net-zero greenhouse gas emission policies rose from 42 to 55 percent after they exchanged views. Pennsylvanians came together on conservative ideas, too. Voter ID requirements went from winning over 68 percent of voters to 73 percent — and became backed by a majority of Democrats. Six in 10 voters initially championed free college tuition at public colleges, but support dropped to 46 percent by the end of the event. The findings underscore the extent to which social media, geographic sorting and partisan echo chambers often fuel partisanship in the U.S. — and point to potential fixes. 'When you have long-form ability to discuss politics face to face, you can convey nuance and you can understand the emotions, drivers and backgrounds of the people that you're speaking to,' said Henry Elkus, a co-organizer of the event and founder of Helena, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with a wide-ranging mission to find solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. 'I think that's the real lesson here,' he said, 'is that democracy does work as intended when people actually are civil and can sit down with one another.' But the fight against polarization has only gotten harder in recent years. Voters' faith in democracy has eroded since the organizers first gathered the biggest-ever in-person representative sample of American voters in 2019 and proved that extremism melts away in optimal conditions. Trump has aggressively tested the limits of presidential power, daring Congress and the courts to stop him. The polarization of media — including social media — has deepened. Elkus isn't deterred by those trends, saying, 'You don't tell firefighters to stop fighting a fire if it seems hopeless.' He argued that democracy 'has to be updated' and 'this project is an attempt to interject and kind of help that growth.' One participant in the event, 32-year-old HVAC technician Matthew Drummond, said he preferred learning about policy issues by talking about them with other Pennsylvanians to following the news or social media. 'It allows you to be able to change your mind,' said Drummond, a Trump supporter from the deep-blue Philadelphia suburbs of Montgomery County. 'Hearing other people's views, it can play a factor.' Michele Berkowitz, another attendee who talked through issues in the breakout group with Drummond, said the project 'sounds wonderful in theory.' But the 73-year-old retiree from the purple Bucks County — a fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — was skeptical of its real-world impact. 'Unless the politicians and the people that make policy and people that work in the consultancies and such can actually take the information gleaned from us and apply it to something to make change, I don't know,' she said. The organizers of the experiment said they are working to make the process available to larger groups of people, including through the use of artificial intelligence. Ultimately, they hope to bring it to millions. They have also been teaming up with elected officials to try to show that their so-called deliberative polling process can be utilized to craft policy — and make the difference that Berkowitz wants. The speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, Democrat Joanna McClinton, attended the event and said that she plans to use the results to help influence voting rights and election administration legislation she has introduced. McClinton said she will 'leverage the report's findings to prioritize the policies that garnered the most support.' Along with showing that voter ID is popular, the poll revealed that a proposal to expand in-person early voting was backed by 71 percent of participants by the end of the event, up from 61 percent initially. The same plan shifted from garnering a minority of support among Republicans to a majority. The organizers also polled participants on their feelings about the state of American democracy before and after the event and found a significant shift. Three-quarters said they were dissatisfied with it at the beginning; by its conclusion, that number dropped to 54 percent. Still, that's a majority of the voters who walked out of the long weekend still feeling dissatisfied with how democracy is going in the country.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How would ordinary voters resolve Pennsylvania's big election policy debates?
America in One Room, a collaboration between Stanford University's Deliberative Democracy Lab and Helena, a nonprofit, hosted a deliberative poll in Philadelphia in June 2025 focusing on immigration, healthcare, voting, and other issues. Voters from around Pennsylvania gathered to discuss these issues and try to reach consensus on policy proposals. (Carter Walker / Votebeat) This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. After years of fruitless debate in Pennsylvania's legislature about whether and how to update the commonwealth's election laws, a civics project is trying to see whether ordinary voters have better luck reaching a consensus on issues such as early voting and voter ID. Nearly 200 Pennsylvanians gave it a shot last weekend in an effort organized by Stanford University's Deliberative Democracy Lab and Helena, a nonprofit that describes itself as a 'global problem solving organization.' The discussions among the participants, gathered in small groups at a Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia, spotlighted the way ordinary voters process the issues that fuel political rhetoric, legislative debates, and court battles. In one exchange, William Sontag, a participant from Chester County, said he was 'baffled' about what the argument against new voter ID requirements might be. Sarah Dewey, from Bucks County, told him about a friend who had been homeless for a time, with no identification. Dewey said she wasn't necessarily against voter ID, but worried that the cost of obtaining it could be prohibitive. After about 15 minutes of discussion, the group coalesced around the idea that requiring an ID to vote would be acceptable, so long as there were no barriers to getting one. They also decided to ask an expert panel later that day whether the cost of getting an ID could be considered a poll tax. Sontag, Dewey, and the rest of the participants got involved in the project after the organizers randomly selected them from across Pennsylvania, using a method meant to proportionally represent the state's geographic regions, as well as demographic and political characteristics, such as age, race, education, and political leaning. Participants were paid for their time. Focusing on a single state's policies was a novel approach for the American in One Room project, a collaborative effort between the Deliberative Democracy Lab and Helena which have organized four similar nationally focused events since 2019. This type of event is called a 'deliberative poll.' Participants are provided with relevant information on the issues and access to policy experts. They also take a survey meant to gauge their opinions both before and after the event, to see how the deliberation affected their policy preferences. A control group of residents who aren't participating in the deliberations also take the poll as a basis for comparison. The idea is to 'get a better assessment of the will of the people,' said James Fishkin, a communications and political science professor at Stanford and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. Besides elections, participants in the Pennsylvania event talked about healthcare, immigration, and housing, among other topics. Many of the election topics mirrored proposals currently being debated in Harrisburg as part of an omnibus voting reform package sponsored by state House Speaker Joanna McClinton, a Philadelphia Democrat, who answered participants' questions on election issues on the third day. Fishkin said deliberative polling can prompt policy changes, as it did during consideration of constitutional changes in Mongolia in 2019 — a process that Stanford was also involved with. Deliberative polling also played a role in energy policy debates in Texas, after the Legislature there ordered it as part of its planning process. A Helena representative said McClinton will use the results of its Pennsylvania poll to inform her priorities in ongoing negotiations with the state Senate over sweeping election legislation that passed the state House last month. Participants wrestled with a list of thorny election policy questions, including whether to install video cameras to monitor ballot drop boxes; audit a random sample of ballots to check the accuracy of election results; implement in-person early voting; allow counties to begin processing mail ballots ahead of Election Day; create criminal penalties for misleading, deceiving, or intimidating voters; preregister voters at age 16; and require photo identification to vote. Many of those policies are part of McClinton's election bill, which organizers said they used to select the topics for discussion. In the group discussion observed by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, participants reached agreement on many of the questions posed to them, but it's hard to know if they had all the information. For instance, participants were assigned to consider whether Pennsylvania should allow 11 days of early voting, as McClinton's bill proposes. The briefing document listed increased accessibility as an argument for the proposal, and increased cost as an argument against, among other pros and cons. One factor they didn't consider: that the state's current version of quasi-early voting — in which voters can apply for, complete, and return a mail ballot in person at an elections office — has prompted long lines and confusion. Pennsylvania election officials said they expect that to be an issue for them and for voters in the 2026 and 2028 federal elections. Instead, the participants in that group looked at early voting only from a redundancy standpoint. 'If mail-in ballots remain, then I don't see a need for this,' Dewey, from Bucks County, said. Others in the room agreed with her. Roy Bell, a poll worker from Delaware County, cited the cost of adding personnel for early voting, and election officials' difficulties in enough poll workers. In addition, the briefing materials provided to participants were not entirely accurate. For example, the section on pre-canvassing mail ballots said Pennsylvania 'currently permits election officials to begin processing mail-in and absentee ballots ahead of time but restricts how early this can start.' Pennsylvania's election code does not allow any pre-canvassing — the technical term for this process — of mail ballots before Election Day. It also said that an argument against allowing pre-canvassing is that it 'could increase wait times before results.' It's actually the opposite: Election officials say allowing pre-canvassing would speed up results. Other portions of the briefing were accurate but incomplete, such as a section on post-election audits that did not mention that Pennsylvania already requires two such audits. Some of the citations in the report also included broken links. Votebeat and Spotlight PA used GPTzero, a tool that detects whether text is generated using artificial intelligence, to see whether any of the election portions of the briefing had been written by AI. The tool found that for many of the sections on election issues between 80% and 100% of the text was AI-generated. WITF, an NPR affiliate in Harrisburg, also found errors in other areas of the document. A spokesperson for the Deliberative Democracy Lab said the briefing materials were developed by research assistants and incorporated materials from previous events. An advisory committee — only one member of which was from Pennsylvania — reviewed the materials, and AI was used to help address recommendations and simplify the language to 'an 8th-grade reading level, reflecting the average level of a US adult,' the spokesperson said in an email response to questions. Some information, including the currently required audits, was excluded so as not to overwhelm the participants, the spokesperson said. Organizers said they were confident in the integrity of the deliberations, and would note any errors in their final results. Due to the error in the pre-canvassing pros and cons list flagged by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, the Deliberative Democracy Lab said data from that proposal would be excluded. 'These errors appear to have been introduced during an editing and review process of human-created material in which some AI tools were used to assist,' Fishkin said. 'We apologize for these errors and are reviewing our processes to ensure that such issues do not occur in the future,' Fishkin said. 'We are, however, confident that in totality, the materials provided to participants were reliable and allowed for a fact-based civil dialogue, which is at the heart of the Deliberative Polling process.' Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@ Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
