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Abstract
This study uses quasi-experimental data from participants in structured and moderated face-to-face deliberations on sexual minority rights in Poland (n =182) and builds on evidence that disagreement perceived during these deliberations mobilizes extreme participants to political action. This study takes the next step and tests the processes underlying such mobilization. Drawing on social movement scholarship and using Structural Equation Modeling, this study shows that perceived disagreement evokes a collective action frame among extreme participants and—through this frame—further mobilizes them to both communicative and also public and confrontational actions around sexual minority rights. Although scholars often see citizen-to-citizen deliberation as applicable to mitigating conflicts, this evidence suggests that deliberative settings may deepen cleavages between oppositional factions.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Michael Delli Carpini, Dr. Vincent Price, and Dr. Michael Hennessy from the Annenberg School for Communication, as well as Konrad Maj and a research team from the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.
Notes
1. The label “extreme” is used because the survey item that assessed this factor taps the “extremity” component of strong attitudes (Krosnick, Booninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993). This label does not contain negative normative evaluations. In fact, as Young (2001) notes: “[t]he common rhetorical move of official powers to paint all protest action with the tar of ‘extremism’ should be resisted by any-one committed to social justice and reasonable communication” (p. 676).
2. Not all scholars think that deliberation should be unifying or lead to compromise. In fact, some theorists note that deliberation should reaffirm conflict and crystallize the divergent positions (e.g., Mouffe, 2000; Young, 2001).
3. Dialogue scholars also recognize that contexts in which cultural and political differences emerge may require us to rethink some assumptions about dialogue as an antidote to social problems (e.g., Simpson, 2008). These scholars caution that dialogue—especially on such issues as racial divisions—may prove a “dangerous business (McPhail, 2004, p. 215). Also, while some note that participants should suspend their judgments for a successful dialogue to occur, others posit that—on personally important issues—this requirement is a “comforting delusion” (p. 215). Further, scholars recognize that some conceptions of dialogue seem to presume that debated issues are not politically charged and the differences between people are superficial, presumptions that often do not hold and that may obscure the power differentials operating in some settings (Deetz & Simpson, 2004). Rather than countering conflict, these scholars make it a centerpiece, noting that in dialogue “each voice wants to be heard first and to listen later” (Hawes, 2004, p. 179) and seeing conflict as necessary for meaningful discursive encounters (see Deetz & Simpson, 2004; Hawes, 2004).
4. Social movement scholars also note that collective action frames are developed via contested processes (see Benford & Snow, 2000). In this context, three main challenges are studied: “counterframing by movement opponents, bystanders, and the media; frame disputes within movements; and the dialectic between frames and events” (p. 625). Studies on counterframing are most relevant here, as they focus on attempts by opponents to challenge the movement's frames and on reframing activities by the movement. This research tends to analyze reframing strategies, frame contests’ outcomes, and how media frames are countered by the movements, rather than collective action frames as enhanced by direct interactions with opponents, during group discussions for example.
5. Using AAPOR Response Rate RR1, participation rate is 31%. Although this is relatively low, three things need to be kept in mind. First, of the 599 people who were contacted, for many cases no response was received, the e-mail was returned, the telephone number was not in service, or the recipient was not based in Warsaw (at least 107 contacts involved an invalid number or e-mail). Because these cases were not systematically tracked, the calculation classifies them as unknown eligibility. Yet, they should be excluded as ineligible, which would increase the RR. Also, many people who were contacted wanted to join the study. Because the PI's stay in Poland was short, those people were thanked for their interest. Third, a majority of those who were contacted did participate. It also needs to be noted that because the recruitment process was purposive, RR for the recruitment stage cannot be computed. Also, due to logistic problems some groups had four or five participants.
6. The decision-making element was not included. Asking deliberators to decide on several proposals would create pressures, artificial to the extent that deliberators could not influence the process.
7. One person did not complete the Feeling Thermometer; thus, one case is missing.
8. This had two advantages over doing separate analyses for the two groups. First, it provided a test for the significance of any differences between the groups. Also, if there were no differences or if the differences concerned only a few model parameters, the simultaneous analysis provided more accurate estimates than would be obtained from two separate single-group analyses (see Arbuckle, 2007).
9. This difference results from the fact that SEM models accounted for collective action frame as a mediator. Retesting the OLS models with collective action frame as a control yielded an insignificant interaction term between opinion extremity and perceived disagreement, b=.09, p=.37.