Can Debate and Deliberation Reduce Partisan Divisions? Evidence from a Study of High School Students

ABSTRACT

This paper presents findings from a study of high school students (N = 165) engaged in discussions of controversial political issues within Close Up Washington’s civic education program. We report findings from pre- and post surveys to investigate how the group’s views about the issues were affected by the discussion strategy they experienced. We compare two strategies: a deliberative small group activity and a team debate. We find that the deliberative strategy promoted more participation, promoted more comfort with the discussion, and resulted in more consensus within the group as shown by comparing pre- and post surveys. In the debate strategy, students reported less participation, more discomfort during the activity, and more polarized views on the post-survey compared with the pre-survey. Despite these differences, students reported enjoying each activity at about the same rates, though girls were more likely to report negative experiences. The findings suggest that using deliberative strategies in social studies classes with high political diversity may be an effective approach for mitigating the divisive attitudes that dominate the hyperpartisan context within the United States.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our reviewers for their helpful feedback as we developed this paper. Many thanks also to Alison Cohen and Sandy Pope for coordinating and editing this special issue. We are grateful to the team of NCSU students who worked on this project: Arine Lowery, Nada Wafa, and Jason Savo. Thanks also to the Close Up Foundation for their support of this work.

Notes

¹ The density plots are a smoothed representation of the distribution of attitudes. The response categories for the survey questions about issues attitudes ranged from 1 to 7. To get a clearer sense of the smoothed distribution, the density plots are plotted using a range of 1 to 10.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded through the Faculty Research Development Program at North Carolina State University. The Close Up Foundation contributed to the incentives for participants who completed surveys.

Notes on contributors

Paula McAvoy

Paula McAvoy, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Social Studies education at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on empirical and philosophical questions related to the aims and practices of democratic education. She is the co-author with Diana Hess of The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (Routledge, 2015), which won the 2016 Outstanding Book of the Year from AERA and the 2017 Grawemeyer Award for Education.

Gregory E. McAvoy

Gregory E. McAvoy, PhD, is Professor of Political Science and Department Head at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. In his research, he studies American public opinion with a focus on the role of partisanship in shaping citizen attitudes. He examines these issues in Collective Political Rationality: Partisan Thinking and Why It’s Not All Bad (Routledge, 2015).