The Role of Persuasion in Deliberative Opinion Change

Abstract

How does discussion lead to opinion change during deliberation? I formulate and test hypotheses based on theories of persuasion, and examine them against other possible sources of deliberative opinion change. Through detailed analysis of a nationally representative deliberative event I create a full discussion network for each small group that deliberated by recording who said what, the argument quality for what was said, and to whom it was directed. I find that well-justified arguments made in the context of direct engagement between peers are a consistent predictor of opinion change. Individual-level persuasion, not knowledge-driven refinement or extremity, drives most opinion change. These results show that further deliberative research needs to account for persuasion when explaining deliberative opinion change.

Keywords:

• persuasion
• deliberation

Notes

1. Transcripts from one small group were missing and were excluded. This leaves a total of 15 groups in all following analyses.

2. Full distributions across the four levels are presented in the results section. Where disagreement occurred the majority ruled.

3. Statistics for item difficulty and discrimination are available in the Supplemental material. Full sample demographics are also included in the Supplemental material.

4. I collapse “inferior justification,” “qualified justification,” and “sophisticated justification” to create a justified/unjustified dichotomous measure. The justification variable was collapsed because of sparseness. Consideration of each level of justification would be ideal, but there are too few examples of sophisticated and inferior justification across the issues to perform meaningful analysis. There are no significant differences between the three levels of justification, but I cannot determine if this is because there are no differences or if this is because I do not have enough observations at the different levels to identify differences.

5. Each message was not coded for its ideological thrust. I assume that participants voice opinions consistent with their ideological position. A spot check of 100 statements shows this is a reasonable assumption.

6. Statements from those with higher education, which is often associated with status and expertise (see Peterson, 1990; Verba & Nie, 1987), had no effect on attitude change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean J. Westwood

Sean J. Westwood is Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Dartmouth College.