Case Study - United States
Abstract
“America In One Room” was a deliberative polling event held in Dallas, Texas, where 526 Americans discussed key national issues like immigration and healthcare over four days. The event, marked by its intensive format and expert panels, successfully moderated extreme political views among participants. Surprisingly, both Republicans and Democrats shifted toward more centrist positions, fostering understanding across divides. This process demonstrated the potential of deliberation in reducing polarization, highlighted by personal transformations and newfound empathy among attendees, as revealed in follow-up interviews for the “Voices from America In One Room” podcast series.
Transcript
In this lesson, we’ll talk about America In One Room. This one was widely covered by media and press from around the world. It was a project done in person with 526 Americans. They all flew together to Dallas, Texas, and spent about four days together in a resort. And basically once they got in, they were not allowed to leave. All expenses paid, and they also received an honorarium on top of that before they left.
The topics that they covered over these four days included immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, environment, and the economy. And during this event, we had a few then presidential candidates show up, both Democratic and Republican, and a number of panels from experts that helped answer people’s questions.
This event brought together a representative sample of the entire United States, and what was so amazing about this event was the changes of opinions that we saw after deliberation.
First of all, many people thought that having this event at this time in the United States was pretty impossible. 2019 was a time when there was quite extreme polarization, not that there isn’t now, but at the time, quite extreme polarization.
And people really wondered whether participants that saw themselves as liberal and conservative could really be together in a room and have these types of really difficult conversations. What we found was not only were they able to have these conversations, but many people actually shifted their opinions.
One of the topics was immigration. And surprisingly, we had many people who self-identified themselves as Republican shift their opinions dramatically about immigration. What before was very strong support for not letting asylum seekers in or not letting a certain amount of visas in changed from, you know, having a nine or a 10 on a zero to 10 scale, moving them to a seven or eight, which meant that a significant percentage of people who self-identified themselves as Republicans shifted their opinions to a more moderate level.
Self-identified Democrats also shifted their opinions as well, and on topics that were quite interesting. You know, topics like minimum wage or wealth tax often seem as more progressive or liberal leaning policies. But Democrats in this group decided that, you know, actually, those are not such great policies at this time, and Democrats actually moderated themselves closer to the middle.
So in these discussions, we found that liberals and conservatives were moving closer to each other and moderating their opinions, which is something that many of us did not think could happen at times like this.
And deliberation may not solve all the problems, but it actually made people move closer just a little bit. In my podcast series, Voices from America in One Room, I interviewed a number of participants, liberals, and conservatives. They did say they didn’t necessarily change a lot of opinions, but what they did say was that they came to understand what other people’s lives were like, other people that were not like them.
One person shared that it was really impossible to meet people that were not within his socioeconomic class. Basically, he had never met someone who was working for minimum wage. And in his small group, he actually had somebody that was working minimum wage and on programs like Snap, the food assistance programs, and listening and understanding on how somebody could be living actually paycheck to paycheck, really surprised him. And this person actually gave his own 300 dollar honorarium from the event and sent it off to this person, to the group, who was struggling to make ends meet.
It was stories that I learned in this podcast series, following up with these participants a year after the event where I learned the impact that America In One Room had on all of these participants. And the next lessons will cover impacts deliberative polling and deliberation has had around the world.
Watch the Full Series on Deliberative Polling by the Stanford Democracy Lab x Rustic Pathways
- Introduction to Deliberative Polling
- Polling
- Deliberation Case Study: United States
- Deliberation Case Study: Europe
- Critics of Deliberation
- Myths About Deliberation
- Deliberation Case Study: China
- Deliberation Case Study: Africa
- Deliberating Across Divides
- The Future of Deliberation
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