Christopher F Karpowitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 262249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher F Karpowitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher F |
| FAMILY NAME | Karpowitz |
| SIGNATURE | KARPOWITZ C F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brigham Young University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9782-9856 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 632 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
How Durable Are Experimental Increases in Women’s Representation
Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental ga…
The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging
Prominent scholars have argued that reframing political positions and issues in terms of moral foundations that appeal to conservatives or liberals can attract more individual-level support for those positions, even when such support would be unexpected. Such a change of attitude would be promising for those looking to narrow ideological divides. As two independent research teams, we set out to explore the promising evidence along these lines and…
Handbook of Innovations in Political Psychology
Race, Voice, and Authority in Discussion Groups
Few studies examine how often people of color voice their views or shape the discussion in civic or political decision-making groups. Existing studies do not link participants’ private preferences to what they say and lack data on racial inequalities in individuals’ public speech. We analyze a large sample of citizens randomized to groups tasked with deciding on punishment for corporate malfeasance, an issue of consequence for communities of colo…
Strength in Numbers? Gender Composition, Leadership, and Women’s Influence in Teams
The Effects of Racial Diversity in Citizen Decision-Making Bodies
Selecting for Masculinity
The gap between women's representation in the Democratic and Republican parties has grown significantly in the last three decades. We argue existing explanations undervalue voters' contributions to this trend by focusing on voter responses to candidate sex rather than candidate gender. We theorize that Republican voters (especially the most conservative) prefer masculine candidates in intraparty and entry-level elections. Because sex and gender a…
How Social Context Affects Immigration Attitudes
Selection bias represents a persistent challenge to understanding the effects of social context on political attitudes. We attempt to overcome this challenge by focusing on a unique sample of individuals who were assigned to a new social context for an extended period, without control over the location they were sent: missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We interviewed a sample of 1,804 young people before and after t…
Experimenting with List Experiments
List experimentation is a common survey methodology that purports to reduce or eliminate social desirability bias. While some studies have assessed list experimentation’s effectiveness in achieving that goal, to our knowledge, this is the first ever experimental evaluation of interviewer effects on list experiment performance. We embedded a list experiment about immigration attitudes in an in-person survey administered to 718 white respondents. R…
Moral Individualism in Modern Politics
We reexamine the concept of individualism and its political implications. While both political scientists and social psychologists agree that individualism is a core value for many Americans, political science has primarily associated the concept with views about economic mobility. Building upon insights from political theory, we argue that a narrow focus on economics overlooks key elements of individualism and its relation to political life. Wit…
Changing Hearts and Minds? Why Media Messages Designed to Foster Empathy Often Fail
Politicians and social activists frequently employ media designed to "change hearts and minds" by humanizing out-groups. These messages, it is assumed, lead to empathic concern, which motivates individuals to reconsider punitive policy attitudes. How effective is this approach? Using two experiments, we find that while media messages humanized Latinos for all respondents, the treatment messages produced the largest empathy response among those wi…
What Leads Racially Resentful Voters to Choose Black Candidates
In studies of voting behavior, racial resentment has consistently been associated with decreased support for black candidates. In this article we bring together a unique collection of observational data and survey experiments to show how, in the certain contexts, exactly the opposite occurs: racially resentful voters prefer to vote for a black candidate over a white competitor. Higher levels of racial resentment do not imply an unyielding opposit…
Do Enclaves Remediate Social Inequality
Do women benefit from participating in women-only, "enclave" groups? Specifically, do such groups benefit their individual members? This question underlies a number of influential normative theories of inequality but remains underexplored despite the ubiquity of these groups in the organizational life of legislative, party, civic, education, and interest-group settings. This article develops multiple objective and subjective dimensions of individ…
Who Gets the Credit? Legislative Responsiveness and Evaluations of Members, Parties, and the US Congress – Addendum
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Who Gets the Credit? Legislative Responsiveness and Evaluations of Members, Parties, and the US Congress
This article considers the hypothesis that the positive actions taken by members of Congress (MCs) influence citizens’ evaluations of them, their party, and Congress as an institution. We begin with a look at the available cross-sectional survey data on contact with legislators and legislator and institutional approval. Their legislative responsiveness appears to have a small spillover effect on institutions. However, when we employ a unique pane…
How to Elect More Women
Women are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies, and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates (supply). However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. We designed an original field experiment to test whether messages from party leaders can affect women's electoral success. The experimental treatments involved messages from a state Re…
A Conversation with Jane J. Mansbridge and Martha McCoy
Jane J. Mansbridge, Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, and Martha McCoy, Executive Director of Everyday Democracy, discuss deliberative equity and equality in theory and practice. They identify potential tensions and trade-offs between the two values and between these values and other deliberative aims. They discuss how practitioners have attempted to promote equal and equitable deliberative processes and th…
Affinity Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity
There is growing appreciation for the value of holding enclave dialogue and deliberation among marginalized peoples in their own affinity groups, as one stage in a larger conversation with the broader public or with public officials. These enclaves may be disempowered by enduring political inequalities, or in relation to a particular issue under discussion, or by the act of deliberation itself. Recent research and practice has demonstrated that w…
Equality and Equity in Deliberation
This article introduces the special issue focused on equality and equity in deliberative democracy. The essay proposes some initial working definitions of equity and equality and offers reasons why scholars and practitioners should attend to both. We outline the basic structure of the issue’s three sections and preview the contributors’ articles, with special attention to the opportunities and the challenges of achieving equality and equity withi…
Equity and Inclusion in Online Community Forums
Online forums pose unique challenges and opportunities for creating equitable public discussions. In this interview, Steven Clift, Executive Director and Founder of E-Democracy.org, shares lessons learned about how to attract new immigrants and refugees to place-based online communities, seeding and facilitating discussions among ethnically diverse residents, and fostering civil discourse. He emphasizes that building a thriving and diverse neighb…
Equity in School Forums
American school boards, parent teacher associations, and other school forums are crucial sites for participatory and deliberative democracy, yet they often involve debilitating inequities of power among school officials and parents, adults and students, and parents from more and less privileged backgrounds. In this interview, John Landesman, a Senior Associate at Everyday Democracy, discusses how he addresses power differences in dialogues aimed …
Ideals of Inclusion in Deliberation
Building on prior thinking about political representation in democratic deliberation, we argue for four ideals of inclusion, each of which is most appropriate to a different situation. These principles of inclusion depend not only on the goals of a deliberation, but also on its level of empowerment in the political system, and its openness to all who want to participate. Holistic and open deliberations can most legitimately incorporate and decide…
Power, Gender, and Group Discussion
This article reviews the growing literature on the ways in which gender informs our understanding of political psychology and how studies of political psychology shed light on the meaning of gender in society and politics. It focuses on gender gaps in contemporary American politics, where men tend to be more conservative and to engage in more influence‐seeking action than women. The article develops explanations for these gaps and tests them with…
Who's In and Who's Out
What are the boundaries for discussing a candidate's religion? In the 2008 and the 2012 presidential campaigns, the religious beliefs and practices of at least one of the candidates became a subject of intense scrutiny from the media and the public. To ascertain the limits of social discourse for religious out-group, we conducted a survey experiment on the 2012 CCES survey. We find strong evidence that norms of social discourse do not apply to al…
Gender and Women's Influence in Public Settings
Does gender equality in public meetings improve as women's numbers grow? Research applying critical mass theory to the exercise of influence in public discussion and decision making reveals a complicated story. Women have made significant progress in education, employment, and the attainment of elected office; yet, they continue to lag behind their male counterparts in substantive, symbolic, and authoritative representation. Across political, non…
Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation
Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alter…
A Field Experiment on Legislators’ Home Styles
We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway…
Deliberative Democracy and Inequality
Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. I…
Does Descriptive Representation Facilitate Women's Distinctive Voice? How Gender Composition and Decision Rules Affect Deliberation
Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberating groups? We address this question and go beyond to ask if the effects of descriptive representation also depend on decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions, randomizing the group's gender composition and decision rule, including many groups, and linking individuals’ predeliberation attitudes to their speech and to postdeliber…
Gender Inequality in Deliberation
When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of in…
How to Elect More Women
Women are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies, and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates (supply). However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. We designed an original field experiment to test whether messages from party leaders can affect women's electoral success. The experimental treatments involved messages from a state Re…
Political Norms and the Private Act of Voting
Journal Article Political Norms and the Private Act of Voting Get access Christopher F. Karpowitz, Christopher F. Karpowitz * *Address correspondence to Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University Department of Political Science, 745 SWKT, Provo, UT 84602, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Quin Monson, J. Quin Monson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
What Leads Racially Resentful Voters to Choose Black Candidates
In studies of voting behavior, racial resentment has consistently been associated with decreased support for black candidates. In this article we bring together a unique collection of observational data and survey experiments to show how, in the certain contexts, exactly the opposite occurs: racially resentful voters prefer to vote for a black candidate over a white competitor. Higher levels of racial resentment do not imply an unyielding opposit…
Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections
By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, govern…
Do Enclaves Remediate Social Inequality
Do women benefit from participating in women-only, "enclave" groups? Specifically, do such groups benefit their individual members? This question underlies a number of influential normative theories of inequality but remains underexplored despite the ubiquity of these groups in the organizational life of legislative, party, civic, education, and interest-group settings. This article develops multiple objective and subjective dimensions of individ…
Selecting for Masculinity
The gap between women's representation in the Democratic and Republican parties has grown significantly in the last three decades. We argue existing explanations undervalue voters' contributions to this trend by focusing on voter responses to candidate sex rather than candidate gender. We theorize that Republican voters (especially the most conservative) prefer masculine candidates in intraparty and entry-level elections. Because sex and gender a…
Why women's numbers elevate women's influence, and when they do not
Critical mass theory argues that women's numbers are a major cause of women's status and authority in a group. Applications of the theory to political settings have yielded mixed support for the theory. We unpack one mechanism that can explain when, why, and how numbers aid women. That mechanism is the norm of communication during group discussion. Our focus is on how women build or lose authority while they interact with men. We argue that numbe…
Groups and Deliberation
We present a group‐based approach to the study of deliberation. Deliberation occurs in groups, yet many studies of deliberation do not take the group as a unit of analysis. We argue that group composition and the attendant social dynamics to which they give rise are an important aspect of deliberation. We offer several examples of ways to study these effects, including the interaction of gender composition and the group's decision rule in the con…
Power, Gender, and Group Discussion
This article reviews the growing literature on the ways in which gender informs our understanding of political psychology and how studies of political psychology shed light on the meaning of gender in society and politics. It focuses on gender gaps in contemporary American politics, where men tend to be more conservative and to engage in more influence‐seeking action than women. The article develops explanations for these gaps and tests them with…
Good Publicity
Although deliberative democratic theory values the principle of publicity, few empirical studies systematically assess the public communication of civic groups that deliberate over policy. The proliferation of such groups in contemporary politics, and of uncertainty about their legitimacy, suggests the need for such study. Drawing on contemporary deliberative theory, we derive a set of legitimate publicity indicators for assessing how well groups…
Changing Hearts and Minds? Why Media Messages Designed to Foster Empathy Often Fail
Politicians and social activists frequently employ media designed to "change hearts and minds" by humanizing out-groups. These messages, it is assumed, lead to empathic concern, which motivates individuals to reconsider punitive policy attitudes. How effective is this approach? Using two experiments, we find that while media messages humanized Latinos for all respondents, the treatment messages produced the largest empathy response among those wi…
The Local Roots of American Inequality
We agree with the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy that not only the quality but the very legitimacy of American democracy is threatened by persistent and rising inequalities of political power and influence. Class conflict is as old as democracy itself, and there is an intrinsic tension between the inequalities generated by free markets and the political equality that is at the core of democracy. No institutional fixes or policy r…
Who's In and Who's Out
What are the boundaries for discussing a candidate's religion? In the 2008 and the 2012 presidential campaigns, the religious beliefs and practices of at least one of the candidates became a subject of intense scrutiny from the media and the public. To ascertain the limits of social discourse for religious out-group, we conducted a survey experiment on the 2012 CCES survey. We find strong evidence that norms of social discourse do not apply to al…
Who Caucuses? An Experimental Approach to Institutional Design and Electoral Participation
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America's democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results sho…
How Social Context Affects Immigration Attitudes
Selection bias represents a persistent challenge to understanding the effects of social context on political attitudes. We attempt to overcome this challenge by focusing on a unique sample of individuals who were assigned to a new social context for an extended period, without control over the location they were sent: missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We interviewed a sample of 1,804 young people before and after t…
Moral Individualism in Modern Politics
We reexamine the concept of individualism and its political implications. While both political scientists and social psychologists agree that individualism is a core value for many Americans, political science has primarily associated the concept with views about economic mobility. Building upon insights from political theory, we argue that a narrow focus on economics overlooks key elements of individualism and its relation to political life. Wit…
Who Gets the Credit? Legislative Responsiveness and Evaluations of Members, Parties, and the US Congress
This article considers the hypothesis that the positive actions taken by members of Congress (MCs) influence citizens’ evaluations of them, their party, and Congress as an institution. We begin with a look at the available cross-sectional survey data on contact with legislators and legislator and institutional approval. Their legislative responsiveness appears to have a small spillover effect on institutions. However, when we employ a unique pane…
Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton? The Decline of the Short-Term Supreme Court Justice
Against the backdrop of a decade-long wait for a Supreme Court vacancy, legal academics from across the political spectrum have recently proposed or supported significant constitutional or statutory reforms designed to limit the terms of Supreme Court justices and increase the pace of turnover at the Court. Fearing a Court that is increasingly out of touch with the national mood and staffed by justices of advanced age, advocates of term and age l…
The Effects of Racial Diversity in Citizen Decision-Making Bodies
Experimenting with List Experiments
List experimentation is a common survey methodology that purports to reduce or eliminate social desirability bias. While some studies have assessed list experimentation’s effectiveness in achieving that goal, to our knowledge, this is the first ever experimental evaluation of interviewer effects on list experiment performance. We embedded a list experiment about immigration attitudes in an in-person survey administered to 718 white respondents. R…
Disagreement and Consensus
This analysis compares a consensus-oriented procedure, Princeton Future, with a more adversarial procedure, the public meetings of the Princeton, N.J. borough council, organized as public hearings. It finds that the consensus-oriented procedure failed to pick up significant conflicting interests among the citizens and as a consequence failed to provide venues for discussing and possibly negotiating those interests. It advises that deliberative de…
The Local Roots of American Inequality
We agree with the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy that not only the quality but the very legitimacy of American democracy is threatened by persistent and rising inequalities of political power and influence. Class conflict is as old as democracy itself, and there is an intrinsic tension between the inequalities generated by free markets and the political equality that is at the core of democracy. No institutional fixes or policy r…
Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton? The Decline of the Short-Term Supreme Court Justice
Against the backdrop of a decade-long wait for a Supreme Court vacancy, legal academics from across the political spectrum have recently proposed or supported significant constitutional or statutory reforms designed to limit the terms of Supreme Court justices and increase the pace of turnover at the Court. Fearing a Court that is increasingly out of touch with the national mood and staffed by justices of advanced age, advocates of term and age l…
Groups and Deliberation
We present a group‐based approach to the study of deliberation. Deliberation occurs in groups, yet many studies of deliberation do not take the group as a unit of analysis. We argue that group composition and the attendant social dynamics to which they give rise are an important aspect of deliberation. We offer several examples of ways to study these effects, including the interaction of gender composition and the group's decision rule in the con…
What Can a President Learn from the News Media? The Instructive Case of Richard Nixon
This study examines the media diet of Richard Nixon, whose exposure to the news consisted almost entirely of a White House-produced daily news summary. Nixon staffers repeatedly asserted that the summary was the most effective way to give the president a comprehensive, objective account of the previous day’s reporting. While the summaries covered a wide range of media sources, analysis of the framing and filtering done by the White House raises d…
Deliberative Democracy and Inequality
Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. I…
Political Norms and the Private Act of Voting
Journal Article Political Norms and the Private Act of Voting Get access Christopher F. Karpowitz, Christopher F. Karpowitz * *Address correspondence to Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University Department of Political Science, 745 SWKT, Provo, UT 84602, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Quin Monson, J. Quin Monson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections
By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, govern…
A Field Experiment on Legislators’ Home Styles
We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway…
Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation
Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alter…
Good Publicity
Although deliberative democratic theory values the principle of publicity, few empirical studies systematically assess the public communication of civic groups that deliberate over policy. The proliferation of such groups in contemporary politics, and of uncertainty about their legitimacy, suggests the need for such study. Drawing on contemporary deliberative theory, we derive a set of legitimate publicity indicators for assessing how well groups…
The Silent Sex
Do women participate in and influence meetings equally with men? Does gender shape how a meeting is run and whose voices are heard? This book shows how the gender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, the kinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group ultimately decides. It argues that efforts to improve the representation of women will fall short unless…
The Silent Sex
Gender Inequality in Deliberation
When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of in…
Does Descriptive Representation Facilitate Women's Distinctive Voice? How Gender Composition and Decision Rules Affect Deliberation
Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberating groups? We address this question and go beyond to ask if the effects of descriptive representation also depend on decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions, randomizing the group's gender composition and decision rule, including many groups, and linking individuals’ predeliberation attitudes to their speech and to postdeliber…
Gender and Women's Influence in Public Settings
Does gender equality in public meetings improve as women's numbers grow? Research applying critical mass theory to the exercise of influence in public discussion and decision making reveals a complicated story. Women have made significant progress in education, employment, and the attainment of elected office; yet, they continue to lag behind their male counterparts in substantive, symbolic, and authoritative representation. Across political, non…
How group forces demonstrate the malleability of gendered behavior
In this brief response, we take up several themes raised by the scholars who responded to our work, paying special attention to the interaction between individuals and group contexts. We argue that our study represents a productive first step in the attempt to understand how norms shape individual behavior, discursive dynamics, collective outcomes, and overall authority in small-group settings
Why women's numbers elevate women's influence, and when they do not
Critical mass theory argues that women's numbers are a major cause of women's status and authority in a group. Applications of the theory to political settings have yielded mixed support for the theory. We unpack one mechanism that can explain when, why, and how numbers aid women. That mechanism is the norm of communication during group discussion. Our focus is on how women build or lose authority while they interact with men. We argue that numbe…
Who Caucuses? An Experimental Approach to Institutional Design and Electoral Participation
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America's democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results sho…
A Conversation with Jane J. Mansbridge and Martha McCoy
Jane J. Mansbridge, Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, and Martha McCoy, Executive Director of Everyday Democracy, discuss deliberative equity and equality in theory and practice. They identify potential tensions and trade-offs between the two values and between these values and other deliberative aims. They discuss how practitioners have attempted to promote equal and equitable deliberative processes and th…
Affinity Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity
There is growing appreciation for the value of holding enclave dialogue and deliberation among marginalized peoples in their own affinity groups, as one stage in a larger conversation with the broader public or with public officials. These enclaves may be disempowered by enduring political inequalities, or in relation to a particular issue under discussion, or by the act of deliberation itself. Recent research and practice has demonstrated that w…
Equality and Equity in Deliberation
This article introduces the special issue focused on equality and equity in deliberative democracy. The essay proposes some initial working definitions of equity and equality and offers reasons why scholars and practitioners should attend to both. We outline the basic structure of the issue’s three sections and preview the contributors’ articles, with special attention to the opportunities and the challenges of achieving equality and equity withi…
Equity and Inclusion in Online Community Forums
Online forums pose unique challenges and opportunities for creating equitable public discussions. In this interview, Steven Clift, Executive Director and Founder of E-Democracy.org, shares lessons learned about how to attract new immigrants and refugees to place-based online communities, seeding and facilitating discussions among ethnically diverse residents, and fostering civil discourse. He emphasizes that building a thriving and diverse neighb…
Equity in School Forums
American school boards, parent teacher associations, and other school forums are crucial sites for participatory and deliberative democracy, yet they often involve debilitating inequities of power among school officials and parents, adults and students, and parents from more and less privileged backgrounds. In this interview, John Landesman, a Senior Associate at Everyday Democracy, discusses how he addresses power differences in dialogues aimed …
Ideals of Inclusion in Deliberation
Building on prior thinking about political representation in democratic deliberation, we argue for four ideals of inclusion, each of which is most appropriate to a different situation. These principles of inclusion depend not only on the goals of a deliberation, but also on its level of empowerment in the political system, and its openness to all who want to participate. Holistic and open deliberations can most legitimately incorporate and decide…
Political science (39 works) · Politics (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (21 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Democracy (15 works) · Social Psychology (14 works)