Michael A Neblo
Biographic Data
| ID | 984892 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael A Neblo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael A |
| FAMILY NAME | Neblo |
| SIGNATURE | NEBLO M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6723-0738 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 749 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
A randomized field trial on motives for consulting with elected officials
Scholars know little about participation in consultative events such as town halls, and even less about newer modalities, such as telephone town halls. We study participation in such events with a large, randomized field trial in which Australian voters received varying invitations to a telephone town hall with their representative. In addition to invitations framed prospectively or retrospectively , a control condition provided no rationale for …
Listening as Power in Political Communication
Advancing deliberative reform in a parliamentary system: Prospects for Recursive Representation
Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond ‘minimalist’ notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for ‘recursive representation’, which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We…
Testing the Benefits of Public Deliberation
Public deliberation grows increasingly prevalent yet remains costly in terms of money and time. Accordingly, some suggest supplanting talk‐based practices with individual, “deliberation within.” Yet we have little evidence either way on the additional benefits of public deliberation over its individual variant. We evaluate the benefits of public deliberation with a field experiment. With the cooperation of two sitting US Senators, we recruited se…
Pathways of Peer Influence on Major Choice
Peers influence students' academic decisions and outcomes. For example, several studies with strong claims to causality demonstrate that peers affect the choice of and persistence in majors. One remaining issue, however, has stymied efforts to translate this evidence into actionable interventions: the literature has not grappled adequately with the fact that in natural settings, students typically select most of their peers. The bulk of causal ev…
Does Familiarity Breed Esteem? A Field Experiment on Emergent Attitudes Toward Members of Congress
Canonical theories of democratic representation envision legislators cultivating familiarity to enhance esteem among their constituents. Some scholars, however, argue that familiarity breeds contempt, which if true would undermine incentives for effective representation. Survey respondents who are unfamiliar with their legislator tend not to provide substantive answers to attitude questions, and so we are missing key evidence necessary to adjudic…
Deliberative Field Experiments
Deliberative democrats aim to reform real-world politics. This goal, however, poses a dilemma for researchers assessing deliberation. Researchers can study deliberation through controlled but artificial laboratory and survey experiments. They can confidently infer causality (high internal validity) but cannot be sure that deliberation will operate the same way in applied politics (low external validity). Meanwhile, researchers can observe natural…
Active Is as Active Does: Deliberative and Non-Deliberative Political Communication in Context
The development of theories of citizens’ political communication has been hindered by a debate over whether such communication is best characterized as deliberative or non-deliberative. This article aims to overcome that impasse with a new account of citizens’ political communication informed by theories of message production and sense-making: the goals–sense-making–justification (GSJ) model. This model holds that citizens’ political-communicativ…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Capturing the Public: Beyond Technocracy & Populism in the U.S. Administrative State
The core problem of the administrative state is not its own legitimacy, but its role in creating a more wide-ranging legitimacy crisis in American society. The particular problem is that while government administration is necessary in a complex modern society, the mere existence of something as powerful as the bureaucracy is an invitation toward a kind of power politics that undermines the legitimacy of American government as a whole. We can best…
Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions
Critics of deliberative democracy have worried that deliberation may mirror (or even exacerbate) inequalities in participation across categories such as gender, race, and age. Accordingly, we investigate the potential for technology and design to ameliorate these concerns, looking at the extent to which online deliberative sessions facilitate inclusive participation. In a large study of online deliberation (over 1600 participants nested in hundre…
A Plague on Politics? The Covid Crisis, Expertise, and the Future of Legitimation
Governments rely more and more on experts to manage the increasingly complex problems posed by a growing, diversifying, globalizing world. Surplus technocracy, however, usually comes with deficits of democracy. While especially true in liberal regimes, authoritarian states often face parallel dynamics. Recent trends illustrate how technocratic encroachment on civil society's prerogatives can provoke populist backlash. Such cycles can build toward…
The Civic Culture(s): Groups, Norms, and the Health of Democracy
Democratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. …
The Incidental Pundit: Who Talks Politics with Whom, and Why
Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by‐products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we d…
Impassioned Democracy: The Roles of Emotion in Deliberative Theory
In ordinary language, people often treat emotion as the opposite of reason. Deliberative democrats, however, typically use "reason" in a rather different way. They regard arbitrary power, not emotion, as the opposite of reason. Emotion, then, is not at all contrary to reason. Critics who rely on ordinary language to claim that deliberative democrats denigrate emotion are likely to misconstrue how both reason and emotion are deployed. In fact, mos…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
Low status rejection: How status hierarchies influence negative tie formation
Response to James Fishkin’s review of Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress
Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone t…
Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy
Many citizens in the US and abroad fear that democratic institutions have become weak, and continue to weaken. Politics with the People develops the principles and practice of 'directly representative democracy' - a new way of connecting citizens and elected officials to improve representative government. Sitting members of Congress agreed to meet with groups of their constituents via online, deliberative town hall meetings to discuss some of the…
Deliberative Democracy between Theory and Practice
Deliberative democrats seek to link political choices more closely to the deliberations of common citizens, rather than consigning them to speak only in the desiccated language of checks on a ballot. Sober thinkers from Plato to today, however, have argued that if we want to make good decisions we cannot entrust them to the deliberations of common citizens. Critics argue that deliberative democracy is wildly unworkable in practice. Deliberative D…
Expanding the Conversation: Multiplier Effects From a Deliberative Field Experiment
Do formal deliberative events influence larger patterns of political discussion and public opinion? Critics argue that only a tiny number of people can participate in any given gathering and that deliberation may not remedy—and may in fact exacerbate—inequalities. We assess these criticisms with an experimental design merging a formal deliberative session with data on participants' social networks. We conducted a field experiment in which randoml…
Connecting to Constituents: The Diffusion of Representation Practices among Congressional Websites
Legislative websites are increasingly important in the practice of representation. Since adapting old practices to new technology entails uncertainty, the authors expect legislative offices to learn website representation practices from each other. Using data from the 2006 and 2007 official home pages of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the authors find that web design practices regarding the content of legislative websites diffuse w…
What Is Good Public Deliberation
Representative Communication: Web Site Interactivity and Distributional Path Dependence in the U.S. Congress
We examine the speed and extent to which members of the U.S. House of Representatives adopt emerging Web-based communication technologies. Given the growing centrality of communication for governance and the Web's growing role in effective public outreach, a rational actor approach would suggest that members of Congress should aggressively exploit online communication technology. And this should especially be true for freshman members. We test th…
Who Wants To Deliberate-And Why
Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists, political scientists, activists, and even government officials. Many scholars, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue(inter alia)that most people dislike politics and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large national samples investigating people'…
Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Blind Spots and Complementarities
The Coevolution of Networks and Political Attitudes
How do attitudes and social affiliations coevolve? A long stream of research has focused on the relationship between attitudes and social affiliations. However, in most of this research the causal relationship between views and affiliations is difficult to discern definitively: Do people influence each other's views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views? Here we use …
Thinking through Democracy: Between the Theory and Practice of Deliberative Politics
Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents
Journal Article Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents Get access Kevin M. Esterling, Kevin M. Esterling * *Address correspondence to Kevin M. Esterling, UCR Political Science, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael A. …
The Incidental Pundit: Who Talks Politics with Whom, and Why
Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by‐products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we d…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Three-Fifths a Racist: A Typology for Analyzing Public Opinion About Race
A Plague on Politics? The Covid Crisis, Expertise, and the Future of Legitimation
Governments rely more and more on experts to manage the increasingly complex problems posed by a growing, diversifying, globalizing world. Surplus technocracy, however, usually comes with deficits of democracy. While especially true in liberal regimes, authoritarian states often face parallel dynamics. Recent trends illustrate how technocratic encroachment on civil society's prerogatives can provoke populist backlash. Such cycles can build toward…
Impassioned Democracy: The Roles of Emotion in Deliberative Theory
In ordinary language, people often treat emotion as the opposite of reason. Deliberative democrats, however, typically use "reason" in a rather different way. They regard arbitrary power, not emotion, as the opposite of reason. Emotion, then, is not at all contrary to reason. Critics who rely on ordinary language to claim that deliberative democrats denigrate emotion are likely to misconstrue how both reason and emotion are deployed. In fact, mos…
Family Disputes: Diversity in Defining and Measuring Deliberation
Interdisciplinary deliberative research has grown tremendously over the last decade. Theorists are attending more carefully to the findings of empirical research. And empiricists are framing their research in ways that are tailored to track normative‐theoretical concerns. The recent surge in empirical work on deliberation, however, has led to a huge proliferation of research designs, general measurement strategies, operational criteria, and even …
Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress
Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone t…
Meaning and Measurement: Reorienting the Race Politics Debate
Is race politics about racism, ideology, or group conflict? After decades, this debate seems scarcely closer to resolution, despite the enormous theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake. I argue that a misguided approach to interpreting public opinion has stymied the debate. All three theories implicitly try to read a person’s motives for supporting or opposing proposals off of their placement in the so-called complex space of contem…
Patients, privacy and trust: Patients' willingness to allow researchers to access their medical records
Estimating Treatment Effects in the Presence of Noncompliance and Nonresponse: The Generalized Endogenous Treatment Model
If ignored, noncompliance with a treatment or nonresponse on outcome measures can bias estimates of treatment effects in a randomized experiment. To identify and estimate causal treatment effects in the case where compliance and response depend on unobservables, we propose the parametric generalized endogenous treatment (GET) model. GET incorporates behavioral responses within an experiment to measure each subject's latent compliance type and ide…
Expanding the Conversation: Multiplier Effects From a Deliberative Field Experiment
Do formal deliberative events influence larger patterns of political discussion and public opinion? Critics argue that only a tiny number of people can participate in any given gathering and that deliberation may not remedy—and may in fact exacerbate—inequalities. We assess these criticisms with an experimental design merging a formal deliberative session with data on participants' social networks. We conducted a field experiment in which randoml…
Connecting to Constituents: The Diffusion of Representation Practices among Congressional Websites
Legislative websites are increasingly important in the practice of representation. Since adapting old practices to new technology entails uncertainty, the authors expect legislative offices to learn website representation practices from each other. Using data from the 2006 and 2007 official home pages of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the authors find that web design practices regarding the content of legislative websites diffuse w…
Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions
Critics of deliberative democracy have worried that deliberation may mirror (or even exacerbate) inequalities in participation across categories such as gender, race, and age. Accordingly, we investigate the potential for technology and design to ameliorate these concerns, looking at the extent to which online deliberative sessions facilitate inclusive participation. In a large study of online deliberation (over 1600 participants nested in hundre…
Advancing deliberative reform in a parliamentary system: Prospects for Recursive Representation
Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond ‘minimalist’ notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for ‘recursive representation’, which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We…
Testing the Benefits of Public Deliberation
Public deliberation grows increasingly prevalent yet remains costly in terms of money and time. Accordingly, some suggest supplanting talk‐based practices with individual, “deliberation within.” Yet we have little evidence either way on the additional benefits of public deliberation over its individual variant. We evaluate the benefits of public deliberation with a field experiment. With the cooperation of two sitting US Senators, we recruited se…
Representative Communication: Web Site Interactivity and Distributional Path Dependence in the U.S. Congress
We examine the speed and extent to which members of the U.S. House of Representatives adopt emerging Web-based communication technologies. Given the growing centrality of communication for governance and the Web's growing role in effective public outreach, a rational actor approach would suggest that members of Congress should aggressively exploit online communication technology. And this should especially be true for freshman members. We test th…
Capturing the Public: Beyond Technocracy & Populism in the U.S. Administrative State
The core problem of the administrative state is not its own legitimacy, but its role in creating a more wide-ranging legitimacy crisis in American society. The particular problem is that while government administration is necessary in a complex modern society, the mere existence of something as powerful as the bureaucracy is an invitation toward a kind of power politics that undermines the legitimacy of American government as a whole. We can best…
Giving Hands and Feet to Morality
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Pathways of Peer Influence on Major Choice
Peers influence students' academic decisions and outcomes. For example, several studies with strong claims to causality demonstrate that peers affect the choice of and persistence in majors. One remaining issue, however, has stymied efforts to translate this evidence into actionable interventions: the literature has not grappled adequately with the fact that in natural settings, students typically select most of their peers. The bulk of causal ev…
Does Familiarity Breed Esteem? A Field Experiment on Emergent Attitudes Toward Members of Congress
Canonical theories of democratic representation envision legislators cultivating familiarity to enhance esteem among their constituents. Some scholars, however, argue that familiarity breeds contempt, which if true would undermine incentives for effective representation. Survey respondents who are unfamiliar with their legislator tend not to provide substantive answers to attitude questions, and so we are missing key evidence necessary to adjudic…
The Emergence of Postculturalism
Giving Hands and Feet to Morality
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Thinking through Democracy: Between the Theory and Practice of Deliberative Politics
Family Disputes: Diversity in Defining and Measuring Deliberation
Interdisciplinary deliberative research has grown tremendously over the last decade. Theorists are attending more carefully to the findings of empirical research. And empiricists are framing their research in ways that are tailored to track normative‐theoretical concerns. The recent surge in empirical work on deliberation, however, has led to a huge proliferation of research designs, general measurement strategies, operational criteria, and even …
Patients, privacy and trust: Patients' willingness to allow researchers to access their medical records
Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Blind Spots and Complementarities
Meaning and Measurement: Reorienting the Race Politics Debate
Is race politics about racism, ideology, or group conflict? After decades, this debate seems scarcely closer to resolution, despite the enormous theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake. I argue that a misguided approach to interpreting public opinion has stymied the debate. All three theories implicitly try to read a person’s motives for supporting or opposing proposals off of their placement in the so-called complex space of contem…
Three-Fifths a Racist: A Typology for Analyzing Public Opinion About Race
The Coevolution of Networks and Political Attitudes
How do attitudes and social affiliations coevolve? A long stream of research has focused on the relationship between attitudes and social affiliations. However, in most of this research the causal relationship between views and affiliations is difficult to discern definitively: Do people influence each other's views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views? Here we use …
Who Wants To Deliberate-And Why
Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists, political scientists, activists, and even government officials. Many scholars, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue(inter alia)that most people dislike politics and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large national samples investigating people'…
Representative Communication: Web Site Interactivity and Distributional Path Dependence in the U.S. Congress
We examine the speed and extent to which members of the U.S. House of Representatives adopt emerging Web-based communication technologies. Given the growing centrality of communication for governance and the Web's growing role in effective public outreach, a rational actor approach would suggest that members of Congress should aggressively exploit online communication technology. And this should especially be true for freshman members. We test th…
Estimating Treatment Effects in the Presence of Noncompliance and Nonresponse: The Generalized Endogenous Treatment Model
If ignored, noncompliance with a treatment or nonresponse on outcome measures can bias estimates of treatment effects in a randomized experiment. To identify and estimate causal treatment effects in the case where compliance and response depend on unobservables, we propose the parametric generalized endogenous treatment (GET) model. GET incorporates behavioral responses within an experiment to measure each subject's latent compliance type and ide…
Deliberation's Legitimation Crisis: Reply to Gleason
Laurel Gleason contends that deliberative polling constrains the autonomy of participants and substitutes the ideas and agendas of ‘‘experts’ ’ for those of the deliberators. However, the format and informational constraints faced by participants in deliberative forums are no worse, and are in many ways better, than those faced by ordinary citizens. The real problem with deliberative polls is that if they were to become popular, it would be tempt…
Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents
Journal Article Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents Get access Kevin M. Esterling, Kevin M. Esterling * *Address correspondence to Kevin M. Esterling, UCR Political Science, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael A. …
What Is Good Public Deliberation
Connecting to Constituents: The Diffusion of Representation Practices among Congressional Websites
Legislative websites are increasingly important in the practice of representation. Since adapting old practices to new technology entails uncertainty, the authors expect legislative offices to learn website representation practices from each other. Using data from the 2006 and 2007 official home pages of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the authors find that web design practices regarding the content of legislative websites diffuse w…
Deliberative Democracy between Theory and Practice
Deliberative democrats seek to link political choices more closely to the deliberations of common citizens, rather than consigning them to speak only in the desiccated language of checks on a ballot. Sober thinkers from Plato to today, however, have argued that if we want to make good decisions we cannot entrust them to the deliberations of common citizens. Critics argue that deliberative democracy is wildly unworkable in practice. Deliberative D…
Expanding the Conversation: Multiplier Effects From a Deliberative Field Experiment
Do formal deliberative events influence larger patterns of political discussion and public opinion? Critics argue that only a tiny number of people can participate in any given gathering and that deliberation may not remedy—and may in fact exacerbate—inequalities. We assess these criticisms with an experimental design merging a formal deliberative session with data on participants' social networks. We conducted a field experiment in which randoml…
Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy
Many citizens in the US and abroad fear that democratic institutions have become weak, and continue to weaken. Politics with the People develops the principles and practice of 'directly representative democracy' - a new way of connecting citizens and elected officials to improve representative government. Sitting members of Congress agreed to meet with groups of their constituents via online, deliberative town hall meetings to discuss some of the…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
Low status rejection: How status hierarchies influence negative tie formation
Response to James Fishkin’s review of Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress
Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone t…
The Civic Culture(s): Groups, Norms, and the Health of Democracy
Democratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. …
The Incidental Pundit: Who Talks Politics with Whom, and Why
Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by‐products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we d…
Political science (33 works) · Law (29 works) · Social Media and Politics (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Democracy (18 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Deliberative democracy (13 works)