Voters often show low levels of accurate policy information owing to misinformation and directional motivated reasoning. Extant research shows that participants in randomly selected deliberative groups—commonly called “minipublics”—can update their beliefs and deliver reasoned policy analysis and recommendations. When distributed to a wider public, such information can bypass motivated reasoning heuristics to improve policy knowledge across the electorate. However, critics posit that these benefits may spread unevenly across demographic, political, and other social subgroups. To investigate that claim, we analyzed survey experiments conducted across 13 realworld minipublics with more than 10,000 respondents and more than 60,000 knowledge scores. Results showed that advisory minipublics boosted policy knowledge evenly across many voter groups, but gains were slightly diminished for racial/ethnic minorities and some income brackets. Further analysis indicates that these differences did not stem from variations in deliberative faith or preexisting levels of policy knowledge.

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Who Learns from Deliberative Minipublics? Identity-Based Differences in Knowledge Gains across Thirteen Citizens’ Initiative Review Experiments.
Ársælsson KM and Gastil J. (2025). Who Learns from Deliberative Minipublics? Identity-Based Differences in Knowledge Gains across Thirteen Citizens’ Initiative Review Experiments. Sociological Science 12(17). http://dx.doi.org/10.15195/v12.a17

Although sociologists have long recognized the civic effects of workplace structure, extant theory has yet to make sense of growing evidence that civic life also affects what happens at work. The authors leverage the first national, mixed methods study of worker cooperatives—an extreme case of participation in the workplace—to develop a new hypothesis of civic work. Civic work describes how people opt into or create workplaces that embody ideals of the good society or serve the common good. Whereas previous studies assume that workplace participation fosters civic participation manifesting only outside of work, this article’s analysis of survey and interview data finds that people in worker cooperatives make a difference both on and off the clock. By theorizing selection and recognizing work itself as a site of civic action, the authors’ civic work hypothesis raises new questions and contributes to broader conversations about the changing nature of work across the economy.

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Civic Work: Making a Difference on and off the Clock
Schlachter LH and Ársælsson KM. (2023) Civic Work: Making a Difference on and off the Clock. American Journal of Sociology 130(1): 44-87. https://doi.org/10.1086/730771

Coverage

Civic Engagement at Work in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (2024), by Chana R. Schoenberger.

Evolving US media and political systems, coupled with escalating misinformation campaigns, have left the public divided over objective facts featured in policy debates. The public also has lost much of its confidence in the institutions designed to adjudicate those epistemic debates. To counter this threat, civic entrepreneurs have devised institutional reforms to revitalize democratic policymaking. One promising intervention is the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR), which has been adopted into law in Oregon and tested in several other states, as well as Switzerland and Finland. Each CIR gathers a demographically stratified random sample of registered voters to form a deliberative panel, which hears from pro and con advocates and neutral experts while assessing the merits of a ballot measure. After four-to-five days of deliberation, each CIR writes an issue guide for voters that identifies key factual findings, along with the most important pro and con arguments. This study, published in PLOS ONE pools the results of survey experiments conducted on thirteen CIRs held from 2010 to 2018, resulting in a dataset that includes 67,120 knowledge scores collected from 10,872 registered voters exposed to 82 empirical claims. Analysis shows that reading the CIR guide had a positive effect on voters’ policy knowledge, with stronger effects for those holding greater faith in deliberation. We found little evidence of directional motivated reasoning but some evidence that reading the CIR statement can spark an accuracy motivation. Overall, the main results show how trust in peer deliberation provides one path out of the maze of misinformation shaping voter decisions during elections.

Replication Data and Code

The data and code are available on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IRVPKN

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Deliberative panels as a source of public knowledge: A large-sample test of the Citizens’ Initiative Review
Gastil J, Ársælsson KM, Knobloch KR, Brinker DL, Richards RC Jr, et al. (2023) Deliberative panels as a source of public knowledge: A large-sample test of the Citizens’ Initiative Review. PLOS ONE 18(7): e0288188. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288188

Many scholars suspect that people view minipublics as trustworthy information shortcuts because they’re composed of lay citizens—people like themselves. But who trusts these minipublics? And does their influence hinge on that trust? This is exactly what me and John Gastil examine in our paper published in Political Behavior. Is minipublic trust (or “legitimacy”) the secret ingredient? Drawing on evidence from three minipublics held in Oregon, Massachusetts, and California, we ask whether people trust minipublics, who trusts them, can we increase that trust by describing the minipublic more fully, and are only those who trust minipublics susceptible to their recommendations? We found that most people are ambivalent about minipublics, with around 30-40% unsure about their merits. This isn’t surprising given most people haven’t learned much about them. Nevertheless, a significant number of people did trust these minipublics. About 25% of respondents in the three states we sampled were willing to trust minipublics to “make decisions on behalf of the wider public” while 39% did not. On average, US citizens seem to be cautious about these minipublics. Next, we explored whether information about how the minipublic was designed could boost its legitimacy. Many practitioners argue that the use of random selection, exposure to experts and advocates, and generous time for deliberation are all necessary for a successful minipublic. We asked whether telling respondents about these features increased their trust in minipublics. It did not. In fact, we found that being told that the minipublic met with pro and con advocates decreased perceived legitimacy, particularly for politically conservative respondents. Finally, we asked whether those who trust minipublics were more likely to update their policy knowledge or shift their voting intention in line with the final report produced by the minipublic. Surprisingly, we found that those who trust minipublics are about as likely to learn from their recommendations as are their distrustful counterparts. Future research needs to confirm these findings and find out exactly why so many people follow their recommendations, even when unsure about the overall legitimacy of the minipublic process.

Replication Data and Code

Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KMS

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Már, K., Gastil, J. Do Voters Trust Deliberative Minipublics? Examining the Origins and Impact of Legitimacy Perceptions for the Citizens’ Initiative Review. Polit Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09742-6

A large literature shows how voters’ decision making is often biased due to various mechanisms often referred to as “motivated reasoning” (Druckman, 2012). For example, people are more likely to uncritically accept (reject) information that confirms (disproves) their previous beliefs. Such motivated reasoning has been shown to be exacerbated in politics, especially in a polarized setting (Druckman, Peterson and Slothuus, 2013). Less attention, however, has been given to exploring the “boundaries” of such motivated reasoning. How and when are voters motivated to form an accurate or informed view on an issue? My paper (co-authored with professor John Gastil at the Pennsylvania State University), published in Political Psychology, utilizes a real-world case and survey experiment data to explore this issue. We tested whether information from a deliberative minipublic – who met over a short period of time to deliberate on a proposal to ban GMO in their county – helped improve voters’ knowledge about the upcoming ballot measure. Contrary to expectations from extant theory, we found information from fellow citizens significantly improved voters’ knowledge. More importantly, those who should have resisted the new information the most were often those who improved the most. While more work is needed to confirm and better understand the mechanisms in play, this work gives hope minipublics can help inform voters more generally on political issues. Currently, we are working on a new project where we explore minipublic trust and legitimacy, in addition to whether some groups are more likely than others to be influenced by minipublic statements.

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Már, K. and Gastil, J. (2020), Tracing the Boundaries of Motivated Reasoning: How Deliberative Minipublics Can Improve Voter Knowledge. Political Psychology, 41: 107-127. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12591

This paper focuses on the increasing animus between Republican and Democratic partisans towards each other’s party. Over the past three decades, these rival-party feelings have grown significantly colder. In fact, rival-party feelings of stalwart partisans are now among the lowest on record, comparable to how white Americans feel towards undocumented immigrants. This gradual cooling of rival-party feelings has been labeled “affective polarization” (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012). In this paper, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, I break down and decompose the over-time trend of affective polarization, using a Blinder-Oaxaca approach and data from the American National Election Studies, to identify three processes that help explain how rival-party and own-party feelings changed. I find, contrary to previous research, that “sorting” – the “correct” matching of liberal-conservative ideology and party membership – has a limited effect on the cooling of rival-party feelings. In fact, social sorting among Republicans works against the trend. Instead, I find rival-party feelings grow colder across all Democrats, whether white or black, religious or secular, rich or poor; a process I call fortification. Among Republicans, there is evidence suggesting the trend is driven mostly by white partisans rather than those of color; a process I call entrenchment.

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Kristinn Már, Partisan Affective Polarization: Sorting, Entrenchment, and Fortification, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 84, Issue 4, Winter 2020, Pages 915–935, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaa060