Testing the Benefits of Public Deliberation

Abstract

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 several hundred of their constituents to deliberate on immigration reform. Participants were randomly assigned to either deliberate publicly in an online discussion, to deliberate individually, or to an information-only control. Across several measures, public deliberation yielded more benefits than individual deliberation. We find, moreover, little evidence to ground worries that differences in education, race, conflict avoidance, gender, or gender composition of deliberating groups will render public talk less valuable than individual deliberation.