Deliberative
Opinion Change and Consistency:
Citizens in the 1994 Illinois Gubernatorial Election
Jason
Barabas
Abstract
Does deliberation lead to improvements in public opinion
quality? The answer depends upon what standards are used. I argue
that two widely used criteria stability and consistency should
be modified for use in deliberation research. When citizens discuss
politics we often desire instability after deliberation (through
evidence of opinion change) and inconsistency during deliberation
(when participants consider multiple viewpoints). In contrast to
past work comparing pre- and post-deliberative opinions, here the
actual deliberation captured in two focus group discussions during
the 1994 Illinois gubernatorial election (N=2,564 statements) is
used to predict the probabilities of vote change and candidate choice.
I find that consistency operates selectively. Candidate consistency
when deliberation matches vote choice and when the deliberative
statements themselves tend to favor one candidate decreases the
likelihood that citizens change their vote. Issue consistency
when deliberation matches voting explanations on a salient issue
like crime increases the probability of vote change. These same
relationships hold for predicting the probability of voting for
the group"s most preferred candidate, but they are inverted
for the least preferred candidate. That is, the people who eventually
favored the winning candidate deliberated one way. Those in the
minority who remained with an unpopular candidate tended to deliberate
another way. This means that deliberation influences political opinions
differently for different citizens. Statewide public opinion before
and after the focus groups strongly suggests that the deliberative
processes at work in the focus groups closely mirrored events during
the rest of the election.
Jason Barabas, Department
of Political Science, Northwestern University
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