PI: Isaac Mehlfaff, Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,400, Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Civic Education Fund
Project Abstract: How do citizens reason about politics? Does reasoning have the power to change political attitudes? I argue that citizens’ political reasoning capabilities are best utilized not when they attempt to reason on their own or even when they engage in casual political discussion. Instead, citizens are most likely to change their opinions and reduce their reliance on partisan stereotypes when they engage in debate, exchanging and evaluating a series of arguments and counterarguments with a discussion partner. I test this theory with a survey experiment in which I subtly manipulate whether respondents reason in an argumentative or contemplative context. A pilot study reveals that argumentation decreases the extremity of subjects’ political attitudes and results in those attitudes being held less strongly, suggesting the potential for political argumentation to be used as a strategy for depolarization. Elsewhere in my dissertation, I use an innovative combination of online data sources and machine learning to understand how citizens engage each other in debate, change the attitudes of their interlocutors, and have their attitudes changed in turn.