Christopher F. Karpowitz

Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing womens descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the groups gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals’ attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

Deliberative Democracy and Inequality: Two Cheers for Enclave Deliberation among the Disempowered:

Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. In contrast, others argue that democratic equality is best achieved when disempowered groups deliberate in their own enclaves (interest groups, parties, and movements) before entering the broader public sphere. Borrowing from each perspective, the authors argue that there are strong reasons to incorporate enclave deliberation among the disempowered within civic forums. They support this claim by presenting case study evidence showing that participants in such forums can gain some of the same benefits of deliberation found in more heterogeneous groups (e.g., political knowledge, efficacy and trust), can consider a diversity of viewpoints rather than falling into groupthink and polarization, and can persuade external stakeholders of the legitimacy of the group’s deliberations.

Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections

By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movements primary issues.

A Field Experiment on Legislators’ Home Styles: Service versus Policy

We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway with their constituents in order to pursue their own policy goals. We also find that at the federal level Democrats prioritize service over policy more than Republicans and at the state level legislators who won by larger margins are more likely to prioritize service over policy. Finally, our results suggest that the decision to prioritize service occurs in how the office is structured. Among other things this suggests that legislators may be microtargeting less than is often supposed.

Gender Inequality in Deliberation: Unpacking the Black Box of Interaction

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others’. But when the groupis assigned tounanimous rule, orwhen women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation.

How People Deliberate about Justice: Groups, Gender, and Decision Rules

In recent years, theorists, observers and policy makers have increasingly promoted citizen deliberation. Yet little is known about how people deliberate about matters of politics. In this paper we ask how people deliberate about distributive justice, and in particular, about a guaranteed minimum income to the poor. If the proponents of deliberation are correct, deliberation is likely to enhance distributive justice and will lead people to grant a decent minimum income to the poor. But what actually happens when people deliberate about distributive justice? We make use of experimental data matched with discussion transcripts. The data were gathered for a somewhat different purpose but can shed light on the question of what deliberation actually does when people use it to decide a matter of justice. We find that deliberation can work as expected, enhancing distributive justice — and creating a long list of other positive outcomes — but only under certain conditions. Those conditions are structured by the decision rule (majority rule or unanimous vote) and by gender composition. Rules and gender interact to shape the group’s social norms. When deliberation is not properly structured by rules and norms, it does not conform to the expectations of its proponents.

Why women's numbers elevate women's influence, and when they do not: rules, norms, and authority in political discussion

Critical mass theory argues that womens numbers are a major cause of womens status and authority in a group. Applications of the theory to political settings have yielded mixed support for the theory. We unpack one mechanism that can explain when, why, and how numbers aid women. That mechanism is the norm of communication during group discussion. Our focus is on how women build or lose authority while they interact with men. We argue that numbers – and group procedures – shape norms that advance or hinder womens authority. Womens authority in turn affects the groups decision about economic redistribution – the higher the womens authority, the higher the groups generosity to the poor. We suggest that future work further explore how rules and norms affect womens status in a group by equalizing their participation and influence, with the ultimate goal being equal gender authority.

Who Caucuses? An Experimental Approach to Institutional Design and Electoral Participation

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America’s democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results show that institutional choices are not neutral. Nominating candidates through caucuses rather than primaries not only reduces the number of participants, but also significantly affects the ideological composition of the electorate. Caucuses produce a more ideologically consistent electorate than do primaries, because policy centrists appear to avoid caucuses. This experimental finding is strongly buttressed by the observational data on Obama and Clinton voters. In the 2008 Democratic presidential primary Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton by a very narrow margin – a margin that was largely due to his success in caucus states. Clinton won only 174 pledged delegates in caucuses to Obama’s 312 pledged delegates in the caucus format – almost two-thirds of the total going to Obama. The result in primaries was quite different: Clinton won 1,379.5 delegates 1 to Obama’s 1,371.5 – essentially a tie, though one that Clinton actually won narrowly. In the eyes of a die-hard Clinton supporter this result is, no doubt, striking – and possibly a bit infuriating. After all, it holds out the tantalizing possibility that, had all states used primary elections, Hillary Clinton could well have become the nominee. Of course, because different states held primaries and caucuses that margin might really have nothing to do with process; it could be due to differences between the states. Such an explanation could not, however, account for the results in Texas, where the Democratic party awarded 126 pledged delegates based on the results of the primary held during the day on March 4, 2008, and sixty-seven delegates based on the results of caucuses held in the evening on the same day. Texas serves as a useful natural experiment because the two procedures came from potentially the exact same electorate, 2 but the different processes produced different results. 3 While Clinton won a three-point victory in the primary election, she lost by nearly thirteen points in the caucuses. This meant that Obama received four more delegates than Clinton in the state

Good Publicity: The Legitimacy of Public Communication of Deliberation

Although deliberative democratic theory values the principle of publicity, few empirical studies systematically assess the public communication of civic groups that deliberate over policy. The proliferation of such groups in contemporary politics, and of uncertainty about their legitimacy, suggests the need for such study. Drawing on contemporary deliberative theory, we derive a set of legitimate publicity indicators for assessing how well groups report their deliberative processes and policy conclusions. We demonstrate the reliability and utility of these measures in a comparative content analysis of the final reports of three common kinds of deliberative bodies: a government-stakeholder task force, an activist strategy group, and a citizen consensus conference. We conclude by suggesting an agenda for further research on the perceived legitimacy of publicity about deliberative processes, outcomes, and impacts on the policy process.

What Can a President Learn from the News Media? The Instructive Case of Richard Nixon

This study examines the media diet of Richard Nixon, whose exposure to the news consisted almost entirely of a White House-produced daily news summary. Nixon staffers repeatedly asserted that the summary was the most effective way to give the president a comprehensive, objective account of the previous days reporting. While the summaries covered a wide range of media sources, analysis of the framing and filtering done by the White House raises doubts about the assertion that summaries were an effective substitute for first-hand consumption of the news. Nixons handwritten marginal notes reveal that the summaries provoked reactions in the president that had important implications for his conduct of the presidency.