In my now-weekly meeting with my advisor, I presented an overview of my dissertation logic. There isn’t much research yet, other than some extensive and patchwork literature reviews to point me in a direction. The gist of my topic is that the barriers to political discourse can be lowered by designing forums with a relational bent.
In the feedback session that followed, the discussion of polarization politics suggested a nice high-level framing of my research interests. Namely, the reason for being interested in facilitating a relational approach to talking politics is that it may be a way of mitigating or reversing the violent consequence of polarization.
A Polarized America
In America, polarization is peaking. A Gallup poll revealed Obama’s second year of his current term of office was the most polarizing since 1953. Aside from two re-election years for Reagan and Clinton, the Bush-Obama decade has split Americans since the Iraq War entered Year Two.
A few years ago, Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution (a Washington think tank) argued that party polarization “is the historical norm, not the exception.†It even has some advantages, such as giving voters a greater self-confidence because the candidate choices are easier to distinguish. Nivola cited a number of system properties that contributed to the current polarization, including geographic separation, “safe seats” in incumbent districts, and Internet communities that allow people to self-select ideas they want to hear. President Bill Clinton once said he thinks the Republican Party believes in polarization (a claim that itself is polarizing).
Another explanation is that, instead of the two parties growing apart, they are in fact more similar than ever. Polarization is a necessity to differentiate two groups who have voted together on a number of divisive issues, such as tax cuts (2001), Iraq (2002), and abortion ban (2003). Counter-intuitively, it is easier for centrist voters to pick a side when the distance between their ideologies and practices is not as great.
In the March 2008 issue of Journal of Politics, a debate raged over the cause of polarization in America politics. Alan Abramowitz (Emory) and Kyle Saunders (Colorado State) published an article debunking the assertion by Morris Fiorina of Stanford that polarization is a myth:
Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological†(2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorina’s suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.
source: “Is polarization a myth?” (March 27, 2008)
Their conclusion is that polarization is a product of and results in an engaged electorate. In a response, Fiorina criticized that view (and many of their measures), arguing that polarization is driven by the elite down to the electorate. Whether or not polarization is real, there is little denying that our language used when talking politics is polarizing.
Avoiding Violence
A times of peak polarization, the threat for an outbreak of violence increases. Conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin identified five changes that contribute to escalation:
- Parties move from light tactics (e.g., persuasive arguments and promises) to heavy tactics (e.g., threats and violence).
- The conflict gets bigger, both in terms of the number of contentious issues and the resources invested in the struggle.
- Issues move from specific to general as party relationships deteriorate (e.g., the other side is “evil.”).
- More and more people and groups are drawn into the conflict.
- Goals switch from “doing well” to winning to hurting the other.
There are two big considerations about this cycle of polarized politics. First, is it inevitable? Is it human nature to seek conflict and evolve our discourse until something explodes? Or, is this escalation a self-fulfilling prophecy, brought on by a feedback loop that reinforces our polarizing behaviors? Second, if it is not an inevitability, would a different mechanism of discourse—relational politics—serve to disrupt the escalation to conflict?
Focusing on human relationship in political discourse is not the current expectation of American politics. Adopting and facilitating, through our designed systems, a relational focus could alter the goals of discussion, moving away from consensus and convincing toward understanding. When I look at the five changes of Pruitt-Rubin, I see areas where a relational approach can have impact. Imagine the following:
- Through collective moderation, participants avoid heavy tactics in favor of light tactics.
- Contentious issues are humanized through storytelling and empathy.
- Accountability instituted through personal introductions and group trust prevents generalizations by asking for specific experiences.
- Multiple threads allow for self-selected small interest groups to form within a forum.
- Goals switch from convincing to understanding.
These are a few of the key properties of the WebLab small group dialogue forums of the late 1990s and early part of this century. While the designers may not have intentionally set out to facilitate a relational approach, their well-chosen constraints had these effects.