Role of Deliberation in Partisan Polarization Paper
Political Science QuestionThis final paper follow-up to the work you did for Discussion Board #5 – about Partisan Polarization and Political Animosity. In that earlier work, you learned: MY DISCUSSION BOARDS ARE BELOW
1) that a lot of people are worried that partisan polarization is increasing and may be impeding the ability of our political system to address important problems
2) about some of the suspected causes- including partisan “sorting”, the media environment (especially social media that amplifies a small set of loud voices), and the way our electoral and political system rewards political elites for “ideologically extreme ideas and language., all of which also contributes to a view among the general public that the “other” side is much more awful than one’s “own” side;
3) that political scientists distinguish between “issue” polarization and “affective” polarization, and they especially worry that “affective” polarization is driving “issue” polarization;
and 4) how the increase in “affective” polarization might be driving many away from political discussions, reducing their sense of political efficacy, and excluding them (even more than they currently are) from decisions about the public good and our common future.
As some of you commented in that discussion board, what to do about this problem is not entirely clear. But it can’t be as simple as “we should all just get along,” nor can it be only a matter of choosing the most “moderate” policy or compromise (when it comes to climate change, for example, moderation or compromise might not be enough to avoid catastrophe).
Many political scientists have been studying strategies for building trust and empathy across this divide. One example is an experiment conducted in 2019 to test the role of “deliberation” in easing partisan polarization. They brought together randomly-chosen individuals from around the country, gave them a pre-experiment survey about their views, taught them about policies AND about deliberation (see this link from CSU (Links to an external site.) for a quick summary of how this is different than simple discussion or debate), had them deliberate, and finally gave them a post-experiment survey about their views. Here is a description of the “America in One Room” (Links to an external site.) deliberative poll in June of 2019, links (Links to an external site.) to stories about the approach, an article about their findings (Links to an external site.), and about an upcoming deliberation in September (Links to an external site.) before the next world-wide meeting about climate change in Glasgow this November.
Then approach this as a student; critique the methodology, discuss the approach with others and report on their impressions, consider the insights of collective action theory and the free rider effect for this approach, suggest a larger list of questions for the upcoming deliberation on social media and goverment consider the logistics and how one might make this sort of experience available to more participants and more relevant to decision making, relate this approach to your experiences in other countries, develop a way to convince others of the importance of this approach, etc. Feel free to build on your posts for Discussion Boards 5 and 6.
Write a standard academic paper.
Please incorporate the topic of social media into this paper. ORGINAL WORK NO PLAGIARISM Must be 4 pages single-spaced pages .
WHAT I WROTE FOR Discussion Boards 5 and 6.
for this week’s discussion topic, a public problem I would like to talk about is Social Media. Social Media has been a significant influence in today’s world starting from adolescence to young adults. In today’s world, there are lots of positive aspects of the use of social media but also a lot of negative ones. The adolescence period of time consists of huge formative changes. With all of these transitions occurring especially during which young people display a restricted limit with regards to self-guideline and danger of vulnerability to peer strain and experimentation. One example is that during this period, Social Media can be very harmful to a young woman or teenager. Seeing a female on their Instagram feed with unrealistic looks and overly edited pictures allows these young girls to believe that they should look like that, especially when they see their favorite “influencers” post nude on social media and believe that as a 16-year-old girl, they should be posting the same when, in reality, that would be considered child pornography.
I have been to a meeting regarding social media back when I was in High School where we were advocating that social media use should be banned at school since people are on their phones a larger portion during class rather than paying attention to their teacher. We were able to gain access from the school to have a wifi blocker to prevent using social media only texting and calls when using school wifi. In my opinion, I believe that you should be eighteen years or older in order to use social media
There are many points that stood out to me from the Political sectarianism in America and 3 things driving the ‘ascendance of political hatred’ by Clark Merrifield. One in particular, comes from this direct quote: “Political scientists in recent years have used various terms to describe America’s deep political divide, including ‘affective polarization’” (Merrifield). I believe that America is currently in a significant divide politically. Millennials source their political information from various social media sites, such as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Yet, these platforms may not always source accurate and credible information, and the younger generation bases their political opinions on the information they receive from these platforms. This individual article discusses the results of asking people if they feel “hot or cold” based on degrees while analyzing political parties. The aversion to differences between political parties has significantly grown since 2012. I have witnessed this through many different situations, one of which being childhood friends splitting apart due to opposing political views instead of simply finding a way to meet in the middle or even choosing not to discuss politics amongst each other all-together. In my opinion, this is just the start of Political Sectarianism. Merrifield sites The Journal of politics:The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences in his article, stating, “‘Republicans estimate that 32% of Democrats are LGBT when in reality it is 6%; Democrats estimate that 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year when in reality it is 2%,” citing the 2018′” (Douglas J. Ahler and Gaurav Sood). A majority of today’s younger republicans support the LGBTQ community and major movements like BLM, but are labeled as a Republican from qualifications of the 1900’s. Throughout history, it has been proven that both the Republican and Democratic parties had slaves, yet the larger portion of Republicans are identified as racists. On social media, Candice Owen has been labeled as a “traitor” because she is a 32 year-old African American woman who identifies with the Republicans and Conservative. Merrifield suggests in the article that a way to reduce sectarianism in America is through Social Media interventions. Though, it is important to remember his statement that “crowdsourced judgments of news source quality being baked into algorithms so that hyper-partisan or false content does not often show up in users’ news feeds.” As someone who uses social media, 50% of it is a part of my day-to-day life. I have seen a large amount of false content. Whether it be a clip of a politician that is edited into something completely different than what he/she stated and is turned into false information taken from a credible source, I do agree that there should be an intervention on Social Media—specifically, filtering sources based on social media servers or only allowing credible information to be posted. Hopefully, one day our country can come together as one or hopefully something closer to it by taking a step back and analyzing the content we digest on a daily basis.