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Are voters influenced by the results of a consensus conference?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2021

Steven Sloman Open the ORCID record for Steven Sloman [Opens in a new window] ,
Daniella Kupor  and
David Yokum
Steven Sloman*
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Daniella Kupor
Affiliation:
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
David Yokum
Affiliation:
The Policy Lab, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
*
*Correspondence to: Brown University – CLPS, Box 1821, Providence, RI 02912, USA. E-mail: steven_sloman@brown.edu
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Abstract

We evaluate whether people will outsource their opinion on public policy to consensus conference participants. The ideal consensus conference brings together a representative sample of citizens and introduces them to the range of perspectives and evidence related to some policy. The sample is given the opportunity to ask questions of experts and to deliberate. Attitudes about each policy are queried before and after the conference to see if the event has changed minds. In general, such conferences do produce opinion shifts. Our hypothesis is that the shift can be leveraged by simply communicating conference results – absent substantive information about the merits of the policies discussed – to scale up the value of conferences to the population at large. In five studies, we tell participants about the impact of a consensus conference on a sample of citizens’ opinions for a range of policies without providing any new information about the inherent value of the policy itself. For several of the policies, we see a shift in opinion. We conclude that the value of consensus conferences can be scaled up simply by telling an electorate about its results. This suggests an economical way to bring evidence and rational argument to bear on citizens’ policy attitudes.

Keywords

deliberative democracyevidence-based policyexpert opinionconsensus conferencecollective cognition
Type
Article
Information
Behavioural Public Policy , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 395 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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