Becoming more and more like our parents as we grow is a natural part of life. Parents pass along preferences to children, whether it is a fondness for mom’s meatloaf or affection for a sports team. And for decades, research affirmed the idea that children absorb some of their parents’ partisan leanings. Grow up in a Republican house and you’re likely to lean a little bit right at least early on in life, and vice versa.
But research also showed this was a sort of soft partisanship, with children having a fondness for their own side without any real animosity toward the other. Today, that is no more. Political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Matthew Tyler find that just as adults today are much more negative toward the other party, they find children as young as 11 years old holding much deeper animosity toward the other side of the aisle than adolescents did in 1980. Parents got more polarized, and their children went right along with them.
Why does this matter? There are volumes of research about how the things that define your political worldview when you’re young tend to be sticky, hanging around and affecting your political behavior and preferences long after you’re grown.
Children growing up believing that those of the other party are not just wrong but are bad people can’t possibly have a positive effect on the future of democracy. We are defined by the moment in which we come of age. There are plenty of reasons to be worried about the effect of deep polarization on our country. But is there any way forward?
I’ve often written about the enormous benefits we as a nation get from providing good civics education and experiences to young people. Debate tournaments, model Congress and United Nations, government simulations, the list of opportunities is long, though too many students do not have access to these sorts of programs at their own schools.
If we know that polarization is increasing and it is bleeding down into high school and middle school age groups, could these sorts of programs play an even more important role today in promoting a healthy democratic society?
Emphatically: yes. And new research from political scientists at Stanford and the University of Chicago shows there is a proven way to reduce polarization, and it actually looks a lot like a high school debate tournament.
Reviewing the available research, the researchers note that polarization is growing, while at the same time most people are busy individuals who often outsource deliberation on policy issues to leaders they trust. To the extent they engage in social conversation about politics with friends and neighbors, they are likely to be speaking to people with whom they already agree. Less and less often do we talk to people with whom we disagree.
But what if the public is engaged in more of what the authors call “deliberative democracy,” an intentional hashing-it-out of big issues with other people?
To find out, they conducted a major experiment they called “America in One Room,” randomly sampling and surveying about 500 people and then flying them to Dallas for a weekend to participate in a weekend of “deliberative democracy.” Over the weekend, the participants were assigned to small groups and asked to deliberate over questions on hot-button issues such as immigration, healthcare, and climate change. They got briefing materials provided by experts from across the political spectrum and were given opportunities to ask questions and discuss their views while getting to know the others in their small group.
At the end of the weekend, participants were surveyed again about their views and found that not only had people become less polarized in their views on policy, they experienced less affective polarization, meaning they were less negative toward people in the other party in general.
High school civics activities do exactly what this experiment did — require people to confront views that differ from their own and consider them thoughtfully. As someone who studies young people’s political views, I often hear older people express concern about the next generation — that they lack critical thinking skills, that they’re being indoctrinated, and so on. And the data do show young people picking up the polarization they hear from their parents.
The good news is we now know what can be done to reverse that polarization, and it is already available to at least some high schoolers across the country. Why not make it available to more?
Critics will rightly point out that fixing democracy by asking all to spend a weekend engaged in policy deliberation is not a scalable solution. Football is on, there’s yard work to be done, and this probably doesn’t sound like the most fun way to spend a weekend for the vast, vast majority of people.
Unless, of course, you’re a high school student who wants to join the debate team. Let’s encourage them to do so.
