Browsing by Subject "Deliberation"

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    Deliberation and intra-attitudinal complexity.
    (2011-07) Lippmann, Brad Michael
    American civil discourse suffers from the incivility of its rhetoric and the relative disengagement, ignorance, and bias of its citizenry. Without the space or motivation to discuss serious issues in a sober tone, discussion of serious topics devolves into name calling, sloganeering, and a general avoidance of the problems facing the country. Deliberative democratic theory - a normative model of democracy in which citizens engage in effortful, unbiased, reason-based deliberations with one another in service of finding and implementing a common good - has been advanced as a possible remedy to our civic shortcomings (Gutmann & Thompson, 2004). Extant research has shown that properly constructed deliberative environments increase participants' topic-specific knowledge and alter participants' attitudes. The study detailed here extends this line of research by examining deliberation's ability to induce complex attitudes, those with both a positive and negative evaluation of the attitude object. Further, it tests deliberation's ability to do so relative to non-deliberative alternatives in both a general sample and among those likely most and least ready to engage in deliberation. A process model of complexity induction and maintenance is presented and deliberation's relative ability to retain the complexity induced is assessed. Results indicate that deliberation yields comparable or lesser degrees of intra-attitudinal complexity in the short term and no advantage or deficit in the long term. Implications for the study of deliberation and measurement of intra-attitudinal complexity are discussed.
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    Senatorial deliberation and Supreme Court nominations
    (2014-08) Gregory, Charles
    Although senators actively participate in the confirmation debates, existing research that examines the confirmation debates has questioned whether the Senate is capable of fulfilling its constitutional duties. Unfortunately, this research does not fully investigate why senators participate in these important debates. To investigate the factors that influence senatorial deliberation I build on previous research that describes confirmation votes as opportunities for position taking and formally models the selection stage. I argue these two strands of research provide a framework for understanding what factors influence senatorial deliberation across the Supreme Court appointment process. Overall, I find strong support for the hypothesis that senators strategically engage Supreme Court confirmation debates. More specifically, I find political, electoral, and institutional considerations affect the willingness of senators to participate in these important debates.