Thanks for writing this! As a practitioner, I had no idea this event happened, before I read this post.
I also hadn't seen the presentation David Broockman made a few years ago shown in this post. I watched it, and I was impressed. His graphs maybe are from 2013, but he said they look similar as of a few years ago.
David explained that a major concern of his was an elite misconception that the American public is "moderate" across many topics. As his graphs show, the American public was better described as "heterodox" or "inconsistent", with a substantial number having views more extreme than those of most politicians — shown as ratings below 3 or above 5 on his 1-7 scale.
I think his concern is reasonable and correct, though my concern is more about the description of the country as "polarized." Again looking at the graphs, at most 2 (climate change and trans rights) of the 14 issues studied followed a classic "polarization" distribution, which would show many views on both edges and few in the middle. Instead, the views were usually fairly evenly distributed across the political spectrum, with some looking a bit like normal distributions (e.g., gay rights, healthcare), and a few showing obvious skew toward liberal positions (e.g., Social Security, Medicare).
Mina Cikara's work in this post expands this to show that not only is the public not classically "polarized" along a single dimension, groups also have views across multiple dimensions. Issue positions of groups are all across the space, not only on the edges as one may expect in a "polarized" environment.
Were there any conflict resolution or peacebuilding experts invited to this conference? The US academic community seems to have missed almost entirely that our field exists and has been focused on research and intervention on depolarization for over 50 years. I'm grateful a new book by Cherian George on "Fighting Polarization" acknowledges the work of our community.
Thanks for writing this! As a practitioner, I had no idea this event happened, before I read this post.
I also hadn't seen the presentation David Broockman made a few years ago shown in this post. I watched it, and I was impressed. His graphs maybe are from 2013, but he said they look similar as of a few years ago.
David explained that a major concern of his was an elite misconception that the American public is "moderate" across many topics. As his graphs show, the American public was better described as "heterodox" or "inconsistent", with a substantial number having views more extreme than those of most politicians — shown as ratings below 3 or above 5 on his 1-7 scale.
I think his concern is reasonable and correct, though my concern is more about the description of the country as "polarized." Again looking at the graphs, at most 2 (climate change and trans rights) of the 14 issues studied followed a classic "polarization" distribution, which would show many views on both edges and few in the middle. Instead, the views were usually fairly evenly distributed across the political spectrum, with some looking a bit like normal distributions (e.g., gay rights, healthcare), and a few showing obvious skew toward liberal positions (e.g., Social Security, Medicare).
Mina Cikara's work in this post expands this to show that not only is the public not classically "polarized" along a single dimension, groups also have views across multiple dimensions. Issue positions of groups are all across the space, not only on the edges as one may expect in a "polarized" environment.
Were there any conflict resolution or peacebuilding experts invited to this conference? The US academic community seems to have missed almost entirely that our field exists and has been focused on research and intervention on depolarization for over 50 years. I'm grateful a new book by Cherian George on "Fighting Polarization" acknowledges the work of our community.
Not really. I agree it’s a problem — a weird cultural disjunction. Let’s fix that!