In my research, I focus on uncovering mechanisms of public deliberation, whether deliberators are following groupthink or social status rather than reasoning when making decisions.
Domination by the more advantaged
Do people who have more resources by social status speak more? Do they change how others think during deliberation? My research using the Shaping Our Future Deliberative Poll does not indicate that deliberators with less social status do not defer their opinions.
To read in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy
Law of group polarization
Jury research and group psychology literature records a phenomenon called “group polarization,” where deliberation amplifies the group’s pre-deliberation preference. My research, being one of the first studies to use an employed balance of the argument pool from transcripts, illustrated that group composition does not predict the balance of the argument pool or the deliberation’s outcome.
To read in the International Political Science Review
Discourse in minipublics
I use NLP (dictionary-based, topic modeling, LLM classifiers) to study what deliberators discuss. Data I have used so far include 2017 Public Deliberation on Shin Gori Nuclear Reactors No.5 and 6 and 2021 America in One Room – Climate and Energy.
(I did not write the documents linked in this paragraph. I linked them to share what I am interested in.)
Analysis on Shin Gori public deliberation is currently being written into a chapter for an upcoming book, led by Alice Siu and Chunseok Kim.
I am also translating the analysis on 2021 A1R Climate and Energy into the final chapter of my dissertation.
