Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents

Abstract

Deliberative theorists emphasize that citizens’ capacity to become informed when given a motive and the opportunity to participate in politics is important for democratic citizenship. We assess this capacity among citizens using a deliberative field experiment. In the summer of 2006, we conducted a field experiment in which we recruited twelve current members of the U.S. Congress to discuss immigration policy with randomly drawn small groups of their constituents. We find that constituents demonstrate a strong capacity to become informed in response to this opportunity. The primary mechanism for knowledge gains is subjects’ increased attention to policy outside the context of the experiment. This capacity for motivated learning seems to be spread widely throughout the population, in that it is unrelated to prior political knowledge.

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