Online versus Face-to-Face Deliberation: Evidence from Parallel Deliberative Polls

Nowadays, political discussion takes place online as well as face-to-face. The same is true, at least potentially, of deliberation, an elevated— particularly substantive and open-minded—form of discussion. Naturally occurring political discussion may be fairly rare and not very deliberative, but, precisely for that reason, hothouse processes like Consensus Conferences, Citizens’ Juries, and Deliberative Polling have been devised to foster more deliberative discussion. All these processes are natively face-to-face but can also be conducted online. The question we ask here is how online and face-to-face deliberation differ, both in themselves and, more importantly, in their effects. Our analysis capitalizes on a pair of uniquely parallel online and face-to-face Deliberative Polls. They shared the same topic: U.S. foreign policy, including the issues of military intervention, promoting democracy, liberalizing foreign trade, helping other countries with problems like poverty and AIDS, and protecting the global environment. Both spanned roughly the same period, with the face-to-face discussions taking place in mid-January, 2003, and the online discussions over the preceding month. Both administered their post-test survey during the same week. Both involved high-quality national random samples. The briefing documents were identical, the questionnaires nearly so. This parallelism affords an unusually good view of the mode effects of online versus face-to-face deliberation, at least as captured in Deliberative Polling. We focus not on the substantive effects on foreign policy attitudes but on the mode effects—the differences between what happens in the online versus face-to-face treatments. We expect, for reasons we develop, the online treatment to be weaker, its effects to be similar but smaller. We examine the evidence, then consider the longer-term possibilities for narrowing the differences between online and face-to-face deliberations.