Echo vs Deliberative Chambers: Opinion Formation in Online Forums in Swiss Direct-Democratic Voting

In the age of populism, re-storing opinion formation on rational and argumentative grounds becomes increasingly important. This paper investigates how opinions are formed when voters are exposed to dissonant and congruent arguments in online forums. We rely on two online survey experiments which were conducted in the context of two recent popular direct-democratic votes in Switzerland. In the two survey experiments, participants were directed to a simulated online forum where they encountered posts in favour and against the voting topic. While some participants were directed to strongly one-sided forums (so-called “echo chambers”), other participants encountered balanced forums (so-called “deliberative chambers”). Drawing from the approach of “motivated reasoning”, we assume that one-side forums fuel opinion polarization, especially for voters holding strong beliefs about an issue. On the other hand, carefully designed “deliberative chambers” might allow for a more fruitful consideration of diverse arguments and conduce to more opinion change and even opinion convergence. In particular, we expect participants being part of balanced forms to have higher knowledge levels and higher argumentative repertoires than participants in one-sided forums. Our online survey-experiments shed new light on how political opinions can be formed in more deliberative - and less populist - ways in democratic-decision-making.