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Citizen Infrastructure

America in One Room (2019)

TL;DR. In September 2019, Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab flew a representative sample of the American electorate — 526 ordinary voters — to Dallas for four days to deliberate on five of the country’s most divisive issues. Their positions moved, often toward the centre, and crucially the warmth each partisan side felt toward the other rose. It’s the marquee demonstration that deliberative polling can depolarise.

At a glance

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WhenSeptember 2019, over four days
WhereDallas, Texas
Who526 citizen-delegates, a representative sample of the US electorate (travel, hotel and food paid; families flown in on request)
FormatDeliberative polling — pre-survey, balanced briefings, small groups + plenary, post-survey
TopicsImmigration, health care, foreign policy, climate, the economy
OutcomeMeasurable opinion change and reduced affective polarisation (advisory)

What happened

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The Deliberative Democracy Lab (with the non-profit Helena) assembled what was then the largest representative sample of US voters ever gathered to deliberate. Delegates filled in a survey, received briefing materials vetted across the political spectrum, then alternated between facilitated small-group discussion and plenary sessions where they questioned policy experts and then-presidential candidates, before taking the survey again.

What changed

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The shifts surprised even the organisers. Republicans softened their views on immigration; Democrats became more moderate on some signature-progressive policies (universal basic income, “baby bonds”) once discussion turned to whether they were actually implementable. On the relational side — the thing that may matter most — Republicans came to view Democrats more warmly and vice versa. They weren’t “hugging and kissing,” in Alice Siu’s words, but they came to like each other, having found their lived experiences were not so different: everyone had a family member struggling, everyone had someone who needed health care.

The personal effects ran deep. One 70-year-old Texan credited the event with her decision to uproot and move, no longer able to live somewhere she couldn’t stay curious and talk across difference. A low-income single mother on food assistance, who had never touched politics, said it equipped her to talk her newly-18 son through his first vote.

How it went, and its limits

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America in One Room is widely cited as evidence that informed, moderated deliberation pulls people off their polarised defaults — the antidote to the phantom opinions and echo chambers of ordinary polling. Its honest limits are that it was advisory (it measured informed opinion rather than producing binding decisions) and expensive to run at that scale — which is exactly why the Lab now builds AI-assisted platforms to scale the format. See also the epistemic case for democracy.

Sources

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