Aiming at Open Government in a Highly Polarized Socio-political Scenario: is it Deliberation Possible?

ALONSO, DANIELA

Simposio; Early Career Symposium in Deliberation Research; 2021

KU Leuven, Bélgica

Argentina's national and sub-national governments are taking the first steps towards e-government and open government initiatives. In addition to the economic challenges, the need for institutional redesign and the training of human resources, a challenge from citizens? motivations and dispositions is added: Argentine citizens have little interest and knowledge about political issues, show high levels of political cynicism and signs of political alienation (Alonso & Brussino, 2018). Furthermore, levels of polarization and political conflict are increasing, and have only deepened since the beginning of the pandemic, strengthening extremist groups (Aruguete & Calvo, 2020). This conflict exceeds institutional politics, also permeating social relations, with potentially serious socio-political consequences (Jorge, 2018). We address two main challenges: is it possible to generate virtuous tools for deliberation that can serve to soften political conflict around controversial political issues? Is it possible to interest the public to actively participate in collective decision-making? Our research programme comprises a basic experimental phase and an applied phase, designed to intervene directly on the subjective barriers of participation and deliberation. This research programme is at its beginning stages. In order to explore motivated reasoning and polarization in our sociopolitical scenario, we are conducting some basic experimental research. Meanwhile, we are establishing cooperation networks with governmental institutions aimed at developing an online deliberation platform to be tested in a real-world scenario. For this symposium, we have prepared the main results of two similar experiments addressing motivated reasoning (Strickland, Taber, & Lodge, 2011) regarding two different polarizing issues: presidential elections and abortion legalization. We analyzed biases in information processing, argumentation, and polarization on issues of public relevance, and the intervention of cognitive style and ideological self-positioning (Pennycook & Rand, 2019. In the first experiment, we addressed biases in the evaluation of the quality of arguments for voting for one or another presidential candidate in a highly polarized electoral scenario, including partisan clues (Petersen, Skov, Serritzlew, & Ramsøy, 2013). In the second experiment, during the debate in Congress about abortion legalization, we analyzed biases in the processing of arguments for and against this law. We found evidence of directional information processing and rigidity of polarized positions. In the next stage, we will apply these results, together with insights from behavioural economics and video game theory, to design and test an online deliberation platform with gamified components. This will be used for experimental, educational and public decision-making purposes.