Look who's talking: Examining social influence, opinion change, and argument quality in deliberation

While a variety of scholars have written about deliberation and its effects, both positive and negative, almost all the empirical evidence has been based on pre and post deliberation responses on questionnaires or through analyzing outcomes. Moreover, even less is understood about the process of deliberation and how we can analyze argument quality. Based on the theories of deliberative democracy and transcripts of actual deliberation in five Deliberative Polls, this dissertation constructed a method to measure argument quality, issue positions, and other discussion variables. These variables examine their impact on small group mechanisms, such as polarization and social dominance, and policy opinion change. While the sample is limited to a particular design of deliberation, the normative basis makes the model applicable to studying a variety of other deliberative scenarios. This dissertation presents results contrary to two major criticisms of deliberation: social dominance and polarization in deliberations. Furthermore, this dissertation demonstrates that it is the most informed, and not the most privileged, who have higher quality argumentation and are less affected by the imbalance of arguments in deliberations.