Derek E. Holliday, Yphtach Lelkes, and Sean J. Westwood — Why Depolarization Is Hard: Evaluating Attempts to Decrease Partisan Animosity in America

15 published claims from this book.

• Controlled experiments may not predict real-world intervention effects
• Depolarization interventions barely raise out-party warmth and show no gains from repetition.
• Depolarization interventions produce only modest temporary effects on partisan animosity.
• Depolarization interventions produce small, decaying effects that fail to scale or shift downstream attitudes
• Depolarization interventions work in lab settings but fall short of reversing societal polarization.
• Dialogue-based depolarization interventions produce small, short-lived effects that fail to scale.
• Durable depolarization requires structural or institutional rather than one-shot interventions
• Even ideal depolarization gains barely move downstream democratic attitudes.
• Even with identical panels, replicating Megastudy depolarization effects proved unreliable.
• Interventions effective in controlled settings may fail to produce large-scale durable polarization change.
• Modest affective depolarization gains fail to shift downstream attitudes and behaviors.
• Partisan warmth shifts only matter if they alter downstream democratic behavior.
• Stacking multiple depolarization interventions does not amplify their effect on out-party warmth.
• Study 1 randomly assigned thousands of respondents to one, two, or three depolarization treatments.
• Studying interventions amid an election cycle is a stringent but possibly non-generalizable test.