Introduction and Contribution

The United States is frequently described as exceptional among other advanced industrial democracies, especially those of Western Europe. Popular narratives attribute this to the US Constitution, a commitment to individual liberty, and economic opportunity, or the “American dream.” Scholarly accounts, by contrast, have focused on institutional differences, especially the absence of a comprehensive American welfare state. To be sure, these claims must be qualified. Social and economic mobility has declined substantially in the US over recent decades, while Americans derive sizable welfare benefits from tax relief schemes such as retirement savings. In what sense, and relative to which countries, is the US in fact exceptional? 

In “American Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Julieta Casas argues that exceptionalism should be conceptualized in two distinct ways: (1) The US’s lack of convergence with Western European countries, despite similar outcomes (e.g., prosperity and industrialization) and different starting points (limited vs. comprehensive welfare states). (2) The US’s divergence from Latin American countries in terms of outcomes (e.g., development vs. underdevelopment) despite similar starting points (colonization, independence movements seeking Republican government). Put differently, if initial conditions are X and outcomes are Y, the two corresponding questions are “Why Y despite no X?” and “Why X but not Y?” Casas maintains that while much valuable scholarship has focused on (1), especially in the ‘American Political Development’ tradition, an analysis of (2) holds promise to sharpen our explanations of exceptionalism and methodological rigor. 

This reframing of exceptionalism has broader significance beyond academic debates. Indeed, the United States is currently undergoing the most pronounced democratic decline in its history. Similar kinds of declines — particularly those motivated by right-wing, anti-immigrant, populist sentiment — have been observed across Europe and Latin America. Resisting authoritarian leaders and movements in the US requires understanding cases of successful and failed resistance elsewhere. This kind of understanding depends on making appropriate kinds of comparisons.

Two Ways of Thinking About Exceptionalism

Lack of Convergence with Western Europe:

Perceptions of American exceptionalism vis-à-vis Europe date to at least the early nineteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the US as uniquely equal compared to his native France, owing to its lack of a feudal past and abundance of land, among other factors. Twentieth-century observers highlighted the absence of a strong American socialist party as well as dramatic rises in incarceration rates and income inequality — especially after the late 1970s. However, these accounts have been tempered by those who sought to show how, for example, the early American state was not exceptionally weaker than its European counterparts. Although the US lacked a powerful federal government, other institutions, such as Congress, the judiciary, and political parties, were quite strong.

One significant, less disputed case of exceptionalism is the early American bureaucracy, which was substantially more ‘patrimonial’ than in Western Europe. In other words, US politicians treated bureaucratic privileges — such as jobs — as rewards or ‘patronage’ to be doled out in exchange for political support. This lack of convergence with professionalized European bureaucracies was most famously explained by reference to the ‘sequencing’ of popular suffrage and bureaucratic development. In the US, suffrage came first, which gave politicians incentives to behave as patrons interacting with voters or ‘clients.’ In Europe, by contrast, suffrage came later, which enabled bureaucracies to professionalize without electoral pressures. 

Divergence from Latin America:

Although the United States is often seen as standing apart from other countries in the Americas, they share many starting points. These include similar times of independence from the European colonial powers, presidential and Republican as opposed to parliamentary and monarchical systems, and racialized hierarchies where darker-skinned and indigenous groups were oppressed. Across the Americas, weak federal governments struggled to exercise authority over vast territories. This led to intransigent pockets of authoritarian rule — compare the US South under Jim Crow with the decades-long rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Oaxaca, Mexico. However, the US proved quite exceptional in terms of its prosperity and industrialization; indeed, it surpassed not only Latin America but also its former colonizer.

Social scientists have analyzed divergence by using the US as a comparative case study. This includes asking why the US diverged from Canada in terms of their different healthcare systems. In addition, the question of divergence within Latin America, in terms of different kinds of twentieth-century regimes (e.g., military dictatorship, traditional dictatorship, democracy), has received much scholarly attention. American exceptionalism vis-à-vis Latin America, however, has not. 

One of Casas’ key contributions is to show how comparing the US and Latin America forces a rethinking of the above-mentioned sequencing debate. It is true that the American bureaucracy professionalized much later than in Europe. However, explaining this development in terms of the timing of suffrage runs into a problem: Latin American countries also introduced suffrage before building their bureaucracies, yet in these cases, professionalization was either extremely slow or has yet to occur. In Mexico, it was not until 100 years after the franchise was expanded that civil service reforms were enacted. 

In comparison to Latin America, then, the US looks like a pioneer and success story of bureaucratic development — not a laggard in comparison to Western Europe. Casas thus highlights an important point about reference classes or vantage points. To use a related example, Americans may rightly view the US as more free relative to India or Brazil, yet overlook its distance from more robust democracies such as Canada or Japan. This underscores that exceptionalism is not a fixed property, but rather is defined by the comparisons we make.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The numbers and the map beneath them

Weintraub opened with data he had scraped that morning, and the maps told a story of a country voting almost exactly along the lines it already knew. Cepeda's support mapped with striking precision onto Gustavo Petro's 2022 coalition — he flipped essentially no municipality where the combined right-wing vote had exceeded Petro's four years earlier — while De la Espriella's strength traced the same geography as the “No” vote in Colombia's 2016 referendum on the FARC peace agreement. Turnout, oddly, had risen more in Petro's 2022 strongholds than in the right's, which Weintraub read less as good news for Cepeda than as a sign his coalition may already be close to its ceiling, with more untapped voters available to De la Espriella heading into the runoff. Modeling out several scenarios for how Valencia's, Fajardo's, and López's voters might split, most of his projections had De la Espriella winning comfortably — though, as he noted, Colombian elections have a way of moving in the three weeks between rounds.

What the numbers don't show

Mejía pushed back on two points he felt the quantitative read was missing. First, the Pacto Histórico's cohesion: a Colombian left with a long history of fragmentation had, remarkably, stayed unified behind a famously self-centered leader in Petro — though Mejía flagged early signs that some in the movement were quietly urging Cepeda to distance himself, a tension he expected to shape the run-up to the runoff and, potentially, Colombian politics well past this election cycle.

Second, and more pointedly, Mejía argued against reading De la Espriella as simply Colombia's version of an internationally franchised populism — Bukele, Milei, Trump — with the usual explanations about fear and security anxiety layered on top. There's some of that, he allowed. But he made the case that De la Espriella had tapped something more specifically Colombian: a cultural premium on hard work as the individual, personally-earned marker of social standing — a value Mejía argued Petrismo's more abstract, structural language about labor and capital simply doesn't speak to — paired with a live-and-let-live, self-reliant streak that runs across class lines. He pointed to a viral interview De la Espriella gave the streamer Westcol, where he defended a truck driver's right to carry a gun against highway robbers in strikingly plain, non-ideological terms, as the clearest illustration of a message landing well beyond the demographic most analysts assumed was his base.

A clean vote, an anxious moment

Kaplan drew on firsthand observation, having been in Colombia both eighteen months earlier and again just weeks before the vote, where he watched supporters of every camp convince themselves their candidate would win. He was careful to note the good news first: Colombia's electoral authority and EU observers both called the vote clean, turnout was strong, and — in a detail that made the local news cycle that morning — Colombian voters get paid time off work for each round they vote in. But the deeper story, in his read, was a political system whipsawed by unmet expectations since the 2016 peace deal, Petro's stalled “total peace” negotiations, and a personal, legal feud between Cepeda and former president Álvaro Uribe layered on top of an election that had become, in effect, a referendum on Petro himself. Cepeda's central problem, Kaplan argued, echoed Kamala Harris's in the 2024 U.S. election: tied to an unpopular incumbent's record without ever having been able to fully break from it. Whether he could move toward the center — a softer task against De la Espriella than it might have been against the more centrist Valencia — was, in Kaplan's view, the pivotal question of the next three weeks. He closed by naming the deeper worry running under both campaigns: real, if differently shaped, concerns about what either winner might do to Colombia's political institutions.

A regional pattern, and a geopolitical wildcard

Curiel widened the lens. She was careful not to flatten every recent right-populist surge in Latin America into a single story, but she argued it's hard to ignore a regional pattern all the same — strikingly similar candidates, rhetorical strategies, and now fraud allegations recurring across countries (Honduras, Peru, Bolivia among them) whose underlying security and political problems differ substantially. She suggested it might be worth studying today's crop of outsider-right figures the way scholars once studied the diffusion of Latin America's leftist movements in the 1960s and '70s — as a phenomenon with its own cross-border mechanics, not just parallel domestic stories.

On the United States, Curiel expected rhetorical engagement from the Trump administration — De la Espriella is an open admirer who had already met with Trump officials in Miami — but was skeptical it would prove decisive; Cepeda, by contrast, might govern more in the pragmatic, arm's-length mode of Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum, building on the more accommodating turn Petro's own relationship with Washington had taken since earlier in the year. She also flagged a looming energy question neither candidate had addressed in any detail: an anticipated El Niño-driven drop in hydroelectric capacity, and the resulting scramble for imported natural gas — from the United States or, potentially, Venezuela — that whoever won would inherit almost immediately. And she pointed to a genuine irony in De la Espriella's biography: a right-wing candidate whose past legal work had tied him personally to a figure associated with the Maduro government, complicating any simple ideological reading of what a De la Espriella presidency would mean for Colombia–Venezuela relations.

Where the center went, and what comes next

The discussion that followed ranged widely: why Paloma Valencia's campaign collapsed after polling near 20 percent just weeks earlier (the panel's rough consensus: a hard right that structurally tends to outflank the establishment right across the region, compounded by a Petrista strategy that concentrated its fire on De la Espriella as the tougher runoff opponent, leaving Valencia to absorb collateral damage); whether Colombia's center had simply disappeared with the 2016 peace agreement; and how much weight to put on U.S. involvement or even World Cup-driven national sentiment as runoff wildcards. Nobody thought either would be decisive on its own.

Asked directly what a De la Espriella or a Cepeda presidency would mean for the health of Colombian democracy, Weintraub was candid about his concern — less because either candidate is uniquely dangerous, he said, than because Colombia's political system has grown exhausted, its 1991 constitutional settlement showing diminishing returns and a public “willing to experiment” after the unfulfilled promise of Petro's own presidency. Curiel and Kaplan both located genuine grounds for hope in the same place: an unusually fragmented political landscape, without a single unchallenged caudillo on either side, and courts and regulatory institutions that had — so far — held their independence through repeated stress tests. On violence specifically, the panel's closing predictions diverged by scenario. Under De la Espriella, Weintraub and Kaplan worried that a rupture in Petro's ongoing peace talks would trigger retaliatory violence, that a return to aerial coca fumigation would collide head-on with the Constitutional Court, and that elite or paramilitary backlash would follow if Cepeda had instead pursued land reform and a constituent assembly. Under Cepeda, the concern ran more toward armed groups continuing to exploit ceasefires and extortion economies, and toward the durability of institutional checks on a government still tied to Petro's unfinished agenda.

Díaz-Cayeros closed the session on a note that has stayed with the panel since: a viewer's comment in the chat had framed the choice as one between “the devil you know and the devil you don't.” Fair enough, he said — but democracy remains one of the few systems humanity has built that lets a society get rid of either devil, peacefully, and try again.

Postscript: what actually happened

Set against the news since, the panel's read holds up better in its worries than in its point estimates.

The margin was the first surprise. Weintraub's scenario modeling, built the morning after round one, had De la Espriella winning comfortably in most transfer scenarios. The actual runoff, held as scheduled on June 21, was instead a nail-biter: 49.66 percent to 48.70 percent, a gap of roughly 246,000 votes out of some 26 million cast — under one percentage point, and close enough that Cepeda initially declined to concede, contesting results from close to a quarter of polling stations before formally accepting the outcome on June 24 with a pledge to “exercise a democratic, vigilant and constructive opposition.” Election night itself brought clashes between protesters and police in Cali, an early sign of the social tension the panel had flagged as a risk under either outcome.

Weintraub's own post-election analysis, published the day of the runoff, put hard numbers behind the panel's “entrenched spatial blocks” thesis — and, in the process, revised one of the panel's own central premises. Only 26 of Colombia's more than eleven hundred municipalities changed which candidate won between the two rounds (14 flipping to De la Espriella, 12 to Cepeda), and nearly all of those flips came in places that were already razor-thin in round one. The country that voted for De la Espriella — Norte de Santander at 77 percent, Casanare at 69, Santander at 65, Antioquia at 64 — and the country that voted for Cepeda — Chocó and Vaupés both above 80 percent, Putumayo at 79, Nariño at 77, Cauca at 76 — barely overlapped at all. Bogotá told a version of the story Weintraub had flagged live on the panel, now with exact numbers: Cepeda carried the capital 52.5 percent to 45.4, a margin of about 302,000 votes, solid but well short of what Petro had won there in 2022, even as Cepeda gained ground in every other major city between rounds — up 8.7 points in Medellín, 8.2 in Cali, 8.0 in Cartagena, 7.1 in Barranquilla.

The more important correction concerns the “pivotal center” the panel spent so much of its discussion on the day after round one — the roughly 2.8 million voters who had backed Valencia, Fajardo, and López. Weintraub's later numbers show both campaigns' gains between rounds exceeded that entire pool on their own: De la Espriella added nearly 2.6 million votes beyond his first-round total, more than Valencia's whole first-round universe by itself, while Cepeda added over 3 million, more than the combined Fajardo-López vote. The runoff, in other words, wasn't decided mainly by which side won over centrist defectors but by each campaign's ability to pull entirely new voters to the polls, a dynamic already visible in round one, when turnout had risen 2.25 million over 2022, disproportionately in Cepeda's Caribbean and Pacific strongholds. Between rounds, turnout climbed further, up 5.6 points to 63.5 percent (3.6 million more voters than the 2022 runoff), and Cepeda's operation mobilized more of them in absolute terms than De la Espriella's. It simply wasn't enough to close a gap that had already opened in round one. As Weintraub summarized: De la Espriella won a close, high-turnout election on the strength of an intact regional coalition plus modest gains in the center; Cepeda outgrew his first-round vote proportionally, but never closed the gap he faced.

Washington reacted exactly as Curiel expected, if more enthusiastically than her cautious framing implied: Trump declared on Truth Social that De la Espriella had “Won, BIG!,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the president-elect to discuss regional security cooperation, immigration, and trade. Precisely, the rhetorical engagement Curiel predicted, delivered with more warmth than skepticism.

Despite initial post-election tensions, transfer of power went ahead on schedule, if uneasily. De la Espriella was sworn in on August 7, not in Bogotá, but in Cali, under an unprecedented security operation of some 11,000 troops and a drone ban, with Javier Milei and José Antonio Kast among the foreign leaders in attendance.

On policy, the new president has moved fast to confirm Weintraub's most specific fears. He has vowed to end the Petro government's peace negotiations with armed groups, resume aerial fumigation of coca crops (a practice suspended for more than a decade), and the exact flashpoint Weintraub predicted would trigger a “choque” with the Constitutional Court — and expand the military's role against criminal organizations, alongside new large-scale prison construction. Analysts are now warning, in terms that echo Weintraub and Kaplan's closing remarks almost exactly, that abandoning negotiations could backfire: an estimated 27,000 members of armed groups currently have no reintegration pathway if talks collapse entirely. On foreign policy, De la Espriella has aligned closely with the Trump administration, backing its military strikes on suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean, expediting extraditions, severing relations with Cuba, and restoring ties with Israel. 

Six weeks into the new administration, the question the panel closed on that afternoon has stopped being hypothetical and started being lived: can Colombia's institutions absorb what comes next? It's the story DAL's "Democracy at the Ballot Box" series intends to keep following.

Key Findings

The results were striking - and they matter for policymakers, health leaders, and the public alike.

🌍 2,419 citizens across six middle-income countries participated
📈 43 out of 45 policy proposals saw increased support after deliberation
✅ The most popular proposals were those relating to infection prevention
🌐 Regional differences emerged — particularly around attitudes to restricting antibiotic use in food production.

Antimicrobial resistance is not only a scientific challenge but a societal one. This project shows that when citizens are given balanced information, diverse perspectives, and the opportunity to deliberate, they can engage meaningfully with the complexity of AMR and support the action it requires. Building public trust and community engagement is essential to reducing the global impact of AMR. We hope these findings and resources will help advance public engagement on AMR and strengthen deliberative approaches across global health.

From Understanding to Action

This study demonstrates something important: when citizens are given the chance to engage seriously with a complex global health challenge, they rise to it.

Across all six countries, deliberation moved public opinion towards greater support for ambitious AMR action — on prescription practices, agricultural use, access to medicines, and prevention. The 2024 UN Political Declaration set out what governments have committed to. This research shows that the public, when informed, is ready to support it.

The findings have direct relevance for:

• Policymakers designing national AMR action plans, particularly in middle-income countries
• Health communicators seeking evidence-based approaches to public engagement on AMR
• Researchers building the evidence base for deliberative approaches in global health
• Civil society organizations advocating for community-level AMR action
   

We are committed to sharing these findings as widely as possible — with governments, health bodies, and the communities that took part.

Thanks to our funders

With thanks to the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Wellcome.

Contact and Media

For media inquiries and further information about the research, please contact Louise Gough (Chief Operating Officer) at info@thetrinitychallenge.org.

Read our press release.

Introduction and Contribution

Economies depend on infrastructure: roads enable the movement of goods and workers, electricity powers businesses and factories, and communications technologies allow for the exchange of information and services. Yet in our connected world, roughly 1 billion people live more than two kilometers from an all-season road, and approximately 1.2 billion have no access to electricity.¹

For decades, institutions such as the World Bank and McKinsey Global Institute have promoted the idea that closing a trillion-dollar gap between planned global infrastructure investment and the estimated level of investment needed to drive growth will alleviate poverty, harness the potential of developing nations to increase global GDP, and enrich foreign investors. But despite the fact that unrealized gains from greater infrastructure investment in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) outstrip those in the rich world, comparatively little capital flows into the infrastructure of poor countries.

In “The Global Infrastructure Gap: Potential, Perils, and a Framework for Distinction,” Camille Gardner and Peter Blair Henry reject the received narrative that flooding poor countries with capital simply to reach a target level of infrastructure investment will yield the desired gains. Instead, they urge investors and policymakers to move from thinking about infrastructure “gaps” to prioritizing infrastructure returns. Specifically, they propose the first “dual hurdle” framework. The framework uses cross-country differences in returns to identify efficiency in cross-country investments, incorporating the incentives that suppliers and allocators of capital must have to finance productive projects.

Applying the framework to historical data, Gardner and Henry debunk the notion that poor countries offer ubiquitous opportunities for productive investment. Only 13 percent of countries in the data set cleared the dual-hurdle tests of efficiency for projects in both roads and electricity. But for countries that did clear the hurdles, the return on infrastructure was large: more than 10 times greater in some cases than the return on rich-country private capital.

This underscores the need for updated and more accessible data to drive decisions and prioritize projects. Differences across countries, sectors (e.g., roads vs. electricity), and locations (urban vs. rural) must be taken seriously to avoid a wasteful allocation of global infrastructure capital.

Gardner and Henry expand our understanding of when cross-country infrastructure investments are efficient and why poor countries have struggled to catch up. And as labor forces in poor countries grow rapidly, the problems associated with infrastructure scarcity are likely to become more acute, increasing migration pressures. Effective investment can mitigate risks while generating mutual gains for poor and rich countries alike.

When Infrastructure Investment Pays Off

The authors’ dual hurdle framework reveals that public infrastructure investment in a poor country is efficient only if it yields higher returns than the social rate of return on private capital (a) within the country and (b) in rich countries. Countries that clear both hurdles are deemed strong candidates for more investment.
 

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Figure 4. The Dual-Hurdle Framework

Note: For a given poor country and type of infrastructure, the dual-hurdle framework sorts each country-infrastructure observation into one of four quadrants according to whether it clears the hurdle for efficient: (a) domestic investment, and (b) foreign investment.
 

Gardner and Henry apply their framework to 53 countries that belong to the only known data set of comprehensive cross-country estimates of the social rates of return on infrastructure (roads and electricity) in poor countries, found in a paper commissioned by the World Bank that is based on data from 1985.² In their analysis, Gardner and Henry show that while some countries have opportunities for high returns (especially for paved roads), many others do not. In very few countries can the case be made for investing across multiple kinds of infrastructure (only 7 of 53 countries cleared the dual hurdles for both roads and electricity), and for some countries there is no case to be made.

To be clear, infrastructure investment is not generally inefficient. Indeed, worthwhile projects to increase or upgrade infrastructure in poor countries can yield much higher gains than are available from private investment in both poor and rich countries. This is because infrastructure improvements raise productivity across the economy. The problem is that these high-return opportunities are difficult to identify, especially without updated, readily accessible, quality data.

Different types of infrastructure also vary in their impact depending on the context. For example, investments in electricity often yield low returns in rural settings but high returns in urban settings (where firms are concentrated and struggle due to unreliable power). By contrast, roads more often yield higher returns because they support market activity overall. Finally, the authors show that efficient infrastructure also depends on the interaction of private capital, human capital, and good institutions. This underscores the limitations of simply building more infrastructure in isolation. 

Challenges to Infrastructure Investment

Gardner and Henry document extensive variation in efficiency when comparing private versus public capital allocation (in roads and electricity) across rich and poor countries. The social rates of return on public capital vary much more than with private capital, which is the case in both rich and poor countries, and inefficiencies in public capital allocation are greater in poor countries than in rich ones. This variation is driven not just by economic factors but also by political and institutional constraints.

The concept of “frozen capital” helpfully describes the outcome of problems facing prospective investors. For one, because infrastructure requires complementarities (e.g., electrifying an area requires the preexistence of reliable roads), individual projects may be unprofitable unless others are simultaneously financed and coordinated.

Additionally, foreign investors may distrust the governments of the countries where they invest, or they may be wary of the quality of domestic firms tasked with completing a given project. This will certainly be true where transparency and accountability are lacking. Especially in poor autocracies or semi-democracies, governments may arbitrarily change the law, fail to honor contracts, or face political and social instability, leaving investors uncertain about the prospect of repayment and return on their investments.

Ultimately, infrastructure investment offers great promise, but it must be evidence-based and approached with caution. The challenge is not to simply raise the level of investment but, as “The Global Infrastructure Gap” shows, to use cross-country differences in returns to identify the right infrastructure projects, in the right places, to maximize the efficiency of cross-country capital allocation.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

_References:

_{1. Canning, David, and Esra Bennathan. 2000. “The Social Rate of Return on Infrastructure Investment.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2390.}

_{2. Rozenberg, Julie, and Marianne Fay, eds. 2019. Beyond the Gap: How Countries Can Afford the Infrastructure They Need While Protecting the Planet. Washington, DC: World Bank.}

Introduction and Contribution

Democracies face a host of ongoing challenges, including the rise of elected autocrats, income inequality, mainstreamed forms of xenophobic nationalism, and political apathy. All of these challenges pose threats to democratic participation — elected autocrats restrict it, inequality makes it easier for oligarchs to sway election outcomes, and xenophobia can discourage cultural outsiders from voting.

Apart from practical threats to democratic participation, an established intellectual tradition has viewed participation with deep skepticism. In this view, democracy is good simply because it ensures peaceful transfers of power and protects individual rights. Collective decisions, however, cannot be meaningfully viewed as representing the “will of the people” owing to manipulation, apathy, and the high costs of acquiring political knowledge. Is this “realist” vision the best one can hope for in democratic life?

In “Can deliberation have lasting effects?,” James Fishkin, Valentin Bolotnyy, Joshua Lerner, Alice Siu, and Norman Bradburn show how a three-day deliberative experiment in late 2019 had large and long-term effects on turnout and voting behavior. Those most likely to exhibit these civic behaviors nearly a year later had come to follow politics more closely and see their political opinions as valuable. At the same time, the experiment’s effects on participants’ policy views were significant only in the short term — most deliberators eventually reverted to their previously held policy positions.

That three days of deliberation had such lasting civic effects suggests that efforts to create more inclusive forms of democratic participation are both possible and scalable. Moreover, it suggests that academic skepticism about democratic participation is not an argument against citizens’ capacities for reasonable decision-making; rather, it is an argument against our imperfect contexts of participation. Deliberative experiments may offer hope for improving these contexts.

The Deliberative Experiment and Its Effects on Policy Views

In September 2019 — one week prior to the experiment — a treatment group (i.e., those who would deliberate) of 523 registered voters from around the US and a control group of 844 voters were surveyed on their political attitudes. Members of the treatment group then deliberated on five issue domains (the economy, environment, immigration, health care, foreign policy) in small groups and on 47 policy proposals (e.g., redistributing wealth in some way). 26 of these proposals were characterized by extreme partisan polarization, meaning significant numbers of those who identified as Democrats or Republicans held the most extreme views. After the deliberations ended, both the treatment and control groups were surveyed. Then, three subsequent surveys were conducted in late 2020.

Among the treatment group, deliberation produced significant, short-term depolarization on 20 of the 26 (polarized) policy proposals. In other words, the averages for participants who identified with each party moved closer together (though not necessarily toward the center). These changes were large, sometimes 40 percentage points, as in the case of Republicans abandoning extreme positions on immigration. Meanwhile, the control group’s policy positions changed hardly at all — pointing to the key role played by deliberation. Within the five issue areas, averages among deliberators shifted leftward on all but the economy.
 

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Figure 1. Policy-Based Score (PBS) Changes over Time
Note: Policy-based score (PBS) is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. The upper chart shows the participant group, and the lower chart shows the control group. T1 is the survey wave prior to the deliberations, T2 is right after the deliberations, and T3 is 10 months after, in July 2020.
 

By late 2020, however, the treatment group’s policy positions mostly reverted to their pre-deliberation levels. The differences between these two points in time were still significant compared with the control group, yet relatively small in absolute terms. These policy reversions are perhaps unsurprising: deliberators returned to an environment of heightened polarization and aggressive campaigning during the 2020 election cycle. (To be sure, and from the standpoint of finding solutions to collective problems, policy reversion is not especially concerning — the aim of deliberation is to bring citizens together to reason and compromise, which the experiment accomplished.)

A Civic Awakening?

The lack of long-term policy effects suggests that three-day deliberations may be limited in their ability to create a more encompassing, participatory society. However, the treatment group demonstrated large and persistent changes in their intention to vote (i.e., turnout) and their candidate of choice. Among the control group, Joe Biden was favored over Donald Trump by about four percentage points — very close to Biden’s actual margin in the popular vote. Among the treatment group, however, Biden was favored by 28 percentage points. The gaps in turnout were similarly large. (Note that these are intentions, not reports of actual decisions. However, Tables 6 and 7 in the article show similar effects for recollected votes after the election.)
 

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Table 2. Voting Intention for Participant and Control Groups, Time 4
 

These civic outcomes are especially surprising because (a) voting behavior is thought to be stable and deeply rooted in one’s psychology and social context, and (b) experimental efforts to increase turnout have been most successful when undertaken shortly before elections, as opposed to one whole year prior. The effects were most pronounced among political moderates and those without college degrees — perhaps pointing to the educative effects of deliberation.
 

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Figure 5. Effects on Vote Intention Captured by Predictive Modeling, by Education
Note: Middle are those participants who have Policy-Based Scores between 3 and 5 (inclusive) at Time 1. Non-middle participants are all other participants. Positive prediction error shows that, on average, participants were more likely to vote for Biden than predicted by the model. Vote intention data are collected at Time 4, in October, 2020. Full calibrated model used to construct this figure can be found in the APSR Dataverse.
 

Why did deliberation produce only short-term policy effects but long-term effects on voting behavior? The authors posit that deliberation caused an “awakening of civic capacities.” They reason that deliberation was a transformative experience in terms of stimulating political engagement and a sense of efficacy. And indeed, the treatment group was, in the long term, more likely than the control group to follow the 2020 election campaign, believe their political opinions mattered, and acquire general information about American politics. (The latter is measured in terms of knowing which party controlled the House and Senate.)
 

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Figure 9. Having “Political Opinions Worth Listening to”
Note: Policy-based score is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. Responses to the question “How strongly would you disagree or agree with the following statement?”[I have opinions about politics that are worth listening to.] were collected at T1 (just before deliberations), T2 (just after), and T3 (10 months later, July 2020).
 

The authors close by discussing efforts to scale up civic engagement, such as the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform. In all, “Can deliberation have lasting effects?” provides a rigorous case for the value of deliberation in strengthening democratic participation.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

For over 25 years, Stanford’s Kimberly Babiarz has felt fiercely devoted to addressing the complex injustice of human trafficking, a crime she is quick to point out, “is everywhere.” 

Modern slavery, which includes sex and labor trafficking, forced labor, domestic servitude, debt bondage, and forced marriage, is “a big, systemic problem in need of big, systemic solutions,” she notes.

Those kinds of solutions typically require a diverse array of skillsets and experience – not to mention a great deal of dedication to the work, both of which Babiarz found when she and longtime collaborator Grant Miller, Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford School of Medicine, linked up with Jessie Brunner of Stanford’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics Vicki Ward, and Luis Assis, labor prosecutor and Chief Data Scientist at Brazil’s Federal Labor Prosecution Office.

The group coalesced around a shared sense of frustration at the lack of an evidence base undergirding decades of anti-trafficking interventions and the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab was born in 2019 with a mission to bring data and evidence to the fight against human trafficking.

“Few things give me more satisfaction than gathering folks with disparate backgrounds and skillsets towards achieving a common goal to advance human rights,” said Brunner. “Forming the Lab was a unique opportunity to leverage advances in data science and technological innovation to bear on one of the most grievous abuses of our time.”

Fairly quickly, the team identified a gap they could fill in and around the remote Amazon region in northeastern Brazil.

“The steady pace of deforestation and land conversion in the Amazon relies on the exploitation of people, including some children, who work strenuous 16-hour days, often without pay, burning trees at extremely high temperatures and converting them into charcoal,” explains Miller, the Lab’s Principal Investigator. “This all takes place at illegal work sites, where laborers live without adequate shelter or clean water, that are intentionally hidden from view in remote areas.”

Because these sites consist of an almost geometric line-up of dome-shaped kilns devoted to burning trees and an output of thick smoke, the researchers realized their footprints are uniquely visible from space. 

Using geospatial data and remote detection algorithms, the lab was able to pinpoint a clear way in which data science could be leveraged to help Brazilian prosecutors locate and investigate the stealth work sites where laborers are often exploited in conditions analogous to slavery. 

At a Stanford Impact Labs storytelling event in April, Babiarz vividly described the thrill of realizing that an algorithm could be put to work against this severe, yet frequently invisible, human rights issue plaguing Brazil. By building a data-driven tool to find and map illegal charcoal production sites, she described how her team helped law enforcement uncover nearly 200 previously unknown sites.

Most exciting of all, prosecutors were able to inspect 130 of those sites and carried out 10 times more task force raids than historically observed. Most importantly, the team observed a surge in the number of workers rescued from conditions of modern slavery, a more than 10-fold increase compared to typical years. The team is now rolling the tool out to every charcoal producing region in Brazil and exploring the tool’s applicability potential in other geographies and sectors. 

“We found a way to build a solution big enough to meet the scale of the problem in a corner of the world that really needs it,” Babiarz notes. "We also found a great deal of hope in being a part of this solution. By harnessing powerful technology in the context of a trusted partnership, we were able to deliver real impact to people in need of real help.”

The team's work in Brazil is far from over. 

With funding from Stanford Impact Labs, the Lab is expanding the impact of their work in Brazil’s charcoal sector, working with Brazil’s Federal Labor Prosecution Office to create a new data-driven technical tool to map exploitative supply chains. The tool will identify labor trafficking and illegal deforestation in distant tiers of the supply chain by integrating data from siloed publicly available administrative and legal records, making it easier for private sector steel manufacturers to address both trafficking and deforestation in their supply chains.

“The supply chain tracing tool is yet another example of the way our Lab is leveraging advances in data and social sciences to reach more trafficking victims and hold their exploiters accountable,” said Assis. “This has the potential to really change the game.”

This story was originally published by Stanford Impact Labs Director of Strategic Communications & Outreach Kate Green Tripp.