Deliberative citizens don’t participate much, and participatory citizens do not deliberate much.

From a book review by Jason Brennan of Hearing the Other Side 

Diana Mutz’s Hearing the Other Side is one of my favorite books on political behavior and  among the most influential books in my own intellectual development. It’s easy to read, short, and has a very high insight-per-page ratio. It’s one of the pieces that made me realize just how irrelevant most philosophical democratic theory is to justifying actual democracy. Highly recommended.

Here’s the summary I wrote of it in a early draft of chapter 7 of The Ethics of Voting:

Let’s describe two kinds of democratic citizens.

Deliberative citizens have frequent significant cross-cutting political discussion. That is, they frequently consider and respond to contrary views.  They are careful in forming their own political preferences.  They are able to articulate good reasons on behalf of contrary views.  They have high levels of political knowledge.

Participatory citizens engage heavily with politics. They run for office, run campaigns, vote, give money to campaigns, attend town hall meetings, engage in protests, write letters to the editor, etc.

In principle, a good deliberative citizen can also be a good participatory citizen.  These aren’t logically exclusive categories.  Most democratic theorists wish citizens to be deliberative and participatory.

However, Diana Mutz’s empirical work shows that deliberation and participation don’t come together.  Deliberative citizens don’t participate much, and participatory citizens do not deliberate much.  The people who are most active in politics tend to be (in my words, not Mutz’s) cartoon ideologues.  The people who are most careful in formulating their own political views and who spend the most time considering contrary views tend not to participate in politics.

Being exposed to contrary points of view tends to lessen one’s enthusiasm for one’s own political views.  Deliberation with others who hold contrary views tends to make one ambivalent and apathetic about politics. True-believers make better activists than cautious, self-skeptical thinkers.  (Imagine a street evangelist saying, “Hear ye!  My religion might be the one true path, but, you know, there are some good grounds for doubt!”)  Cross-cutting political exposure decreases the likelihood that a person will vote, reduces the number of political activities a person engages in, and makes people take longer to decide how to vote.

In contrast, active, participatory citizens tend not to engage in much deliberation and tend not to have much cross-cutting political discussion.[iv]  Instead, they seek out and interact only with others with whom they already agree.   When asked why other people hold contrary points of view, participatory citizens tend to respond that others must be stupid or corrupt.  Participatory citizens are often unable to give charitable explanations of why people might hold contrary views.  (This is worrisome, because people who tend to demonize all contrary views tend to be unjustified in their own views.)  In contrast, citizens who exhibit high degrees of the deliberative virtues are able to give charitable accounts of contrary viewpoints.