Does Interaction With Out-Party Elites in a Classroom Setting Diminish Negative Partisanship?

Abstract

The American electorate is increasingly affectively polarized. Partisans dislike members of the opposing party, even going so far as to discriminate against opposing partisans in nonpolitical domains. Given the potentially pernicious consequences of affective polarization, especially in nonpolitical settings, scholars have suggested facilitating contact between members of opposing parties as a means of reducing affective polarization. We test this approach in the context of a large introductory American government class comprised almost entirely of Democrats. Our pre-registered experiment randomly assigned recitation sections to treatment or control conditions, where the treatment was an hour-long discussion with a county chair from the Republican Party, and the control was an hour-long discussion with an attorney with no party connection. Partisan attitudes and evaluations were measured extensively at baseline, within a few days of the intervention, and two months later. We find no evidence that the treatment changed students’ partisan evaluations. We conclude by considering theoretical avenues for future experiments that change the nature and extent of cross-party social interaction.

Keywords

affective polarization elite contact experiments

Introduction

Partisanship plays an increasingly dominant role in American politics. Not only are partisans growing more likely to select candidates from their own party in elections (Bafumi & Shapiro, 2009), but even in nonpolitical domains, individuals’ decisions are shaped by their partisan identities (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015). Scholars contend that the expanding influence of party can be explained, in part, by a recent rise in affective polarization: partisans rate the opposing party much more negatively than they do their own party (Iyengar et al., 2019).

Indeed, a long line of research shows that partisans discriminate against members of the other party and favor their party in a wide range of settings (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Shafranek, 2021). Partisans are increasingly resistant to forming close relationships with opposing partisans (Huber & Malhotra, 2017; Iyengar et al., 2012), and economic decisions appear to be influenced by partisan considerations (Engelhardt & Utych, 2020; Gift & Gift, 2015; McConnell et al., 2018). Despite the many consequences of partisanship for nonpolitical decision-making, recent research suggests that affective polarization may have limited direct impact on the functioning of American democracy: experiments designed to change affective polarization have negligible concomitant effects on support for democracy and democratic norms (Broockman et al., 2022; Voelkel et al., 2023). At the same time, other research shows that partisanship and affective polarization predict whether individuals share false news on social media (Osmundsen et al., 2021) and whether they believe misinformation (Jenke, 2023).

Given its many consequences, which are particularly well-documented in nonpolitical settings, political scientists are devoting more attention to developing strategies for reducing affective polarization. Among the most successful interventions are those that facilitate contact between members of opposing parties (see e.g., Fishkin et al., 2021; Kalla & Broockman, 2022; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021). Still, more work is needed in at least two areas: first, to understand the dynamics by which elites might influence negative partisanship among the general public, and second, to craft contact-based depolarization interventions that are both scalable and durable.

In this article, we contribute to a burgeoning literature examining whether interpartisan contact can reduce partisan animosity. We deployed an experiment in the context of a large undergraduate course on American government. In small recitation sections, students were randomly assigned to engage in video conference conversations with Republican elites, Democratic elites, or attorneys with no obvious partisan affiliation. The party elites were active chairs of county party organizations. Treatment consisted of short, pre-planned discussions with standardized questions, conducted in a friendly, non-confrontational manner that stressed the chairs’ personal narratives and respect for their political opponents.

Through these conversations, students learned about the leaders’ backgrounds, party work, and views on partisan politics. The conversations stressed the chairs’ personal narrative, including a number of personal anecdotes about how they gravitated to their particular party and how they acquired their views on a number of policy issues. These conversations also exposed students to party elites who expressed professional respect for their counterparts on the opposite side, even if they disagreed with the out-party’s policy objectives. Afterward, students were encouraged to pose their own questions, which they typically did for about 30 minutes. Students’ partisan attitudes were measured several weeks before the leaders’ presentations, a few days later, and about 7 weeks later.

Our central question is whether an interaction between our students—the vast majority of whom expressed a Democratic Party identity—and a Republican Party elite that created opportunities for students to hear the elite’s perspective, as in Kalla and Broockman’s (2022) perspective-getting, was sufficiently powerful to reduce students’ negative assessment of their out-party. Our intervention differs from that of many out-party contact experiments, which tend to find that two-way perspective giving among peers is an effective means to lessen party animosity. In our conversations, students met with an elite instead of a peer, and although they had ample opportunity to listen to the elite’s perspective, they did not generally give their own.

While this is a weaker form of contact, it is important to assess whether a novel, respectful interaction with an elite can reduce out-party animus. Previous work has found that merely observing cordial communication among elites can reduce affective polarization among the mass public (Huddy & Yair, 2021). Our study builds on this work by including cordial, direct elite-mass interactions. Moreover, by facilitating interpartisan contact in a group setting, our study is easily scalable to larger group settings and allows us to assess the durability of treatment effects with minimal attrition. Although our design is well-powered to detect effects on Democratic students’ opinions of opposing partisans,¹ we find no evidence that the experimental intervention had any effects on their out-party stereotypes or evaluations. Our results indicate that simple (albeit novel) contact with opposing partisans may not ameliorate affective polarization and suggest potential limits of contact-based interventions.

Causes of Affective Polarization

The literature on affective polarization is firmly grounded in social identity theory, which holds that individuals denigrate out-groups and bolster in-groups to boost their self-esteem (e.g., Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Partisanship is an important and enduring social identity (Green et al., 2002; Greene, 1999). Consequently, Iyengar et al. (2012) argue that partisanship naturally generates interpartisan discrimination. As such, affective polarization might be reduced by either diminishing the importance of partisan identities or by encouraging other, more inclusive identities. However, research manipulating the salience of partisan identities has yielded mixed results. Some scholars find little evidence that directly manipulating the salience of partisanship influences affective polarization (Levendusky, 2018b; Singh & Thornton, 2023; West & Iyengar, 2022). On the other hand, Levendusky (2018a) finds that priming a common identity can reduce affective polarization. These results suggest that highlighting commonalities between opposing partisans may successfully reduce partisan animosity (Levendusky, 2023).

Another set of interventions targets downstream consequences of identities rather than the identities themselves, correcting misperceptions about and encouraging empathy for opposing partisans. Due in part to identity-based positive group differentiation and other cognitive biases, partisans tend to vastly overestimate both the differences between the two parties (Ahler & Sood, 2018; Stone, 2023) and the hostility directed at them by opposing partisans (Lees & Cikara, 2020; Moore-Berg et al., 2020). These misperceptions, in turn, fuel hostility toward the opposing party (Druckman et al., 2022; Stone, 2023). Correcting these misperceptions has been shown to decrease intergroup hostility. For example, Ahler and Sood (2018) show that when partisans are informed about the true demographic composition of the parties, their levels of affective polarization decline.

Many partisans also hold negative stereotypes about opposing partisans, believing them to be immoral, lazy, and less intelligent (Stone, 2023). Further, many appear willing to dehumanize individuals in the out-party (Martherus et al., 2021) and to dismiss them as “evil” (Mason & Kalmoe, 2022). The prevalence of partisan stereotypes suggests that interventions that help partisans see out-party members as individuals may help to humanize and reduce animus toward members of the opposing party. Indeed, such strategies have been deployed successfully to reduce prejudice directed at other groups (e.g., Broockman & Kalla, 2016). In particular, Kalla and Broockman (2023) find that hearing the perspective of someone from an out-group (perspective-getting) can reduce prejudice.

Interpartisan Contact and Affective Polarization

Given the multifaceted causes of affective polarization, interest has grown in interventions that target multiple causes at once, like those that facilitate contact between opposing partisans. In friendly conversations, individuals may discover that they share common identities or perspectives with members of the opposing party, potentially heightening the salience of a superordinate identity (Levendusky, 2018a). These conversations may also correct individuals’ misperceptions of the opposing party: for example, partisans may find that members of the out-party are not as extreme as they believed (Druckman et al., 2022). Finally, by hearing directly from opposing partisans, members of the public may come to see out-party members as individuals who do not necessarily conform to party stereotypes. These interactions may humanize and individualize opposing partisans and generate empathy (Kalla & Broockman, 2023).

For these reasons, a great deal of previous work examines the conditions under which interpartisan contact may reliably reduce animosity toward out-partisans. We identified 16 papers that directly examine the effects of interpersonal conversations between opposing partisans on affective polarization through field studies. All of these papers primarily manipulate contact between opposing party peers (i.e., members of the mass public)—though some bundle of interpartisan contact with other treatments, like discussions with experts on policy issues (Fishkin et al., 2021), reading articles (Levendusky & Stecula, 2021), or trivia quiz games (DeFilippis, 2023). The modal study employs one-on-one online chats between opposing partisans to study the effects of interpartisan contact (see e.g., Combs et al., 2023; de Jong, 2023; Greene et al., 2023; Rossiter, 2023; Rossiter & Carlson, 2024); however, other studies included video discussions (Hobolt et al., 2023; Santoro & Broockman, 2022), in-person conversations (Heuser & Stötzer, 2022; Kalla & Broockman, 2022; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021), workshops (Baron et al., 2022; Blair et al., 2023; Fishkin et al., 2021), and conversations within the respondent’s existing network (Bond et al., 2018). While most treatments are less than an hour, interpartisan contact treatments range in duration from as few as 8 minutes (Rossiter & Carlson, 2024) to as many as 3 days (Fishkin et al., 2021). Almost all studies include discussions of contentious political issues, like policy proposals (though see Greene et al., 2023). Even when discussion touches on controversial issues, most studies, across a wide variety of designs and settings, find that interpartisan contact reduces affective polarization.²

Consistent with the hypothesized causes of affective polarization, these studies find that interpartisan contact can increase feelings of commonality with the opposing party (Blattner & Koenen, 2023; de Jong, 2023; Kalla & Broockman, 2022; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021), improve meta-perceptions of the opposing party (DeFilippis, 2023; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021), and reduce negative stereotypes of the opposing party (Levendusky & Stecula, 2021). Notably, the act of listening to the opposing party member’s perspective can humanize and individualize the opposing party, generating greater empathy for and understanding of the out-party (Baron et al., 2022; Blattner & Koenen, 2023; de Jong, 2023; Kalla & Broockman, 2022; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021; Rossiter & Carlson, 2024). By targeting multiple mechanisms, previous studies find that interpartisan contact can effectively reduce affective polarization.

While, as noted, much prior work focuses on the depolarizing potential of contact among peers, we believe that certain kinds of engagement between elites and the mass public could potentially reduce negative partisanship as well. Huddy and Yair (2021) show that simply observing warm relations among elites can reduce affective polarization in the public. It remains to be seen, however, what happens when people experience cordial interactions with out-party elites for themselves. When it comes to contact between elites and the public, interaction designed to highlight the elite’s lived experience—rather than say, a policy debate—might lead to a deeper understanding of their background, perspective, and motivations. Previous work has found that this kind of perspective-getting can humanize out-partisans among activists who have repeated two-way conversations with them (Kalla & Broockman, 2022) and can reduce prejudice directed against immigrants and transgender people (Kalla & Broockman, 2023). It remains to be seen whether a single (but memorable) [redundant] interaction with a political elite can lead to a similar shift in group attitudes. It is plausible that a party leader who is well-versed in conveying a message to a skeptical or agnostic audience makes for an ideal conversation partner for this purpose.

There are additional reasons to suspect that contact with activists may have different implications for affective polarization than mass-level contact. Affective polarization is driven more by feelings about politically engaged partisans and party candidates than feelings toward typical mass-level partisans (Druckman et al., 2022; Druckman & Levendusky, 2019). Thus, the effects of contact on partisan animosity may be particularly strong for contact with politically engaged activists: the intensity of animus directed at activists may create a greater potential for reducing misperceptions and negative stereotypes through contact.

Further, with few exceptions, previous studies involving contact have centered around brief one-on-one or small-group conversations between opposing partisans (though see Baron et al., 2022; Blair et al., 2023; Fishkin et al., 2021). While research has shown these interventions to be effective, their reliance on small groups raises the question of scalability (de Jong, 2023). How might interpartisan contacts be reliably implemented in larger populations, particularly when individuals tend to live in homophilous networks? If the effects of interpartisan contact are conveyed primarily through perceptions of commonality, learning about the out-party, and perspective-getting, this type of intervention may be effective in larger group and educational settings, enhancing the scalability of contact-based depolarization interventions.

Our experiment is designed not only to determine whether larger group discussions convey the same benefits of interpartisan contact as one-on-one conversations, but also whether such effects endure over time. Our experimental design allows us to test the effects of contact with out-party activists in a controlled setting, and to explore the scalability of contact-based interventions. In addition, by conducting our experiment in a classroom setting, we minimize the potential for attrition and noncompliance inherent in many field experimental settings, allowing us to observe partisans for seven weeks post-treatment.

Experimental Design and Expectations

We conducted our experiment within a large (approximately 325-student) introductory undergraduate course in American politics for which we had instructional responsibility; subjects were undergraduate students enrolled in this course during the fall 2019 semester. We pre-registered our experimental design prior to treatment.³ During the first week of the course in early September, we asked students to take a baseline (Wave 1) survey for course credit. In this survey, we assessed students’ feeling thermometer scores of both Democrats and Republicans, their comfort level with out-partisans in intimate settings, and the words they might use to describe “Democrats” and “Republicans” (see Appendix A1 for full question wording of measures we use in the current study). In total, these measures allow us to compare students’ views of their own party with those of their out party.

The pre-treatment survey also measured party identification, some demographics, and other information we used while teaching the class. For instance, we asked about students’ policy views and media consumption, which we summarized on lecture slides while teaching the course unit on political behavior. Due to the breadth of information we collected, the Wave 1 survey took about 10 minutes to complete. We believe that its broad focus—coupled with the length of time that elapsed between Wave 1 and Wave 2—reduced the risk that students recalled their Wave 1 answers and then tried to provide consistent answers at various stages.

To study the effects of close contact with party elites, we exploited the features of our large course. In addition to attending twice-weekly lectures with the entire class, each student taking the course also enrolled in one of eighteen recitation sections that typically contained between seventeen and twenty-one students, meeting for a single weekly 50-minute session each week. Our intervention occurred during these sections, and consisted of a moderated conversation between the course professor, students, and a guest speaker.⁴ Guest speakers either were active Democratic or Republican county unit chairs, or in the case of the control condition, attorneys at large law firms. In each case speakers joined the students via a video-conferencing tool so that all students in the section could see and hear them clearly.⁵

All conversations began with a basic set of questions posed by a course instructor to a guest speaker. In order to provide a measure of similarity across sections, these questions were provided to guest speakers in advance and speakers were encouraged to prepare responses to them. The initial questions encouraged the speakers to describe their personal background and responsibilities, their reasons for affiliating with their political party (in the case of chairs), and how they tend to interact with people in the opposite party (also for chairs). Thus, these questions were intended to standardize the experience somewhat, ensuring that students had an understanding of the chair’s beliefs, responsibilities, and typical interactions with out-partisans. Full question text can be found in Appendix A2. This initial phase lasted approximately 20 minutes.

The instructor’s questions in this phase were structured so that students learned a fairly large amount of personal background about party chairs. For instance, the Republican chair responsible for the majority of conversations told several stories about his parents and grandparents, who had been Republican convention delegates. This chair also described his personal experience of growing up among strong Republicans in a rural area and how this background spawned an interest in politics from a Republican viewpoint at an early age. He was also able to clearly articulate why he felt his job was important for local politics and explained how the job’s high time demands frequently encroached on his personal life. Finally, he consistently expressed a personal respect for his Democratic counterparts, even if he wanted to defeat them in elections. In general, this chair was personable and engaging, and made a conscious effort to draw students in with humor and a respectful tone. His remarks drew laughter on numerous occasions, and several Democratic students told us after the conversation that they were surprised how much they had liked him.

After this stage, students had the opportunity to pose questions to the guest speaker for the remainder of the section period, which lasted about 30 minutes. As part of the assignment, all students were asked to bring two potential questions to their section, which were evaluated afterward on the extent to which they were thoughtful and grounded in either course material or politics of the day. Because they had endeavored to prepare good questions, most students were actively engaged with the speakers in all sections; during their question period, it was typical for students to pose a dozen or more questions as a group. Without exception, the tone of these interactions was respectful; students approached the exercise as an opportunity to learn, and we did not observe overt expressions of partisan animosity. Indeed, there typically appeared to be a high level of attention to and engagement with the conversations.

Though they are not often elected officials themselves, party chairs are an integral part of candidate recruitment, messaging, and voter engagement in the areas they cover (Doherty et al., 2022). They are avid partisans who must often articulate their values and strategic objectives to a lay audience. As such, they are uniquely situated to describe not only what their party stands for and why they adhere to those beliefs, but also the broader electoral dynamics confronting their party, the policy objectives it holds, and the direction they hope it takes in the future. All of these topics came up during the fifty-minute conversations our students had with chairs of both parties.⁶

Our analysis is primarily concerned with how engagement with out-partisans can shape views of subjects’ out-party. Our baseline survey indicated that more than 80% of our students identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaners. This, coupled with the fact that our students were necessarily scattered across sections, led us to note in our pre-analysis plan that even with careful design we did not expect to have sufficient power to detect effects of out-party conversations for Republican students. That assumption turned out to be correct; for instance, of the 40 Republicans in our class, only two were assigned a conversation with a Democratic chair. Thus, as outlined in our pre-analysis plan, in the present study we focus our analysis on effects of conversations with Republican elites on Democratic students’ views of Republicans. We therefore chose to expose students course-wide to a disproportionately high share of conversations with a Republican chair. After the registration period for the class had ended, we randomly assigned six of the 18 sections to a Control condition in which they conversed with an attorney about the legal profession and law school. We assigned another two sections to a Democratic Chair condition (to preserve the appearance of party balance), and ten sections to the Republican Chair condition (see our pre-analysis plan in Appendix A8) for more information on randomization). Descriptive statistics for the students assigned to each condition can be found in Table 1.⁷

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics for Democratic Students in Each Treatment Category.

	Dem. Chair			Rep. Chair			Attorney			Difference-in-Means
	N = 27			N = 129			N = 76			Difference-in-Means
	Mean	Min.	Max.	Mean	Min.	Max.	Mean	Min.	Max.	Dem.-Rep.	Dem.-Att.	Rep.-Att.
Importance of Party ID	3.4	1	5	3.2	1	5	3.0	1	5	0.2	0.4	0.1
Interest in Politics	2.8	1	3	2.8	1	3	2.7	2	3	0.0	0.1	0.1
Hispanic	0.2	0	1	0.1	0	1	0.2	0	1	0.1	0.0	−0.1
Female	0.9	0	1	0.7	0	1	0.8	0	1	0.2	0.1	−0.1
Non-white	0.3	0	1	0.3	0	1	0.4	0	1	−0.0	−0.2	−0.1*
Wave 1 Comfort Index	8.1	3	12	8.0	3	12	8.0	4	12	0.1	0.1	−0.0
Wave 1 Dem. Therm.	76.7	40	100	77.8	35	100	74.1	35	100	−1.1	2.6	3.8*
Wave 1 Rep. Therm.	33.1	0	100	38.3	0	100	40.0	0	100	−5.2	-6.8	−1.6
Wave 1 Dem. Desc. Index	8.4	−4	17	7.7	−4	17	7.1	−7	18	0.7	1.2	0.6
Wave 1 Rep. Desc. Index	-1.9	−14	7	−2.6	−16	11	−2.5	−14	12	0.7	0.6	−0.1
Wave 1 Therm. Distance	43.6	0	80	39.8	−7	100	34.0	−25	92	3.8	9.5	5.8

Note. Data from noncitizens are excluded from this table, as we do not use them in our analysis. Difference-in-means estimates for each treatment group comparison are calculated using clustered standard errors from Blair et al. (2024). p-values from joint tests of covariate imbalance using randomization inference and log likelihoods from multinomial regression of treatment on covariates indicate that observed covariate imbalance is not significantly greater than what would be expected due to random chance (p = .21 for all students and p = .44 for Democratic students alone).

***p ≤ .001; **p ≤ .01; *p ≤ .05.

Guest speakers teleconferenced with sections between October 14 and October 17, 2019. From October 18 to October 22, we administered a second (Wave 2) online survey to the entire class, followed by a third (Wave 3) survey from December 2 to December 6. The Wave 2 and 3 surveys repeated a subset of questions from Wave 1 on subjects’ views of their out-party. Thus, we were able to track subjects’ initial views of their out-party about six weeks before treatment, about one week following treatment, and then again about six weeks later.⁸

Not only did this approach allow us to track students’ attitudes over time, but it also allowed us to confirm that these conversations were a memorable part of the class. In the Wave 3 survey at the conclusion of the course—more than a month after treatment—76% of Democratic students reported that they remembered either “all” or “most” of the conversations, and 84% said that they agree that the conversations were “meaningful and should therefore be repeated in future classes.” Moreover, when asked in Wave 3 if the experience had made them feel more favorably toward Republicans, 36% of Democrats told us that it had; if borne out in our outcomes, this would suggest an extremely large treatment effect. Overall, then, manipulation checks suggest that students remembered the contact they experienced in a positive light.

Previous scholarship has measured affective polarization in a number of ways; we adopt three such methods in this study. First, one of the most common means of assessing views about parties is a feeling thermometer asking respondents to report the warmth they feel for Democrats and Republicans (Druckman & Levendusky, 2019; Garrett et al., 2014; Iyengar et al., 2012; Lelkes & Westwood, 2017). In each survey wave, we asked students to report warmth for each party via standard feeling thermometers ranging from 0 to 100, where higher values indicate more warmth (see Appendix A1 for question wording). The difference between in-party and out-party ratings on the party feeling thermometers provides a measure of affective polarization, which we examine as a secondary outcome along the lines of previous work (Garrett et al., 2014). As noted in our pre-analysis plan, if conversing with a Republican chair made Democrats feel more warmly toward the Republican Party, we should expect that Democrats who talked with a Republican will rate the Republican Party more highly post-treatment. They should also report a smaller perceived distance between the two parties after the conversation occurred.

A second measure asks respondents to report their comfort with having out-partisans as close intimates such as spouses or neighbors (Iyengar et al., 2012; Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016). Given that our subjects were undergraduate students, we measured Out-Party Comfort with an additive index of respondents’ comfort with having a roommate of the opposite party, dating someone of the opposite party, and having close personal friends of the opposite party.⁹ These questions are designed to capture subjects’ comfort with being in close proximity to out-partisans in conditions with which most students would be familiar. If having a conversation with a Republican chair diminished Democrats’ discomfort in this area, we should observe higher scores on Out-Party Comfort among Democrats post-treatment relative to those who conversed with an attorney. This expectation is memorialized in our pre-analysis plan.

Third, some previous research has assessed affect toward out-parties by asking respondents to judge how well certain words describe those parties (Garrett et al., 2014; Iyengar et al., 2012). We pursue a similar strategy, adopting a selection of choices used in Garrett et al. (2014), offering a combination of positive (Patriotic, Intelligent, Honest, Open-minded, Generous) and negative (Hypocritical, Selfish, Mean) descriptors, which we combine into a single Positive Descriptor Index in which higher values indicate generally more agreement among Democrats that positive words describe Republicans (see Appendix A1.2 for full details). If conversing with a Republican elite enhanced Democrats’ views of Republicans overall, then relative to the control condition, our pre-registered expectation is that Democrats exposed to a Republican chair will report higher scores on the Positive Descriptor Index post-treatment.

While our pre-registered expectation was that conversations with party chairs would affect Democratic students’ views of Republicans during the period immediately following treatment, our experimental design also allowed us to track the durability of our treatment effects. Prior work has found that encouraging people to consider the perspective of others (Broockman & Kalla, 2016) or to hold non-judgemental personal conversations (Kalla & Broockman, 2020) can durably reduce exclusionary attitudes. Although our treatment was a two-way exchange, it did not rise to the level of interaction we would expect from a “deep canvassing” conversation. We therefore expected that the out-party conversations would be analogous to treatments in other multi-wave experiments, which tend to produce initial effects that decay after a few weeks (e.g., Dowling et al., 2020; Dowling & Miller, 2015; Swire et al., 2017). As such, we pre-registered an expectation that any effects we observed in Wave 2 would no longer be present in Wave 3 for any of our party affect outcomes.

We stress that by design, our experiment deviates from common approaches to studying intergroup contact in several important ways. As noted above, the typical experiment assessing the effect of interpartisan interaction is designed to foster two-way communication between peers, with discussion often centered on contentious issues. In our experiment, we exposed students to a partisan elite in a group setting where the interaction was designed so that the students would have ample opportunity to hear the perspective of the speaker, but the speaker was not soliciting much information from the students. Because they were not compelled to share information about themselves, it is possible that students were less invested in the conversation than they may have been in a true two-way exchange. Moreover, while the presentation was designed to feature chairs’ personal background, it was delivered through a distinct partisan lens so that students may not have viewed the speaker as a “person” so much as a “partisan.”

Compared to designs common in intergroup contact experiments, these features may weaken the potential power of the conversation because for some students, the interaction may be more akin to an informational treatment about the job of a party chair than an opportunity for rich exchange. This said, we hasten to point out that the experience still presented an opportunity for students to listen to the perspective of a dedicated partisan, which itself might be sufficient to shift their views of out-partisans. Indeed, Kalla and Broockman (2023) find that the act of perspective-getting, or hearing someone else’s story, is particularly effective in reducing prejudice. While our students did not meet with peers and for the most part did not offer their own perspective to the chair, the presentations did center the chair’s personal narrative. They also allowed the chairs to explain why they were drawn to their party and why they held certain views on issues of the day. And finally, the conversations stressed the chair’s professional respect for Democrats in his community, which we felt might be a particularly important feature in terms of lowering out-party animus among Democratic students. Given the political preferences of our students noted above, the opportunity to interact with a Republican in this way was also a unique experience for students. In short, our treatment created ample opportunity for out-partisan perspective-getting, which can induce warmer feelings toward political opponents and other groups (Kalla & Broockman, 2022, 2023). Our experiment is an effort to deploy this logic at scale.

Results

Following our pre-analysis plan, here we report results from “full” models of each outcome Y using data from each Democratic student, testing hypotheses with one-tailed tests. These models take the form:

Y = β_{0} + β_{1} R + β_{2} D + X γ + ε

(1)

Where R is a vector containing the treatment indicator for students who had a conversation with a Republican chair, D is a vector containing the treatment indicator for students who had a conversation with a Democratic chair, and X is a matrix of pre-registered control variables.¹⁰ We cluster standard errors by recitation section.¹¹ Because all models include indicators for conversations with Republican and Democratic chairs, the effects we report reflect the difference between having a conversation with an out-partisan and having one with an attorney (the pure control condition). The coefficient of interest in all models is β₁, the effect of having a conversation with a Republican chair. Because subjects were unaware of which guest speaker they would encounter in their recitation secetion, the subjects in all models are restricted to compliers, that is, those who attended the presentations.

Figure 1 depicts the effects of conversations with Republican chairs on Democrats’ warmth toward the Republican Party at Waves 2 and 3 along with 90% confidence intervals (full results can be found in Appendix Table A4).¹² We also depict analogous results for party distance, calculated as the difference between respondents’ rating of the in-party and their rating of the out-party. Given that mean warmth for Republicans among Democratic students in Wave 1 was only 38.3, there was ample room for treatment to improve these students’ views of out-partisans. We pre-registered an expectation that while the conversation would increase Democrats’ ratings of Republicans in Wave 2, this effect would decay by Wave 3. At least with respect to point estimates, the experimental results on the feeling thermometer ratings are partially consistent with this pattern: We observe a positive effect of about 2 points in feeling thermometer shift in Wave 2 (about a week after the conversation), followed by a slight decay in Wave 3 (about seven weeks after the conversation). However, neither of these effects achieves statistical significance. Similarly, we find no evidence that exposure to a Republican elite reduced the distance between Democrats’ assessment of the Democratic and Republican parties; the point estimate for our Party Distance measure is approximately 3 in both waves—that is, in the opposite direction we expected.¹³

Figure 1.

Democratic students’ feeling thermometer ratings and perceived distance. Note: Points are effects of exposure to a conversation with a Republican county chair, relative to control. Whiskers represent 90% confidence intervals. Means (standard deviations) in the control group are 33.7 (17) for Republican thermometers in wave 2, 34.8 (18.1) for Republican thermometers in wave 3, 37.6 (22.4) for thermometer distance in wave 2, and 36.1 (23.9) for thermometer distance in wave 3.

We turn now to the effects of our conversations on Democrats’ out-party comfort index. This index is constructed from Democrats’ reported comfort dating, being roommates with, and/or having close personal friends who are Republicans. Higher levels of this variable indicate more comfort with Republicans. Results from models of the out-party comfort index are depicted in Figure 2 (full results can be found in Appendix Table A2). The point estimates for treatment effect on party comfort at Waves 2 and 3 are weakly negative. Contrary to our expectations, Figure 2 therefore offers no evidence that exposure to a conversation with a Republican elite increased Democrats’ comfort with Republicans.

Figure 2.

Effects of elite conversations on out-party comfort index. Note: Points are effects of exposure to a conversation with a Republican county chair, relative to control. Whiskers represent 90% confidence intervals. Means (standard deviations) in the control group are 7.7 (2.5) for waves 2 and 3.

Finally, we examine whether conversations with Republican elites affected scores on Democrats’ Out-Party Descriptor Index for Republicans. This index is constructed from the extent to which Democrats felt that positive and negative words described Republicans. Higher values of this index reflect more belief among Democrats that positive words provide a good description of Republicans. Results from models of the out-party comfort index are depicted in Figure 3 (full results can be found in Appendix Table A3). Again, we find no evidence that conversing with a Republican elite shifted Democrats’ views of Republicans. The point estimate of effects among Democrats who conversed with a Republican chair are quite small and not statistically significant.

Figure 3.

Effects of elite conversations on out-party description index. Note: Points are effects of exposure to a conversation with a Republican county chair, relative to control. Whiskers represent 90% confidence intervals. Means (standard deviations) in the control group are -2 (5.7) for Wave 2 and -2.1 (5.7) for Wave 3.

Conclusion

We examined whether and to what extent contact between students and opposing party activists mitigates out-party hostility. Within the context of a large undergraduate class, we randomized contact between Democratic students and Republican Party leaders and facilitated group discussions with a respectful and cordial atmosphere. Over the course of the semester, we gathered a broad array of measures of affective polarization before, shortly after, and several weeks after treatment. Our experiment does not feature two-way perspective giving among peers and so represents a weaker treatment than what is commonly found in contact experiments. While our students were exposed to an out-party elite with limited opportunity to share their own perspective, the conversations centered the elite’s personal narrative and his respect for Democratic opponents. They therefore represent an opportunity to determine whether conversations that allow for novel contact with out-party elites might be a mechanism to reduce negative partisanship.

Our work contributes to a growing body of literature studying the conditions under which interpartisan contact can improve partisan relations. First, we examined whether contact with partisan activists could also reduce affective polarization among ordinary voters. Second, building on other group-based studies (Baron et al., 2022; Blair et al., 2023; Fishkin et al., 2021; Hobolt et al., 2023; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021), we designed an intervention that could be expanded to larger groups of partisans, widening the potential for depolarization treatments at a larger scale.

None of our outcome measures changed appreciably post treatment, indicating that our intervention did not decrease negative partisanship among the Democratic students who participated in conversations with Republican elites. There are a number of reasons why these conversations may have failed to shift students’ opinions. The most obvious is that perhaps—as a growing body of prior research suggests—for out-party contact to reduce affective polarization, it must include two-way perspective-getting and perspective-giving among peers. While our conversations were designed to encourage students to hear the chair’s personal perspective, and to consider the respectful manner in which they viewed their opponents, it could be that this interaction with elites is simply not sufficiently powerful to cause changes in out-party views.

This said, we believe it is premature to foreclose elite interaction as a potential means of reducing cross-party hostility, and our work suggests several avenues for future study. Our discussion questions were intended to highlight and correct misperceptions about the party activists and to facilitate a greater understanding by students of the activists’ work. Future work could examine whether other discussion topics may reduce affective polarization. For example, discussions that emphasize commonalities (Levendusky, 2018a; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021) or foster interpartisan cooperation (DeFilippis, 2023; Mousa, 2020) appear particularly promising.

Additionally, it may be the case that longer or repeated treatments may be more effective at reducing partisan hostility. Due to the necessarily staggered implementation of treatment in our classroom design, some students took midline surveys several days after treatment; therefore, we cannot rule out quickly decaying effects from treatment. Longer and repeated treatments could help foster more durable effects. Finally, our study highlights an important design attribute of contact-based interventions to reduce affective polarization: scalability. Previous field studies of interpartisan contact have primarily examined one-on-one or small-group conversations between opposing partisans, which may be hard to implement in a world where opposing partisans live separately. Instead, we examined whether the benefits of interpartisan contact extend to larger group discussions in an educational setting. Future work should continue to probe whether and how contact-based interventions can be reliably scaled to reach larger shares of the population, including in classrooms and large groups. Ultimately, our paper suggests potential limits to the effects of interpartisan conversations but also charts new avenues for future investigation.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Does Interaction With Out-Party Elites in a Classroom Setting Diminish Negative Partisanship?

Supplemental Material for Does Interaction With Out-Party Elites in a Classroom Setting Diminish Negative Partisanship? by Samuel Frederick, Michael G. Miller, and Donald P. Green in American Politics Research

Footnotes

Author Notes

This paper has previously appeared on the program of the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

Acknowledgments

We thank Casey Libonate for helping us to administer the experiment, and Rohn Bishop of the Fond du Lac County (Wisconsin) Republican Party, Carolyn Conner of the Union County (Pennsylvania) Republican Party, Michelle Tuma of Winston and Strawn LLP, and an anonymous Democratic Chairwoman for the time they spent speaking with our students. We also thank Linda Bell, who provided crucial advice in the formative stages of this project.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Samuel Frederick

Michael G. Miller

Donald P. Green

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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