Deliberation Lite: How Does Feedback Influence Public Climate Change Policy?

Tools are needed for effectively gathering public input on broad environmental policy questions. Social scientists commonly use mail, phone, and increasingly web surveys to ask the public about a range of public policy issues. However, one challenge to the use of surveys is that they tend to elicit quick responses from individuals without time for careful reflection and discussion with others. Decision scientists have suggested the use of "deliberative polling" as an alternative strategy for eliciting public input on policy questions. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which individuals were asked the same climate change mitigation policy preference questions twice over a two-week period. One group of respondents was given feedback about how others voted and their reasons for their preferences when completing the second survey (respondents were divided into subgroups of ten), while another group was simply asked the policy questions again. The sample consists of 211 individuals who completed two mail surveys. The overall level of policy support declined over time (average of 2.6 on a 1-4 scale at time 1 v. 2.4 at time 2, p<.05). Among subgroups receiving information about others' voting preferences, patterns and levels of change in policy support varied. We explore the factors exhibited within these subgroups that may have contributed to these differences. Implications for the use of deliberative polling to engage the public on large-scale environmental policy issues will be discussed.