Is depolarization possible?

Erin Rossiter is willing to stick her hand in the sizzling-hot fire of political discussions in a deeply polarized America.

The Notre Dame political scientist is more courageous than most, but her research has found surprising results—that people who have cross-partisan discussions often feel more positive about the other side after their experience. Still, the experiment is likely safer under her supervision than trying it at your extended family dining table at Thanksgiving.

Rather than survey people on how they feel about their own political discussions, Rossiter matches people from different political beliefs for online chats. Then she can analyze the discussions to see how they unfold and gauge the participants’ reactions afterward.

“Can we understand each other better, and in some cases, moderate our views a little bit by hearing out other viewpoints?” she said. “My research is in asking questions about how people have discussions that cross partisan lines in today’s society, where we are so polarized and things are so tense, and we walk into these conversations with heightened emotions and maybe misperceptions about the other side.”

Rossiter is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Assistant Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, where she began this research in 2021. Her work is a good example of the effort to bolster a Democracy Initiative that is a priority in the University’s strategic framework.

“Polarization is like the famous quip about the weather: Everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it. Erin’s work, however, is a notable exception,” said David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy and director of the initiative. “Not only does her work help us understand the causes of political antipathy, but she has demonstrated how to lower the boil on cross-partisan animosity. This is precisely the sort of work that is the calling card of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative.”

A passion for politics

Rossiter grew up in Spencer, Iowa, a small city in the northwest part of the state. Because Iowa has traditionally held the caucuses that kick off political primaries, presidential contenders travel the state before elections and speak directly to Iowans in intimate settings. Rossiter remembers her mother bringing her to see every candidate who made a stop in the area in 2008, when she was still in high school.

“What was really fascinating to me was how passionate people were, and it really sparked my interest in political behavior,” she said. “I felt—how are you so passionate? I feel like these things are so complicated. How do you know that’s the right answer?”

She attended Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and then earned her doctoral degree at Washington University in Saint Louis. Her curiosity about political passions drove her to become more informed, and her personality pushed her toward research, data, and rigorous answers. For her dissertation, she worked with a software developer to build a chat software that could facilitate cross-partisan conversations.

“So far, they’ve all been online,” she said. “I’ve been increasingly trying to make it more like real-world conversations. And the final step would be to actually have people talk in the real world, but I do it online so I can be a fly on the wall and see how it unfolds.”

For her first academic job, Rossiter came to Notre Dame in 2021, drawn to work with faculty colleagues doing important work.

“I really liked the balance that Notre Dame places on its faculty,” she said. “They said, ‘We want you to do rigorous research. We have graduate students that we want you to train, but also, our undergrads are really smart and curious, and we take your role in the classroom very seriously too,’ which I found really compelling.”

Crossing the political divide

Rossiter said the starting point of a democracy is having an informed citizenry that can discuss and debate different political ideas in civil conversations. But people might avoid political discussions, she said, based on negative perceptions they have developed watching or reading the extreme viewpoints and heated conflicts that make news.

“I think some people are afraid to have a political conversation because that’s how they think it’s going to work, but then so does the other side,” she said. “One of the outcomes I’ve observed is that having a political conversation makes people more willing to have a political conversation again in the future.”

Rossiter has collected more than 1,000 of these chat transcripts. The topics can be different. In one 2023 study, she brought together a Democrat and Republican and randomized whether they talked about a political issue such as gun control or immigration, discussed a nonpolitical issue, or didn’t talk at all.

The discussion below is an actual example from Rossiter’s research, which brings together people from opposite sides of the political aisle in anonymous chat rooms. In defiance of stereotypes, Rossiter has found that people usually report the conversations to be positive experiences, whether agreement is found or not.

In her conclusion, she writes: “I find that conversation, whether politically charged or not, decreases affective polarization. However, I find talking politics has distinct democratic benefits, providing greater opportunity to learn about the outparty and increasing willingness for future political conversations.”

In another study, published in the University of Chicago Press’s The Journal of Politics, she found similar outcomes even right after the January 6 riot and 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden as president, one of the most contentious periods in modern American history.

“People walked away from those conversations feeling better about the other side than if they didn’t have a conversation,” she said. “And that finding was durable, because we surveyed them again three days later and they were still feeling better.”

Plenty of research shows that each side of the political divide views the other with exaggerated negativity. Rossiter is trying to find out whether a cause could be a lack of interaction as people have sorted by party both geographically and in their social lives.

“These opportunities to actually truly interact with people who are different from us politically are so low,” she said. “Do we really know what it’s like to do that anymore? I don’t know.”

Rossiter said her research should be understood with several caveats. All of the conversations are between anonymous strangers online, rather than with a friend or family member whose opinions might make someone react more emotionally. But her current research includes a field study where there are “real social costs at play” because participants are talking with people who are a part of their everyday lives.

She is not searching for widespread solutions. Rossiter said she wants to learn how conversations work and about their consequences, but the one-on-one experiences would be hard to scale.

Still, she said the participants more often than not find something that illuminates the Notre Dame Forum’s featured question: What do we owe each other? Maybe a civil political conversation.

“So maybe we owe it to each other to give it another shot,” she said. “I think my research shows that doing so even in these times can build tolerance and trust and make you a more informed voter.”