Deliberative Town Halls and COVID-19: Examining Deliberation in Non-Traditional Cases of Policymaking
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Date
2022-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Since 2006, the Connecting to Congress project at Ohio State has brought together members of Congress and their constituents to participate in online "Deliberative Town Halls" (DTHs). DTHs are exactly what they sound like—meetings in which constituents voice their opinions on salient policy issues and hear their members' stances. Prior studies have demonstrated that DTHs result in positive gains for members of Congress, with increased levels of trust, approval, and likelihood of reelection from their constituents. DTHs may not hold the same value in the period of deep policy uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic because the pandemic fundamentally changed the way that members of Congress interact with their constituents. The results from this qualitative analysis reveal that constituents do, in fact, seek different types of information from their members of Congress during a time of deep policy uncertainty. The type of information seeking from constituents changed during COVID-19, with over half of constituent questions asking about the government's general response to current conditions or the status of a particular resource. It appears that these changes in information seeking impacted members' favorability across measures of trust, approval, and reelection due to different evaluative mechanisms. Overall, members did not fare as well on these measures as they have during pre-COVID-19 town halls. Future DTHs that navigate deep policy uncertainty must account for this difference in information seeking.
Description
Spencer Award for Best Undergraduate Thesis in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University
Keywords
deliberation, COVID-19, town halls, politics, Congress