The challenge
Partisan animosity and support for undemocratic tactics are rising, but no one knew which fixes work.
The case
Run by Stanford's Polarization and Social Change Lab, the Strengthening Democracy Challenge collected 252 proposals from researchers and practitioners and selected 25 short online interventions, such as videos, text prompts, chatbots and quizzes. All 25 were tested in one randomized experiment with 32,059 US partisans, measuring partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices and support for partisan violence. Published in Science in 2024, the study found 23 of the 25 significantly reduced partisan animosity, beating expert forecasts. Far fewer reduced support for undemocratic practices or partisan violence; the strongest corrected wrong beliefs about what the other side thinks or warned of democratic collapse. Some effects lasted to a two-week follow-up.
Why the results were mixed
Making people like the other side more is easy but does not by itself make them more committed to democratic rules, so interventions must target anti-democratic attitudes directly.
Sources
- Voelkel, J. G. et al. (2024). Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. Science, 386(6719), eadh4764.
- Stanford Sociology (2024). Scalable interventions reduce polarization, support for partisan violence, and anti-democratic attitudes.
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