Replication Data for "A Scalable Democratic Reform that Sharply Reduces Affective Polarization"

Democratic citizens across the globe exhibit dramatically increased affective polarization—a gulf in feelings toward inpartisans versus outpartisans. This trend threatens the social underpinnings of stable, cooperative political cultures. Scholars have responded by developing scores of depolarizing interventions with mixed success. We analyze evidence from a national field experiment centered on a specific democratic innovation, Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs). Though designed for other purposes, we document very large declines in affective polarization for those attending the DTH. A single event led to enormous reductions for a large group, yet DTHs require modest enough resources to make scaling realistic. The effects show no sign of decay out to two weeks, and depolarization emerged as a by-product of citizen engagement that promoted other democratic goods.