As part of our efforts to foster a culture of pluralism in America – one where people are recognized, respected, accepted, and engaged with on the basis of their diversity – New Pluralists supports research collaborations, knowledge networks, and rigorous academic study to better understand what pluralism is and how to put it into action.
Exploring a Slice of the Pluralism Ecosystem
As part of our efforts to foster a culture of pluralism in America – one where people are recognized, respected, accepted, and engaged with on the basis of their diversity – New Pluralists supports research collaborations, knowledge networks, and rigorous academic study to better understand what pluralism is and how to put it into action.
As such, we’re excited to share a new research review we commissioned that represents a first step toward understanding more about one slice of the field of pluralism. The paper, “What Promotes Pluralism in America’s Diversifying Democracy?” draws from empirical work in the fields of psychology, political science, sociology, economics, and critical legal studies, and approaches the challenges to pluralism with an emphasis on the demographic change and partisan division that has strained our democracy. The authors, Professors Justin Gest and Tyler Reny, explore the many challenges and opportunities for pluralism and discuss the strengths and limitations of existing evidence and theory.
Widening political divisions and fundamental disagreement around who we are and what we value serve as the backdrop for this exploration – a timely and important conversation happening in homes, town halls, and local and national political scenes. Political discourse in the US now has an increasingly existential quality due in part to intensifying discussions around race, immigration, gender identity, sexuality, and religion. As a result, pluralism now entails redefining America itself.
What Has Been Tried?
The idea of pluralism is not new. In fact, it’s a fundamental component of our country’s founding ideals of liberty, equality, and justice. And there exists a robust body of evidence-based research and tried interventions around pluralistic approaches that the paper explores.There is much to learn from the existing research on which pluralistic interventions have been tried, which ones have worked, and which ones have been less successful. Ultimately, the authors conclude that facilitated interactions between people from different backgrounds have been shown to alter thoughts toward those they perceive as “others,” but these techniques are often resource-intensive and difficult to scale.
They also find that modifications to political institutions could create pervasive change, however, such reforms are unlikely in the current political environment. In the end, the paper points to activities and institutions that rely on casual interactions among people of different ethnic, racial, or political backgrounds as scalable and promising cultivators of pluralism.
The Future Direction of Research
There is much more to be learned from relevant empirical work and other disciplines, including conflict transformation, peacebuilding, and movement-building, among others. Efforts to weave together knowledge from these largely siloed fields could have a tremendous impact on our understanding and catalyzing of pluralism. We are so excited to share this research review with you and look forward to future work in this domain. We hope this paper sparks important conversations that encourage more research and discovery of evidence-based practice across the broad range of activities in the pluralism ecosystem.
If you have questions about this paper or the New Pluralists Collaborative, please contact us at hello@newpluralists.org, or feel free to reach out to the report’s lead author, Professor Justin Gest of George Mason University at jgest@gmu.edu.
