THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN A LONG-TERM UNDERTAKING, and we are extremely grateful to the many people who made it possible. First we thank our families for their love and support. Tali wishes to thank her parents, Hava and Uri Mendelberg, her brother and sister-in-law, Gabi and Jill Mendelberg, and her daughters, Leora and Daniella Paradise. She also thanks her dear friends Gil Blitz and Jody Kirtner for their encouragement. Chris thanks his parents, Dennis and Diane Karpowitz, his five siblings, his children Caleb, Quinn, Cami, and Zach, and above all his unfailingly supportive wife, Jordan.
We want to thank our coauthors on parts of this book that originate in papers: Lee Shaker on verbal participation, Nick Goedert on issue mentions, and Baxter Oliphant on interruptions. We owe Baxter an extra debt of gratitude for the many difficult hours he put in to assist with the challenging coding of interruptions. Each started out as a dedicated research assistant and transitioned into a collaborator, and we are very grateful for each phase of our association with them.
We received invaluable feedback and encouragement from colleagues. First we wish to thank Marty Gilens, an exemplary colleague and friend who read every word, took the time to really think things through, and provided essential guidance. We are also extremely grateful to Amy Lerman, Chris Achen, Markus Prior, Susan Fiske, and Pat Egan, who read the draft manuscript and spent a full day discussing it with us. The faculty research seminar at Brigham Young University provided especially helpful early feedback on several chapters, and the enthusiasm of the BYU faculty for the project encouraged us to press forward. Valerie Hudson and Jessica Preece served as insightful discussants at these events, and Dan Nielson offered generous and wise insights on early versions of several chapters. BYU colleagues Jeremy Pope, Quin Monson, and Kelly Patterson provided unstinting support and encouragement at multiple points along the way. Kathy Cramer Walsh, Michele Epstein, Amaney Jamal, Cindy Kam, Yanna Krupnikov, Nan Keohane, Jane Mansbridge, and Steve Macedo also provided helpful comments on parts of this project. Additional helpful comments came from the West Coast Experiments Conference, the NYU CESS Experiments Conference, Princeton University’s CSDP seminar, and participants at various meetings and workshops, including the Harvard Kennedy School Women in Public Policy Program. We thank our former editor Chuck Myers for his ongoing interest in the project and for an insightful conversation that prompted us to conduct our analysis of school boards. Two reviewers for the Princeton University Press provided extremely helpful suggestions for revision. Tali also wishes to thank Lynn Sanders and Oliver Avens for early stimulating conversations on deliberation, and Don Kinder and Virginia Sapiro for formative teaching. We both thank Larry Bartels for his generous mentorship.
Funding was generously provided by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, BYU (including a Mentored Environment Grant and substantial support from the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, the Political Science Department, and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy), and Princeton University (we especially thank former chairs Jeff Herbst and Helen Milner, the Bobst Center and the CSDP). Money can’t buy you love, but it buys nearly everything else—labor, which leads to time, which leads to mental focus, which leads to creativity and productivity.
We were also fortunate to have the help of talented undergraduate and graduate assistants. We thank Dan Myers, Lisa Argyle, and Oleg Bespalov for running many of the sessions. Quite simply, our rich data set would not exist without their long hours and commitment to the project. Early assistance came from Steve Howell, Dusan Zaric, and Jason Teeple. We are indebted to Jesse Mudrick for spending a year of his life listening to and deciphering phrases such as “yeah, you know, that thought, but what if, I agree, we wouldn’t want, not that, you know, umm, [unintelligible].” Kabir Khanna provided careful, smart, and extremely helpful edits on the final manuscript. We also thank Matt Barnes, Joy Yang, Adriana Estor, Lois Lee, Oliver Bloom, Dan Chen, Alex Simon, Gabriela Gonzalez, Hayden Galloway, Josephine Borich Shipley, Bobby Purks, Krista Frederico, Greg Baker, Alex Bitter, Ashley Erickson, Jason Harrington, Kris Mahoney, Brooke Rieder, Michael Sheflo, Katherine McCabe, Luke Bell, the invaluable Chris McConnell, and Kyrene Gibb, who is suited to run a country or at least a corporation—we are incredibly lucky that she put her formidable talents to work managing our challenging though comparatively puny school boards project.
Article-length versions of several chapters were published in scholarly journals, and we thank the editors of those journals for their helpful guidance. An earlier version of chapter 5, co-authored with Lee Shaker, appeared in The American Political Science Review (2012, volume 106, issue 3, 533–547). A previous iteration of chapter 7, co-authored with Nicholas Goedert and employing controls for liberalism instead of egalitarianism, was published in The American Journal of Political Science (2014, volume 58, issue 2, 291–306), and an earlier version of chapter 8, written with Baxter Oliphant, can be found in Perspectives on Politics’ special issue on gender and politics (2014, volume 12, issue 1, 18–44). In addition, portions of the description of our experimental research design in chapter 4 are inspired by similar descriptions found in these various journals. We are grateful to the publishers of these articles for permission to draw upon them here.