Researchers at a trio of the world’s leading universities have uncovered evidence that when individuals from polar sides of the political spectrum work together, they produce better results than when working alone. That might seem like common sense, but “common sense” is often just another name for intuition. In this case, there’s now good evidence to support it.
Photo by connor.vick 
In their research, Feng Shi of The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and his colleagues at Harvard and the University of Chicago examined the content of political, social, and scientific Wikipedia articles. Their conclusion: “polarized teams—those consisting of a balanced set of politically diverse editors—create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams” because they “engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates.”
In explaining this outcome, the authors invoke a recurring theme of deliberative research: the importance of “institutional design principles”–in this case “more intense use of Wikipedia policies.” The full article can be found here.
Research like this reinforces both our belief that a civic platform can also put polarization to good use and our commitment to developing the most suitable “institutional design principles” for it.
