LISS 2025. Authors: Puck Guldemond (Wageningen University – Department of Social Sciences), Jade Vrielink (Wageningen University – Department of Social Sciences), Emma Turkenburg (Wageningen University – Department of Social Sciences)
Concerns are growing that polarization in the Netherlands reduces citizens’ willingness to engage in political dialogue or consider opposing views. A healthy democracy requires engagement with both congruent and incongruent political information. Such engagement prevents the reinforcement of existing beliefs and fosters critical reflection. However, little is known about what encourages openness to such reasoning. To address this gap, we propose a novel online experiment combined with a thought-listing assignment to test whether content exposure affects political reasoning. Participants are shown a social media post from a political party that either aligns or conflicts with their political predispositions, with or without an accompanying political argument. We focus on social media for two reasons. First, citizens increasingly rely on it for political information. Second, it is often seen as a driver of polarization. Hence, social media provides an appropriate context to examine whether political reasoning can be stimulated by particular forms of content. By using thought-listing, we move beyond standard self-reports and capture how citizens actually reflect on political information.