Dear friends of My Country Talks,

Hello and welcome to our July newsletter. This month, we are excited to share the published results of our scientific study on Germany Talks! In the run-up to the election in 2021, we held a special edition of Germany Talks that launched our rolling system - each week, a group of participants had a 1:1 conversation about the most polarizing issues of the moment. Two researchers at Stanford and Harvard University, Adrian Blattner and Martin Koenen, aimed to measure the impact of those conversations on affective polarization. Read on for what they found, and more news from the last month of MCT programs.

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Reducing affective polarization with just one conversation

In their newly published working paper, Blattner and Koenen provide exciting evidence for the power of conversations. They find that just one short conversation between political opposites can significantly reduce affective polarization - feelings of animosity toward members of other political parties. Their study methodology was based on surveys about participants’ polarization levels, both before and after their conversation. Participants also played a game in which they were asked to share money with someone from another political party. 

The study finds that one unmoderated conversation as part of Germany Talks reduced participants’ negative feelings toward people purely based on their political party affiliation. After a conversation, participants were more generous with sharing money with people from other political parties, and they also said they saw their conversation partner as positively as someone from their own party, even when their partner was from the opposite end of the political spectrum. 

Read the full study and the rest of the findings here.

Recap: The World Talks

It has been one month since The World Talks global day of conversations on June 25. We asked 100 participants to tell us about their conversation and share what they learned from talking to someone on the other side of the world. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and many people were surprised by just how much they had in common with a total stranger from a different country. Many participants learned about daily life in a different political context, and how those experiences shape their partner’s opinions on global issues like migration and climate change.

Take a look at more feedback from our participants here. 

Going regional: Konstanz meets Kreuzlingen

Together with Karla Magazin, a non-profit local journalism project from Konstanz in Germany, we ran our first ever dialogue event in a border region. The idea of the format was to bring together people from Konstanz in Germany with people of its neighboring city, Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland, about contentious topics of their region.

More than 50 people have signed up to have a conversation about topics such as “Are Germans taking away jobs from Swiss people?”, “Should Switzerland become part of the EU?”, “Has Switzerland dealt better with the Corona pandemic?”. Around 25 participants attended an event in Kreuzlingen, where the 1:1 conversations between the participants were followed by a panel to find ideas for better cooperation on both sides of the border. For instance, participants agreed that there is no need for each city having its own separate cultural projects, but rather that people from Konstanz and Kreuzlingen can benefit by sharing resources such as the contemporary art space, theater and philharmonic. 

Call for proposals: Media for the European Public Sphere 

We are excited to announce that My Country Talks has joined Display Europe, a coalition built to shape a European media landscape as part of the Initiative for European Public Space. Once it is launched, Display will provide citizens throughout Europe with a portal to find media translated into their own language, and European citizen media groups will be able to contribute content to the platform.

Display Europe invites formal and informal media organisations to apply for a grant to produce journalistic content with European relevance, which will be made accessible through the new platform displ.eu. This call supports media platforms to produce high quality journalistic content in all possible formats. We want to fund both local media organisations interested in expanding and connecting their work to European level, as well as outlets that have a proven journalistic record in reaching pan-European audiences. The maximum grant amount is €12,000 for six months. 

Read the full call for proposals here.

Read the full call for proposals here.