ABSTRACT
The engagement of citizens in political discussion is classically considered to be a basic component of democratic political systems (Lane 1961; Almond and Verba 1963). In the current debate on the consequences of everyday political discussion for citizens and democracy, the most common way to conduct research is to base it on declarations to discover patterns of causality between, on the one hand, how much citizens say they talk politics and with whom, and on the other hand, respondents’ characteristics (Mutz 2006; Huckfeldt and Morehouse Mendez 2008; Searing et al. 2007). Other researchers try to find out more precisely what these discussions are really made up of, what they are like, and/or how citizens manage to discuss politics with others. There are different methods to approach this question: asking people to tell us about it (Conover et al. 2002), observing people discussing politics (Gamson 1992; Cramer Walsh 2004), or both (Eliasoph 1998). Our contribution belongs to the second category: we conducted focus groups in order to observe how “ordinary” citizens discuss politics.1 The design of this project differs from others notably because we set up the discussion in such a way that participants knew they were expected to discuss politics, but they were then left to do it in their own way. Our analysis of how participants talk about politics emphasises two processes: a process which recalls deliberation, as debated in the framework of deliberative democracy, because it is a cooperative process of opinion building; a second process that we call “conflictualisation”. We will explain how these two processes involve “raw material” of different natures, respectively opinions and cleavages. What chiefly characterises political discussion among ordinary citizens is the combination of these two processes. We will see that the social background of participants influences the relative strength of each process, but not in a linear way. Different aspects of the national context also impact on the (im)balance between cooperation and conflictualisation in political talk among citizens, including the specific pattern of political cleavages.
