ABSTRACT
Political discussion is essential to the idea of democracy. It is the most common form of political engagement, occurring more frequently than voting or other modes of involvement in politics. Political discussion also can provide unmediated political expression in both intimate and general settings. Further, political conversation may affect voter behaviour in numerous ways. It provides voters with information short-cuts and also offers a means of reactivating latent political attitudes. Conversely, persuasive political talk may alter political attitudes and preconceptions. Certainly this latter point, engaging in political discussion with those holding differing political beliefs, is the basis of democratic consensus. Indeed, this aspect of political discussion has implicitly weighed heavily in the development of deliberative democracy and social capital theories, which attract scholars broadly from different fields. The main tenet of most political discussion and deliberation theories argues that social engagement produces instrumental information as well as reciprocity among discussants and builds a more vibrant society. For democracy, therefore, discussion is essential in the construction of trust across social divisions, as well as in attracting people to participate mutually in political activities. The evidence is not entirely conclusive, however, on whether political discussion consistently leads to these positive results. Political discussion may lead to unintended consequences, biases and a further segmentation of political thought. Some scholarship questions the assumptions that discussion and expression are necessarily egalitarian, and also asks whether discussion truly builds consensus or perhaps cements political predispositions. These conflicting findings leave numerous broad questions about the dynamics of what actually happens in political discussion and what the consequences of political discussion are for democratic politics. Does deliberation empirically occur as normatively hypothesized, and does more discussion lead to greater civic engagement and democratic satisfaction? In an era when other forms of political behaviour are biased towards particular social groups, does political discussion offset these biases, ensure equality and empower democracy? Or, instead, does discussion compound biases? Do consensus and trust emerge from political discussion, or does it stoke divisive tendencies? More instrumentally, does discussion lead to greater political participation or to decision-making that is
superior to conditions when discussion is lacking by increasing citizens’ political information flow? Numerous scholars have increasingly tackled these important questions in recent years. This is not to say that political discussion had been ignored. Indeed, as Alan Zuckerman masterfully demonstrates, the classic models of political behaviour and partisanship suggest a very important role for political discussion, even if they do not directly account for discussion in their findings (Zuckerman 2005). But there are many possible reasons why this area has grown in focus in recent years. First, the party decline and New Politics literature chronicled the weakening of individual-level partisanship, social cleavages and demographic variables as determinants of voting and focused attention on more political variables that often involve the intermediation of political information from such forces as the media. Political discussion is a natural extension as a source of information and intermediation. Second, increased democratization has led many scholars to focus on normative aspects of democracy generally, with diverse trends in research such as how discussion can build social capital (Coleman 1988; Putnam 1995, 2000), the instrumental benefits of discussion (Elster 1998) and the very normative work of Habermas (1984) that argues that political discourse can better produce the common good. Empirical work testing such theories has developed in response. Third, the development of discussion network batteries within national election studies such as the Cross-National Elections Project and numerous other studies in the 1980s and 1990s made rigorous empirical testing of the effects of discussion in interpersonal networks possible. Fourth, as a consequence of these rigorous network data, it is now easier to incorporate the rich findings from the social psychology literature concerning group decision-making and group processes to further test the effects of political discussion. Consequently, political discussion studies incorporate multiple theories, methods, and levels of analyses: from in-depth discursive studies, to Deliberative Polling, to network analyses. Often these very different approaches are not integrated, and as a result, conclusions about the general theoretical topic of political discussion often get tucked away, leaving subsections of the political discussion literature to develop independently. These separate approaches have borne fruit on their own account, but together would provide a broader grasp of political discussion. Some studies specifically concentrate on the content of discussion in controlled settings, whether in focus groups or Deliberative Polling situations. These provide the theoretical underpinnings of what political discussion is like at the micro level. Other studies, most often political discussion network analyses, provide broader conclusions about how democratic citizens gain information through conversation or build nuanced political discussion networks and how the levels and patterns of discussion influence political behaviour. To this point, scholarship that directly studies the content of discussion has not been married with complementary research that focuses on the dynamics and consequences of political discussion more broadly. A broader focus would demonstrate how these fields supplement each other. Further, the lack of studies that focus on the nature and consequences of discussion in a comparative framework
leaves us without a firm grasp of how discussion and its effects are conditioned by national context and/or political culture. The goal of this volume is to add to the burgeoning field of scholarship on political discussion in modern democracies in a number of areas. This vibrant literature has grown in varied directions, but we assemble diverse analyses into two areas of study as sections of this book: the nature of political discussion, and the impact of political discussion in democratic politics. For both sections of the book, expert reviews of the literature provide a backdrop for the original research made by contributors to this volume. The hope is that these chapters provide scholars with definitive reviews of the literature on the nature of political discussion and the consequences of political discussion from a comparative perspective by reviewing where the field has been and where it is headed. Both review chapters are written by top scholars in the field and are outstanding additions to the discipline and achievements on their own. The first review introducing Part I of the book is André Bächtiger and Seraina Pedrini’s exhaustive review of research on the nature of political deliberation, especially deliberative democracy, that provides scholars with a true typology of this widely varied research, as well as highlighting the theoretical and empirical foundations of, and pitfalls facing, this mushrooming field of study. The second review by Ken’ichi Ikeda and Robert Huckfeldt lays out the theoretical bases and historical development of political discussion studies, especially in what regards the consequences of political discussion through the lens of discussion networks. This review by two of the most recognized scholars of comparative political discussion network analyses provides the jumping off point for current comparative analyses into the consequences of interpersonal communication for participation, information, knowledge, relationship to other sources of information, heterogeneity and homogeneity of interaction, as well as to the quality of democratic decision-making. To extend beyond these powerful literature reviews, the book includes a very broad mix of original research using different approaches, international cases, and comparisons involving ten countries from eastern to western and northern to southern Europe, North America, South America and Asia. Many of the chapters present single-country analyses that provide theoretically rich conclusions that are difficult to make when controlling for cross-national distinctions. Other chapters take full advantage of cross-national comparisons or time-series concerning the dynamics of political discussion and draw broader conclusions. Given the variety of consequential findings and research traditions on political discussion in political science and other social sciences, the contributors adopt many different approaches to demonstrate the dynamics and consequences of political discussion and cover different key areas of the discipline: social capital, deliberative democracy and consensus, disagreement in discussion, and how discussion influences political and voting behaviour. Beyond the many cases and research traditions, the authors use multiple methods and levels of analysis from in-depth studies of discourse, to Deliberative Polling and community policymaking, to network analyses.
