ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the premise that citizens do so indirectly as individuals who are embedded within distinctive contexts and settings. It addresses the contexts and intermediaries of political experience—to return the individual to the personal setting in an effort to assess the consequences of political intermediation. Perhaps the first systematically empirical effort aimed at demonstrating the relevance of environmentally bounded political and social experience is found in the work of Herbert Tingsten. Citizens must become informed regarding both the nature of their own political interests and the most efficient steps for achieving outcomes favorable to those interests. The principal agents of political intermediation in the citizen's environment are personal discussants, secondary organizations, political party organizations, and the mass media. The context in which the citizen receives political information is largely defined by his or her exposure to, and the political bias of, these types of intermediaries and their interaction, with the intermediaries' biases sometimes reinforcing one another.
