ABSTRACT
From Aristotle through Tocqueville to the present day, political scientists have routinely presumed that everyday political discussion among citizens is bene ficial for democratic processes. One way of evaluating its contributions is to consider it a part of society’s deliberative system, which aims at the production of binding collective decisions (Mansbridge 1999). This perspective gave rise to a rich variety of empirical studies, which documented strong tendencies in everyday talk towards (1) avoiding making one’s views truly public and (2) neither listening to nor arguing with opposite views, while (3) perpetuating social inequalities and social distance in patterns of interaction (cf. Conover et al. 2002; Duchesne and Haegel 2007; Hansen 2004: 116ff.; Mutz 2006; Rosen berg 2007; Walsh 2004). Thus the deliberative potential of everyday talk, i.e. its capacity to generate outcomes that all can accept as just and binding, seems disputable. This chapter evaluates the impact of everyday political talk from another angle. The question asked here is whether everyday political talk contributes to making citizens’ political choices more faithfully reflect their underlying prefer ences – i.e. to make individual citizens more of a sovereign master of their own political fate. The achievement of this criterion poses no a priori demands on the deliberative quality of the process, or the legitimacy of the collective outcome. But the criterion itself introduces a distinction between the underlying unob served preferences of the individuals as opposed to their observable derived preferences, for example, their choices, which, as Huckfeldt et al. (2005: 512) put it, may be ‘discovered’ in the course of social interactions. A key assumption is that the underlying preferences remain (largely) fixed while citizens receive new information that may alter their choices. This assumption is of course fun damental for many social science approaches, most obviously for rational choice and Marxism, but runs counter to the notion that deliberation can and probably should alter identities and preferences on the way to fair and legitimate out comes. The discussion will return to the question of what the present results may tell readers who wish to avoid the assumption of fixed underlying preferences altogether. Prior to that, the first section of this chapter reviews the theoretical motivation of the present inquiry; the second section reviews its design; and the third section looks at the empirical results.
