Listening During Political Conversations: Traits and Situations

ABSTRACT

Recent political theory in the areas of dialogic and deliberative democracy has placed particular emphasis on the importance of listening in contexts in which people disagree strongly, have competing (and potentially incompatible) interests, or are otherwise profoundly different. Despite this theoretical attention, there is very little empirical research directly examining the concept of listening – especially across lines of difference – in the political context. In this article we present two studies on race and political listening. Study 1 employs a large, diverse national U.S. adult sample and demonstrates that there are some differences – including race-related differences – in the general tendency toward political listening. Study 2, using a large, diverse national sample of U.S. adults, shifts emphasis from overall tendencies in listening during political talk to specific, situational listening with a particular discussion partner. Across three different (randomly assigned) race-related topics, using a method of imagined interactions to simulate such discussions, we find that Blacks (compared to Whites), individuals with fewer opposite-race relatives, and those who do not identify with the opposite race were significantly more likely to report it being “hard” to truly listen during discussion with a cross-race partner. Together, these findings highlight the importance of race itself, racial identity, experience with cross-race interactions, and race-related topics, to the study of political listening.

KEYWORDS:

• political talk
• listening
• deliberation
• dialogue
• intergroup communication
• imagined interactions
• intergroup contact theory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Neblo for his useful insights into the literature on listening and deliberative democracy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1736701.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Search completed October 7, 2019 using the search term “listening” as a topic (which captures the term’s appearance in the title, abstract, or keywords). Six articles were returned, all but one about media use behaviors, typically in the context of talk radio. The remaining article did pertain to interpersonal discussion of politics, but used the term “listening” in a much broader sense.

2. Whites were 49% Democrat and 51% Republican, whereas Blacks were 90% Democrat and only 10% Republican.

3. Removing only network size from the model – which is itself is non-significant (p = .192) – returns having an opposite race discussion partner to statistical significance (p = .023). Similarly, dropping the opposite race discussant measure from the model shifts the network size measure to significance (p = .047). The issue is that these two variables are moderately to strongly correlated at the zero order level (r = .43). Having more political discussants increases the likelihood of having an opposite race discussant, all else equal, and the regression significance test captures only their unique contribution, controlling shared variance with the other. Therefore, we find value in interpreting the marginally significant finding for having an opposite race discussant as meaningful.

4. Absent quotas, the vast majority of Blacks would be Democrats, as very few U.S. Blacks are Republicans. Our study is one of very few that has sufficient Black Republicans to test the impact of partisanship among Blacks.

5. Prior research has considered political talk among similar subgroups (e.g., Moy & Gastil, 2006), and Dillon and McKenzie’s (1998, p. 119) work on listening suggests that future research “manipulate the characteristic of the ‘other person’ in the communication interaction.”

6. To help validate this measure, we estimated correlations between this situational listening item and multiple items commonly used to tap perspective-taking (which as we have noted is related to but not the same as listening). However, because perspective-taking is measured as a trait, it may not be highly correlated with a measure of listening in the very particular situation of cross-race discussion of a race-related issue. Nonetheless, we do find that the single-item situational listening measure correlates with the perspective-taking items most closely representative of listening: “If I’m sure I’m right about something, I don’t waste much time listening to other people’s arguments” (r = −.16, p <.001); “I sometimes find it difficult to see a point from the other person’s view” (r = −.15, p <.001); “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision” (r = .19, p <.001); and “I believe there are many sides to every issue and try to look at most of them” (r =.19, p <.001).

7. The validity of this measure was assessed by demonstrating a significant difference in the number of opposite-race relatives across categories. Those who identified with neither race had on average .40 opposite race relatives, those who identified only with their own race had .72 opposite race relatives, and those who identified with the opposite race had 1.03 opposite race relatives. Also, a single-item measure of identification with the opposite race (measured on a 5-point scale) also revealed the highest outgroup identification among respondents who identified with the outgroup regardless of identifying with their own group or not (M = 3.93) compared to only their own group (M = 2.94) or neither group (M = 3.12). Note, also, that this is a measure of identification with the group rather than actual membership. Five Blacks identified with European Americans but not African Americans, and 27 Whites identified with African Americans but not European Americans. 22 Whites and 20 Blacks identified with both African Americans and European Americans.

8. The likelihood of a person who had an opposite race relative having any particular type of opposite race relative was essentially equal across most relational categories: 5.6%, 7.8%, 6.9%, 6.6%, 7.5%, and 25.4% (the latter for the aggregate category of aunt/uncle, grandparent, and cousin).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William P. Eveland

William P. Eveland, Jr. is a Professor in the School of Communication and Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University, where he studies the role of mass and interpersonal communication, particularly exposure to difference, plays in sustaining democracy.

Kathryn D. Coduto

Kathryn D. Coduto is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University studying interpersonal communication and communication technology.

Osei Appiah

Osei Appiah is a Professor and the Associate Director of the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. His research examines the impact that race, identity, stereotypes, and strategic communication messages have on ethnic minority and majority members’ attitudes towards and intergroup interaction with racial outgroups.

Olivia M. Bullock

Olivia M. Bullock is a PhD student in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on message design strategies that can reduce ideologically motivated processing of science, health, and political information.