From the Living Room to the Meeting Hall? Citizens’ Political Talk in the Deliberative System

ABSTRACT

Focusing on ordinary people’s political talk the paper contributes to the study of deliberative democracy from a systemic perspective. By examining citizens’ everyday communication, it focuses on an object that is rarely studied from a deliberative perspective, but crucial for the deliberative system’s democratic character. By investigating the couplings between different arenas of political talk between citizens, ranging from informal private, semi-public and public conversations to formalized discussions at public events, it provides evidence on the appropriateness of the systemic conception of deliberative democracy. Analyzing data from two high-quality face-to-face surveys by means of structural equation modeling the paper demonstrates how these venues are connected to one another. The linkages between these discursive spheres create opportunities for bottom-up information flows from informal everyday conversations into formalized public discussions. To some extent, informal conversations also empower citizens for participation in these more demanding organized discussion events. Informal political conversations between strangers, a type of political talk largely neglected by extant research, emerge as a crucial nexus that funnels the motivational and capacity-building influence of everyday political talk within people’s social networks into active participation in formalized public discussions.

KEYWORDS:

• citizens’ political talk
• deliberative democracy
• deliberative system
• public sphere
• social networks

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/10.1080/10584609.2020.1760974.

Notes

1. Studies within this line of research often pay lip service to deliberative democracy, but few of them have as of yet applied a genuinely deliberative theoretical perspective. Noteworthy exceptions are Kim et al. (1999), Conover et al. (2002), Mutz (2006), Jacobs et al. (2009), and Zhang and Chang (2014).

2. See Jacobs et al. (2009, pp. 35–36), for an alternative typology of political talk that is less encompassing and partly defined by other criteria, such as whether communication occurs direct or online and whether it aims at persuasion.

3. The 2008 ALLBUS was conducted by GESIS Leibniz Institute of the Social Sciences. It was based on a two-stage random sample of Germany’s resident population aged 18 or older (first stage: municipalities; second stage: residents selected from municipal registers). 3,469 interviews were collected by means of computer-assisted personal interviewing between 1 March and 23 August 2008 (AAPOR response rate 40.3%: for further methodological details see https://www.gesis.org/en/allbus/allbus-home/). The dataset is available at the GESIS data archive (dataset no. ZA4600).

4. The CoDem survey was conducted as part of the project “Conversations of Democracy: Citizens’ Everyday Communication in the Deliberative System (CoDem)” under a grant of the German National Science Foundation (DFG). It utilized a register-based one-stage random sample of residents entitled to vote at the 2017 German Federal Election. 1,600 interviews were completed between 15 May and 23 September 2017 (AAPOR response rate 20.1%). The second panel wave was conducted by telephone from 9 January to 12 March 2018 (N = 877). For methodological details, see Grill et al. (2018).

5. The models are estimated using MPlus. All variables are rescaled to range 0 to 1 to render them comparable.

6. We apply three strategies to address the problem that our observational data cannot unequivocally establish the validity of the causal claim of H2. First, we control for an unusually wide range of known predictors of political talk. Second, we compare our SEM models to a variety of alternative specifications (documented in the Online Appendix). Third, we draw on the panel design of the CoDem study to supplement the cross-sectional analyses with identically specified longitudinal analyses. Specifically, we run three models two of which rely on concurrently measured variables whereas the third estimates effects on a dependent variable that was measured several months after its predictors. Conditional change models would in principle offer an even stronger estimation strategy. However, our data do not contain the repeated measurements necessary for the inclusion of a lagged dependent variable.

7. Since these models are saturated, no comparisons between alternative model specifications are possible.

8. These findings establish a necessary structural condition for the upward flow of political information from citizens’ lifeworld into organized arenas of formal political discussion. Examining whether the substance of citizens’ political talks indeed travels in this way across discursive spheres is beyond the scope of survey research.

9. Results of alternative model specifications are documented in the Online Appendix. Based on goodness-of-fit measures and coefficient estimates the models presented in Figure 2 are the most appropriate ones.

10. This would require detailed data on the content of the discussions that take place in various venues. Such data are hard to come by, especially in an integrated research design. Quantitative content analyses have been repeatedly used for studying formalized discussion events, but what people talk about in everyday settings has as of yet only be explored by a few qualitative case studies, relying on participant observation or focus groups (Schmitt‐Beck & Lup, 2013, p. 517–519).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Schm 882/18-1].

Notes on contributors

Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck

Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (PhD, University of Mannheim 1989; Habilitation, University of Mannheim 1999; ORCID: 0000-0003-1673-6672) is Professor of Political Science – Political Sociology at the University of Mannheim. He was Director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and Chairperson of the German Society for Electoral Research (DGfW) and is Principal Investigator of the project “The Conversations of Democracy. Citizens’ Everyday Communication in the Deliberative System” as well as co-Principal Investigator of the German national election study GLES. His research interests focus on electoral behavior and political communication with a special interest in social networks and interpersonal communication. His work has appeared in, among others, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal for Political Research, Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Communications - the European Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Public Opinion Research as well as with publishers like Oxford University Press and Routledge.

Christiane Grill

Christiane Grill (PhD, University of Vienna 2016; ORCID: 0000-0003-1334-4657) is a research associate in the project “The Conversations of Democracy. Citizens’ Everyday Communication in the Deliberative System” at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim (Germany). Her primary research focuses on interpersonal communication, deliberation, political offline and online communication as well as European integration processes. Her work has been published in International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Communications - the European Journal of Communication.