Interpersonal Political Communication Research Articles

The promise and peril of interpersonal political communication

AbstractAt present, the field of political psychology lacks an effective framework to conceptually organize the findings from the voluminous literature assessing whether interpersonal political interaction makes democracy better or worse. Historically, the scholarship examining various styles of interactions has remained siloed; scholars have not designed their studies to facilitate comparisons across different styles, so the accumulation of knowledge about one style often fails to influence how knowledge is accumulated about other styles. Moreover, the approaches used to study interpersonal political interaction bundle together constituent facets of discussion in a way that makes it difficult to unpack the relationship between the structural features and attitudinal outcomes of that interaction. In this review, I seek to develop a conceptual framework with two goals: (1) to encourage research design that intentionally examines why and how particular features of interpersonal interactions are linked to particular kinds of attitudinal outcomes, regardless of the style of interaction and (2) to facilitate communication between academic researchers and practitioners in order to strengthen the theory‐to‐practice pipeline for interpersonal political interaction research.

Will political disagreement silence political expression? The role of information repertoire filtration and discussion network heterogeneity

AbstractThe present research aims to extend the literature on the effects of interpersonal political disagreement on political expression on social media. It investigates how disagreement-motivated information repertoire filtration and discussion network heterogeneity play a role in the disagreement–expression nexus. A two-wave online panel survey (n = 791) implemented in Hong Kong finds that encountering disagreement during political conversations is associated with filtering the information repertoire. While information repertoire filtration itself may not lead to political expression, political disagreement influenced political expression via information repertoire filtration, and this effect was stronger when network heterogeneity was low. The result indicates that politically motivated selectivity makes already-homogeneous online networks even more fragmented. The present study enriches the literature regarding how digitally mediated disconnectivity creates a personalized, homogeneous private sphere during interpersonal political communication, which may fail to nurture an open and inclusive society.

Does Talking to the Other Side Reduce Inter-party Hostility? Evidence from Three Studies

ABSTRACT According to recent scholarship, citizens in various Western democracies show a growing sense of dislike and distrust toward members of opposing political parties. While political communication processes have been shown to influence inter-party hostility, the literature has so far focused mainly on mass-mediated communication. We argue here that affective polarization might also be determined by interpersonal political communication. Specifically, we hypothesize that “heterogeneous” political discussions – those transcending partisan and ideological boundaries – are associated with decreased hostility toward the other side. We test this hypothesis with three studies conducted in Canada: A cross-sectional survey (N = 3,596), a two-wave panel (N = 3,408), and an instrumental variable analysis (N = 2,005). We find that heterogeneous discussion indeed is associated with reduced polarization, a conclusion that holds across indicators of affect, obtains for both face-to-face and online discussions, and is consistent across studies. Having a heterogeneous (compared to homogeneous) discussion network predicts substantial decreases of up to 0.76, and no less than 0.09, standard deviations in out-party hostility. These findings inform scholarly debates about the antecedents of affective polarization and are consistent with the claim that cross-cutting political discussion can benefit democracy.

Political Talk, Conversation, Discussion, Debate, or Deliberation? An Interpersonal Political Communication Definition and Typology

Interpersonal communication is at the core of every form of human communication system, and the realm of political communication is no exception. Through interpersonal communication, individuals gain knowledge about the political world, understand the common goals and values of their political system, and learn how to participate in political tasks. As do many other research areas, interpersonal communication research faces numerous challenges. There is a lack of conceptual organization and precision about names and labels such as political talk, political conversation, public dialogue, political dialogue, political discussion, political debate, and political deliberation. Apparently, these expressions refer to the same idea: interpersonal communications that fall into the political realm. However, each term has a diverse epistemological, normative, and theoretical background and represents a different way of conceptualizing this idea. This essay suggests a general definition for interpersonal political communication and a matrix that organizes the existing academic knowledge about this topic.

Вербализация толерантности в межличностном политическом общении

The article covers the topic of features and manifestations of tolerance in interpersonal political communication. 10 reports of working group meetings and 1 report of the plenary session in the German Parliament for 2019 were selected as the language material. The issues of interpersonal communication, as well as the concept of “interpersonal tolerance” are of constant interest to research psychologists. In psychology, tolerance is often referred to as human’s personal characteristics. Based on this definition, the author of this article suggests considering tolerance as a parameter for studying the verbal behavior of a politician’s linguistic personality. The analysis scheme developed by the author includes three criteria to determine the level of tolerance-intolerance of a politician’s verbal behavior: (1) linguistic manifestations of tolerance, not directly related to political opponents; (2) a set of linguistic-stylistic markers in the opposition “political tolerance/intolerance”; (3) the type of reaction to conflictogenic situations. The analysis of selected texts, including the speeches of 6 political figures, representatives of various political parties in Germany, showed that politicians most often consciously use tolerance not related to opponents in order to create themselves a positive image and the positive image of their party in the eyes of voters, however, in conflictogenic speech situations they can exhibit intolerance towards their opponents. A tolerant/intolerant reaction to the opponent is associated primarily with politician’s temperament. In addition, the author of the article considers tolerance as a communicative norm in interpersonal political communication, while tolerance is not identified with the concept of political correctness. The main language means of verbalization of tolerance as a norm of behavior in interpersonal political communication are primarily the means of courtesy, consent and recognition of the subjectivity of one’s own opinion.

“It’s about politics, stupid!”: Common understandings of interpersonal political communication

AbstractFor the general public and for scientists, interpersonal political communication is highly important; however, surveys based on self-reports often lack satisfactory validity and reliability, because political talk is embedded in everyday conversations and thus hard to remember. Furthermore, different people are likely to ascribe different meanings to the term ‘politics’. The present paper aims to further our understanding of what people perceive or do not perceive as political. To determine the factors influencing the general public’s understanding of politics, we conducted a representative telephone survey among 804 citizens of a German city. The findings indicate that people’s classification of conversations as political is determined by the characteristics of the discussed issues. Furthermore, some respondents did not mention all conversations that might influence their political opinions and behavior. Nonetheless, the matter might be relevant for research when people are asked about their political conversation behavior.

Differential Learning in Communication Networks. Interpersonal Communication Moderating Influences of News Media Usage on Political Knowledge

This article explores how interpersonal political communication moderates the effect of news media usage on political knowledge; discussant heterogeneity, and expertise are further contingent factors. Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project, these interactive relationships are investigated in East and West Germany around the 1990 election in a comparative manner. The learning effects of media consumption are both reinforced and attenuated by frequent discussions: Reevaluating media content induces both clarity and confusion. And it is not simply that more interpersonal communication matters. Heterogeneous discussions (which provide information on the “other side” and contribute to a broad understanding of the political landscape) and political experts (who offer high-quality information) are most conductive to learning from media sources.

Seeking the Soul of Democracy: A Review of Recent Research into Citizens' Political Talk Culture

AbstractThis article provides a review of extant empirical research on ordinary citizens' everyday political communication, its phenomenology, determinants, consequences, and relevance for democratic politics. It highlights the recent upsurge in interest in the study of political conversations against the background of both classic and more recent developments in democratic theory and empirical research that served as intellectual inspirations. The article discusses conceptual and methodological issues of research into interpersonal political communication and presents key findings with regard to the background and consequences of political talk, tapping into fundamental aspects of democratic citizenship such as political preferences, participation, cognitive involvement with politics as well as orientations towards fellow citizens and towards the democratic political system. It concludes with an assessment of the state of the art in this field of study, highlighting desirable avenues for future empirical research.

Deliberative Barbarians: Reconciling the Civic and the Agonistic in Democratic Education

The history of civics education in the United States suggests a somewhat adversarial relationship between schools and parents. We view the relationship as an evolving and strained social contract; unresolved is the scope of school influence in relation to that of parents. A high school teacher’s decision to open up a classroom for discussion on contested issues can roust resentful parents, many of whom view such activity as indoctrination. Given this sociopolitical backdrop, we propose a framework for curricular reform in which agonistic expression is tempered by the active involvement of parents in family political communication. We explicate a contingent model of deliberative learning, whereby political exchanges in one context contribute to exchanges in another context. With the student as conduit, interpersonal political communication flows back and forth between the classroom and the living room. We apply the model to research on Kids Voting USA curricula to illustrate the heuristic value of contingent learning.

Influences of Ethnicity, Family Communication, and Media on Adolescents' Socialization to U.S. Politics.

This study focuses on the influences of ethnic group membership and family communication environment variables on adolescents’ knowledge, dispositions, and efficacy toward United States politics. Data were gathered in a survey of 10th‐, 11th‐, and 12th‐grade students. Hispanic ethnicity predicts more socio‐oriented family communication, less interpersonal political communication, less political knowledge, and less efficacy, while Native‐American ethnicity predicts less political communication. Results also suggest that adolescents make selective use of actual and vicarious experiences with the minority and majority cultures in their socialization to politics.

The Adolescent Unbound: Unintentional Influence of Curricula on Ideological Conflict Seeking

Conflict seeking is celebrated in advocacy of civil disobedience as a commitment of youth to transcendent principles that compel activism. Conflict avoidance, however, is far more prevalent as an explanatory theme in political socialization research. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine undercurrents of defiance in the seemingly controlled and disciplinary environments of the home and the classroom. We propose that high schools and families—as overlapping spheres of interpersonal political communication—can engender ideological conflict seeking during election campaigns as activity conducive to moral-political identity development. Ideological conflict seeking was modeled as inclination to openly disagree, which fosters support for confrontational activism. Evidence was obtained from multiple interviews of student-parent dyads across two election cycles in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. In validating a theoretical model confined to the ordinary political communication that occurs in classrooms and households, we highlight ideological conflict seeking as a focal concept deserving a more explicit role in the theory of civic identity development.

Sex differences in political communication during presidential campaigns

This study examines and tests sex differences in interpersonal political communication during a period of one week prior to the 1988 presidential election. The data for the study were collected from 567 respondents selected by a systematic random sampling procedure among adult residents in a medium sized city in New York. The results demonstrated that both men and women participated in political discussion quite actively, much more frequently than previous studies have reported. Men still talked about the campaign with significantly more people than women. Women were much more likely than men to name their spouses as their main political discussants, while men were more likely to mention friends and co‐workers. There was a very high congruency between people's perception of their discussants’ voting choices, their own intention and their actual vote. This tendency was especially strong among women. This finding suggests that people talk mainly with people in social groups who agree with them, indicating t...

Structural Equation Models for the Analysis of the Agenda-Setting Process

Agenda setting is the most prominent concept in the analysis of media effects in election campaigns. In a secondary analysis, contingent conditions of political agenda setting (need for orientation, interpersonal communication, issue-specific sensitivity) were tested against direct exposure and content effects of newspapers and television. The results of a series of structural equation models consistently support the audience effects model of agenda setting. Media agenda setting in an election campaign was primarily restricted by media characteristics. For an `obtrusive' issue (social security), no media effect was found. Instead, issue sensitivity is a strong (indeed the only) predictor of awareness of this issue. For an `unobtrusive' issue (foreign affairs), media agenda setting is shaped by interpersonal political communication. Newspaper agenda setting is dependent upon a high degree, television agenda setting upon a low degree, of interpersonal communication about politics.

Agenda-Setting With Local and National Issues

Three factors lead to the hypothesis that agenda-setting should be weaker at the local political level compared to the national level: (1) the more directly observable nature of local political problems, (2) the nature and strength of local interpersonal political communication networks, and (3) the relatively heavier media coverage of national political issues. This hypothesis was supported with data from respondents assigned at random to either local or national issue conditions and from a content analysis of television and newspaper coverage in Toledo, Ohio, of local and national issues. Contrary to the findings of certain previous studies, network television was found to exercise a stronger agenda-setting influence than newspapers at the national level. Newspapers, on the other hand, were the dominant agenda-setter at the local level. The relative agenda-setting influences of television versus newspapers are consistent with other data from this study concerning the relative strengths of the various media as sources of issue information.