The Missing Link in the Deliberative System: Political Talk with Strangers

• In Event: From Deliberation to Participation

Abstract

We study a form of everyday political talk that has thus far been overlooked by theorizing and research on ordinary citizens‘ role in the deliberative system: casual everyday conversations between people that do not know each other. Citizens’ quotidian communication about public affairs is often portrayed as the mainspring and fundamental underpinning of deliberative politics and the touchstone of its democratic character. The politics of deliberative democracy is accordingly supposed to emanate from an ongoing, broad and encompassing discussion within the citizenry at large. Ordinary people’s informal everyday political talk is expected to connect their private lifeworld with the public sphere. Our paper proposes and tests a novel perspective on this phenomenon. Extant research on everyday political talk has typically relied on network perspectives. What has been largely neglected thus far are accidental informal conversations held between strangers and therefore by definition outside the confines of social networks. This is surprising because this overlooked type of everyday political talk appears closer to the deliberative democratic ideal of public communication than conversations within social networks. We argue that from a systemic point of view political discussions with strangers serve as an (in extant research missing) link between citizens’ informal conversations with the members of their social networks, on the one hand, and organized discussion events (such as deliberative minipublics) as settings where individuals that do not know each other discuss political matters in formalized, rule-guided ways, on the other. Drawing on a unique set of high-quality survey data collected in Germany (the 2017 ‘Conversations of Democracy’ study and the General Social Survey ALLBUS 2018), we show that political talk between strangers is fairly widespread, although less frequent than conversations with network members. Importantly, our findings on the backgrounds and consequences of engagement in political talks with strangers cast doubts on their actual value for deliberative democracy and suggest that they nurture political cynicism and protest behavior.

Authors

• Rudiger Schmitt-Beck, University of Mannheim

• Christian Schnaudt, University of Mannheim