News, Talk, Opinion, Participation: The Part Played by Conversation in Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy can be defined as a political system based on citizens' free discussion of public issues. While most scholars have discussed deliberative democracy normatively, this study attempts to test the validity of a model of deliberative democracy through examining the interrelationships among its four components: newsmedia use, political conversation, opinion formation, and political participation. Sufficient empirical evidence was found to support the hypotheses that (a) news-media use is closely associated with the frequency of political conversation in daily life both at general and issue-specific levels; (b) willingness to argue with those who have different opinions is influenced by majority perceptions and by news-media use and political talk; (c) news-media use and political conversation have positive effects on certain measures of the quality of opinions (argument quality, consideredness, and opinionation) and perhaps on opinion consistency; and (d) news-media use and political conv...

[1]  S. Finkel.  The Effects of Participation on Political Efficacy and Political Support: Evidence from a West German Panel , 1987, The Journal of Politics.

[2]  J. David Kennamer,et al.  Self-Serving Biases in Perceiving the Opinions of Others , 1990 .

[3]  John L. Keane.  Public Life and Late Capitalism: Toward a Socialist Theory of Democracy , 1984 .

[4]  D. Kuhn.  THE SKILLS OF ARGUMENT , 2008, Education for Thinking.

[5]  Maxwell McCombs,et al.  The emergence of American political issues : the agenda-setting function of the press , 1977 .

[6]  Gerald M. Kosicki,et al.  TalkShow Exposure as an Opinion Activity , 1997 .

[7]  S. Moscovici,et al.  The age of the crowd : a historical treatise on mass psychology , 1987 .

[8]  S. Chaffee,et al.  Measurement and Effects of Attention to Media News , 1986 .

[9]  B. Lasker,et al.  Democracy through discussion , 1949 .

[10]  M. Schudson,et al.  Why conversation is not the soul of democracy , 1997 .

[11]  B. Barber.  Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age , 1985 .

[12]  John Keane,et al.  The Media and Democracy , 1991 .

[13]  D. G. Taylor,et al.  Pluralistic Ignorance and the Spiral of Silence: A Formal Analysis , 1982 .

[14]  M. M. Ferree,et al.  Zeitgeist as an Empirical Phenomenon@@@The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion--Our Social Skin. , 1985 .

[15]  John S. Dryzek,et al.  Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science , 1992 .

[16]  Diana C. Mutz,et al.  Political persuasion and attitude change , 1996 .

[17]  N. Nie,et al.  Mass Belief Systems Revisited: Political Change and Attitude Structure , 1974, The Journal of Politics.

[18]  J. Bohman,et al.  Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics , 1997 .

[19]  Dennis F. Thompson,et al.  Democracy and Disagreement , 1996 .

[20]  Paul Anthony Golder,et al.  "Don't Know" Responses among Young Adults in Hong Kong. , 1975, The Journal of social psychology.

[21]  Charles T. Salmon,et al.  The Spiral of Silence Ten Years Later: An Examination and Evaluation. , 1983 .

[22]  Jean Louise Cohen,et al.  Civil Society and Political Theory , 2020, Crime, Inequality and the State.

[23]  Michael Billig,et al.  Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology , 1987 .

[24]  Bruce A. Williams,et al.  Methods, Metaphors, and Media Research , 1994 .

[25]  J. Zaller,et al.  The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. , 1992 .

[26]  Mikel L. Wyckoff.  Measures of Attitudinal Consistency as Indicators of Ideological Sophistication: A Reliability and Validity Assessment , 1987, The Journal of Politics.

[27]  A. Miller,et al.  COMPARING CITIZEN AND ELITE BELIEF SYSTEMS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA AND UKRAINE , 1995 .

[28]  John P. Robinson,et al.  Television News and the Informed Public: An Information-Processing Approach. , 1990 .

[29]  N. Nie,et al.  Participation and Political Equality: A Seven-Nation Comparison , 1978 .

[30]  Stephen K. White,et al.  Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy@@@The Cambridge Companion to Habermas , 1997 .

[31]  M. Baldassare,et al.  USING THE “L-WORD” IN PUBLIC: A TEST OF THE SPIRAL OF SILENCE IN CONSERVATIVE ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA , 1992 .

[32]  N. Miller,et al.  Attitude change : a critical analysis of theoretical approaches , 1970 .

[33]  S. Feldman,et al.  A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences , 1992 .

[34]  Charles M. Judd,et al.  The Structure of Attitude Systems in the General Public: Comparisons of a Structural Equation Model , 1980 .

[35]  Jack M. McLeod,et al.  Public Opinion du Jour: An Examination of the Spiral of Silence , 1984 .

[36]  Daniel G. McDonald,et al.  BEYOND SIMPLE EXPOSURE , 1985 .

[37]  W. Beach,et al.  Claiming Insufficient Knowledge , 1997 .

[38]  P. Bourdieu.  Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* , 2018, Food and Culture.

[39]  Michael Oakeshott,et al.  Rationalism in politics and other essays , 1963 .

[40]  A. Barton,et al.  Measuring Belief System Structure , 1977 .

[41]  Vincent Price,et al.  Opinion Spirals, Silent and Otherwise , 1990 .

[42]  M. Kent Jennings,et al.  IDEOLOGICAL THINKING AMONG MASS PUBLICS AND POLITICAL ELITES , 1992 .

[43]  C. Judd,et al.  Political expertise and the development of attitude consistency. , 1990 .

[44]  N. Koch.  Changing times? The effect of The New York Times on college students' political information and behavior , 1994 .

[45]  Benjamin I. Page,et al.  The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences , 1992 .

[46]  Charles T. Salmon,et al.  Community Size, Perceptions of Majority Opinion, and Opinion Expression , 2020, Public Relations Research Annual.

[47]  Bruce Robbins,et al.  The phantom public sphere , 1993 .

[48]  A. Gouldner,et al.  The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, the Origins, Grammar and Future of Ideology , 1978 .

[49]  Leonard Carmichael,et al.  The Human Condition , 1960 .

[50]  S. Chambers,et al.  Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse , 1996 .

[51]  Carroll J. Glynn,et al.  Perceived Support for One's Opinions and Willingness to Speak Out: A Meta-Analysis of Survey Studies on the 'Spiral of Silence' , 1997 .

[52]  C. Calhoun,et al.  Habermas and the Public Sphere. , 1993 .

[53]  J. Habermas,et al.  The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society , 1989 .

[54]  Richard A. Brody,et al.  Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology , 1991 .

[55]  Joseph N. Cappella,et al.  The Role of Political Sophistication in Learning From News , 1997 .

[56]  Jacob Shamir,et al.  Information Cues and Indicators of the Climate of Opinion , 1995 .

[57]  Benjamin I. Page.  Who Deliberates?: Mass Media in Modern Democracy , 1996 .

[58]  Jacob Shamir.  Speaking Up and Silencing Out in Face of a Changing Climate of Opinion , 1997 .

[59]  S. Keeter,et al.  What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters , 1996 .

[60]  Norberto Bobbio,et al.  The future of democracy : a defence of the rules of the game , 1987 .

[61]  Robert Ward Dardenne,et al.  The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and News , 1994 .

[62]  Barry A. Hollander.  Fuel to the Fire: Talk Radio and the Gamson Hypothesis , 1997 .

[63]  M. H. Prosser,et al.  Readings in Classical Rhetoric , 1972 .

[64]  Stephen L. Elkin.  Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform , 1991 .

[65]  A. B. Blankenship,et al.  Say it with Figures. , 1947 .

[66]  J. Dewey,et al.  The Public and its Problems , 1927 .

[67]  E. Eisenstein.  The printing press as an agent of change : communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe : volumes I and II , 1980 .

[68]  Jeffrey E. Danes,et al.  Change in single attitudes and cognitive structure , 1984 .

[69]  J. Bryce,et al.  The American Commonwealth , 1973 .