We examine the effectiveness of political communication and deliberation among citizens during a presidential election campaign. In order for communication to be effective, messages conveyed through social interaction must be unambiguous, and the recipient must readily, confidently, and accurately perceive the intent of the sender. We address a number of factors that may influence communication effectiveness: the accessibility and extremity of political preferences, the distribution of preferences in the surrounding environment, disagreement between the senders and receivers of political messages, and the dynamic of the election campaign. The analysis is based on a study of the 1996 campaign, which interviewed citizens and discussion partners between March 1996 and January 1997. The citizens are a random sample of registered voters in the Indianapolis and St. Louis areas, and these registered voters identified the discussion partners as people with whom they discuss either “government, elections, and politics” or “important matters.”
In this paper we are concerned with the clarity of political signals transmitted through political conversation and the accuracy with which those signals are perceived. The social communication of political information is subject to distortion effects that arise due to skewed expectations on the part of the receiver and ambiguous representations on the part of the sender. Indeed, communication that occurs between two citizens might be distorted either by characteristics of the individuals who are transmitting and receiving messages, or by characteristics of the setting in which the information is being transmitted. We argue that the power of majority opinion is magnified by the inferential devices that citizens use to reach judgments in the face of ambiguous political messages and hence the use of a personal experience heuristic gives rise to a political bias that favors the continued dominance of majority opinion. ow important is political communication among citizens? Political discussion is an efficient vehicle for becoming informed about politics (Downs 1957); it is a widespread activity with influential consequences (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944); and it may be fundamentally important to the vitality of democratic politics. At the same time, relatively few citizens demonstrate highly intense levels of political interest and engagement (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995); politics is only one among many important topics competing for airtime during citizens' conversations (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995); few of the com-This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation to Indiana University, Ohio State University, and the University of California, Irvine. We are especially grateful to John Sprague for his helpful advice and comments.
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