The Conversations of Democracy: Citizens' Everyday Communication in the Deliberative System

该项目旨在解决协商政治实证研究中的一个主要空白。尽管民主理论的审议转向激发了人们对谈话对民主政治质量的作用的兴趣，但研究几乎没有注意到普通公民关于政治的非正式谈话。关于这种形式的政治沟通如何经得起审议的高规范标准，目前还没有确切的知识。同样，对于导致日常政治谈话的商议质量更高的因素，也没有强有力的证据，也没有证据表明它是否真的会对商议理论所期望的民主进程产生有益的影响。通过调查他们的商议性及其条件和后果，该项目旨在有助于更深入地了解人们对公共事务的对话，这是政治交流的最基本形式，也是民主商议制度的基础。作为对协商制度制度领域政治传播研究的补充，该项目试图回答三个相互关联的研究问题：（RQ1）公民日常谈论政治的协商程度如何？为了评估人们人际交往的协商质量，将在一系列子维度上进行经验描述，并系统地与真正协商的理想类型进行比较。（RQ2）哪些条件促成了公民日常政治讨论的审慎性？在参与性研究方法的基础上，该项目将重点关注个人的个人技能和动机，以及由于他们在社会空间和情境环境中的嵌入性而产生的机会和限制。（RQ3）公民日常谈论政治的协商性是否会导致协商理论所假设的民主政治的有益后果？该项目将测试协商理论的假设，这些假设涉及协商沟通对个人公民取向和合法性信念的影响。因此，它将有助于更好地了解协商传播的系统一级后果的微观基础。为了解决这些研究问题，该项目将遵循社会网络研究的最佳实践示例，创建和分析公民日常政治谈话的实质性和方法论最佳数据库。它结合了对公民随机抽样的当地两波小组调查和对政治讨论者的滚雪球调查，以及关于社会政治背景的汇总数据。为了调查情境环境的作用，小组将以这样一种方式进行计时，即基线访谈反映了“选举之间”政治的正常情况，而重新访谈则反映了选举政治的政治化背景。

The project is to address a major gap in the empirical study of deliberative politics. Although democratic theory's deliberative turn stimulated increasing interest in the role of talk for the quality of democratic politics, research paid as of yet hardly any attention to ordinary citizens' informal conversations about politics. No assured knowledge exists about how this form of political communication stands up to the high normative standards of deliberation. Likewise, there is no robust evidence on the factors that lead to a higher deliberative quality of everyday political talk, nor on whether it actually entails the beneficial influences on the democratic process expected by deliberative theory. By investigating their deliberativeness as well as its conditions and consequences the project seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of people's conversations about public affairs as the most basic form of political communication and foundation of democracy's deliberative system. Complementing research on political communication in institutional arenas of the deliberative system the project seeks to answer three interrelated research questions: (RQ1) How deliberative is citizens' everyday talk about politics? To assess the deliberative quality of people's interpersonal communication it will be empirically described on a range of sub-dimensions and systematically compared to the ideal type of genuine deliberation. (RQ2) Which conditions contribute to the deliberativeness of citizens' everyday talk about politics? Building on approaches from participation research the project will focus on individuals' personal skills and motivations as well as on opportunities and constraints that result from their embeddedness in socio-spatial and situational contexts. (RQ3) Does the deliberativeness of citizens' everyday talk about politics lead to the beneficial consequences for democratic politics assumed by deliberative theory? The project will test hypotheses from deliberative theory that pertain to effects of deliberative communication on individuals' civic orientations and legitimacy beliefs. It will thus contribute to a better understanding of the micro foundations of the system-level consequences of deliberative communication. To address these research questions the project will follow best-practice examples from social network research to create and analyze a substantively and methodologically optimal database on citizens' everyday political talk. It combines a local two-wave panel survey of a random sample of citizens with a snowball survey of political discussants and aggregate data on socio-political contexts. To investigate the role of situational circumstances the panel will be timed in such a way that the baseline interviews reflect the normal conditions of 'between-election' politics and the re-interviews the politicized context of electoral politics.