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The paradox of deliberative democracy is that the prerequisites of deliberation must be produced through deliberation itself. This essay, thus, proposes that deliberative democracy requires two levels of deliberation: One is instrumental deliberation, a procedural tool, through which people negotiate and make decisions; the other is dialogic deliberation, or dialogue, through which people construct the concept of the self and other, the sense of community, and public reason. Relying on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Buber’s concept of dialogue, and Giddens’s theory of structuration, we propose that informal and nonpurposive everyday political talk, the practical form of dialogic deliberation, is the fundamental underpinning of deliberative democracy. Through everyday political talk, citizens construct their identities, achieve mutual understanding, produce public reason, form considered opinions, and produce rules and resources for deliberative democracy.

For some theorists, talk about politics is infrequent, difficult, divisive, and, to be efficacious, must proceed according to special rules in protected spaces. We, however, examined ordinary political conversation in common spaces, asking Americans how freely and how often they talked about 9 political and personal topics at home, work, civic organizations, and elsewhere. Respondents felt free to talk about all topics. Most topics were talked about most frequently at home and at work, suggesting that the electronic cottage is wired to the public sphere. Political conversation in most loci correlated significantly with opinion quality and political participation, indicating that such conversation is a vital component of actual democratic practice, despite the emphasis given to argumentation and formal deliberation by some normative theorists. Given the dictum, "Two things I never talk about in public are politics and religion," the troublesome fall in news consumption, a continuing slippage in voter turnout, and the controversy swirling around citizens' distrust of government and the decline of America's "social capital" (Putnam, 1995a(Putnam, , 1995b, 1 there is little wonder that questions abound about how little, how reluctantly, and where, if at all, Americans talk about politics. This debate proceeds, incidentally, despite empirical evidence that civic participation is alive and well Disciplines Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences

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Abstract. In this study, we investigated how grit is related to the satisfaction of the basic needs and subjective well-being. Grit means dedication to long-term goals with enthusiasm, which is closely related to success in objective terms. Thus, we expected that grit would be positively related to satisfying the autonomy and competence needs, which would lead to greater subjective well-being (i.e., higher life satisfaction and lower depression). A survey of young adults (N = 455) revealed that grit is strongly related to both the autonomy and competence needs, and these needs mediated the effect of grit on subjective well-being. Grit, did not directly increase life satisfaction but weakly decreased depression. Further, the two basic needs played different roles in enhancing subjective well-being. Autonomy reduced depression, and competence increased life satisfaction.