A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.

Habermas's late theory of the public sphere is fundamentally about democracy and growing complexity. The network form is at the core of growing complexity, and the centrality of networks in the economy, political system, civil society, and the lifeworld calls for revisions in central theoretical assumptions about the structure of the public sphere. We argue that in order to maintain Habermas's larger democratic project, we will have to rethink theoretical assumptions linked to its neo-Parsonsian systems theoretical foundations and to systematically integrate new network forms of social life into theory.

This article advances a communicative approach to social capital that views communication as the fundamental source of societal integration. We contend that integration occurring at the system level via news consumption and at the individual level via interpersonal discussion is amplified through ties at the community level. This cross-level interaction is theorized to encourage civic engagement, writ large, above and beyond the influences of news, talk, or social ties. This perspective distinguishes between the extent of news use and political talk and the orientation toward news consumption and political conversation. We offer evidence that communication variables, specifically news attention and exposure along with conversational frequency and orientation toward conversational understanding, interact with associational membership and network size to foster engagement.

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