The consequences of political disagreement in interpersonal communication: New insights from a comparative perspective

Abstract

Political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases attitudinal ambivalence and can depress voter turnout. These effects seem to be driven by a wish to avoid social controversy rather than informational gains from encountering other opinions. This article shows that political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases the difficulty of deciding for which party to vote. Moreover, this effect is a result of social disapproval of one's party preference, while political expertise in interpersonal communication has no effect. For voter turnout, no direct effect of social disapproval of one's party preference is found. However, disapproval has an indirect influence on turnout via difficulty of vote choice. In sum, both political attitudes and political behaviour are affected by social pressures. Students of political attitudes and behaviour should try to include interpersonal discussion in their models in greater detail than is common practice today.

Political disagreement and vote volatility: the role of familism across different European countries

“…Besides showing that political behavior and interactions are to be evaluated in the light of family arrangements across Europe, our analyses also emphasize the importance of demographic patterns in political and electoral studies. Results and theoretical arguments of the article go toward the direction indicated by previous works (Hopmann, 2012), which demanded technical and theoretical tools to understand country differences and analogies in political behavior, demonstrating the benefits of connecting, in a theoretically fruitful way, the two relevant disciplines (demography and political science/communication) that rarely interact with each other.…”

“…Hopmann, 2012). So far, few studies have attempted to tackle the problem comparatively (Hopmann, 2012;Hopmann et al, 2015), and even fewer have attempted to combine cultural/contextual differences, political discussion and electoral behavior (Huckfeldt et al, 2005;Ikeda and Huckfeldt, 2001;Lup, 2016). Overall, the literature focusing on contextual determinants of the differences and similarities across countries in political discussion is limited.…”

Seeking the Soul of Democracy: A Review of Recent Research into Citizens' Political Talk Culture

“…(), which observed substantially higher turnout among persons who expected their electoral behavior to be made publicly visible in their neighborhood, leads to the same conclusion. Survey‐based evidence suggests that perceived disapproval of non‐voting among people's associates increases turnout (Hopmann ). Mutz () proposed similar mechanisms trying to explain negative effects of discussants' political heterogeneity on turnout.…”

“…Yet, the improvement of political understanding and complexity of thinking generated by exposure to divergent political views seems to come at the expense of an increased difficulty of electoral choice (Mutz ). It appears that confrontational conversations not only delay choices (Nir ; Hopmann ), but also decrease electors' chances to cast a vote that is in line with their interests (Sokhey and McClurg ; Kraft and Schmitt‐Beck ). However, effects of political disagreement such as these might again be moderated by the nature of relationships.…”

Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: the social flow of political communication in Italy

“…The first concerns the national context wherein hypotheses will be tested. As pointed out in different works (Hopmann, 2012;Eveland et al, 2015), the large portion of empirical evidence concerning the relationship with individual vote choices and networks is of American origin. If we except a small number of contributions (Campus et al, 2008;Baldassarri, 2009;Guidetti et al, 2016;Vezzoni and Mancosu, 2016), the attempt to test network-based hypotheses in Italy is quite small, while works that identify both geographical context and networks as relevant predictors of political choice are just occasional (Sani, 1976); this gap in the literature is even more serious if we consider that Italy presents an ideal situation of testing such hypotheses because of the geographical scattering of its political landscape.…”