Talking Politics: Political Discussion Networks and the New American Electorate

Individuals arrive at meaning through conversation. Scholars have long explored political conversations in the United States, and the vast majority of this research suggests that political discussion has important effects on political attitudes and engagement. However, much of this research relies on samples of White respondents, making it potentially difficult to generalize these findings to our increasingly diverse electorate. In this book, we seek to understand how political discussion networks vary across groups who have vastly different social positions in the United States, specifically along the lines of ethnorace, nativity, and gender. We build upon seminal work in the field as we argue that individuals with different social positions likely discuss politics with different groups of people and, as a consequence, their discussion networks have different effects on their political behavior. We use a novel discussion network data set with an ethnoracially diverse sample, paired with qualitative interviews, to test this argument. We assert that this book makes three central contributions: (1) expanding the scope of the political discussion network literature by providing a comparative analysis across ethnorace, nativity, and gender; (2) demonstrating how historical differences in partisanship, policy attitudes, and engagement are reflected within groups' social networks; and (3) revealing how the social position of our respondents affects the impact that networks can have on their trust and efficacy in government, political knowledge, policy attitudes, and political and civic engagement patterns.