The promise and peril of interpersonal political communication

Abstract

AbstractAt present, the field of political psychology lacks an effective framework to conceptually organize the findings from the voluminous literature assessing whether interpersonal political interaction makes democracy better or worse. Historically, the scholarship examining various styles of interactions has remained siloed; scholars have not designed their studies to facilitate comparisons across different styles, so the accumulation of knowledge about one style often fails to influence how knowledge is accumulated about other styles. Moreover, the approaches used to study interpersonal political interaction bundle together constituent facets of discussion in a way that makes it difficult to unpack the relationship between the structural features and attitudinal outcomes of that interaction. In this review, I seek to develop a conceptual framework with two goals: (1) to encourage research design that intentionally examines why and how particular features of interpersonal interactions are linked to particular kinds of attitudinal outcomes, regardless of the style of interaction and (2) to facilitate communication between academic researchers and practitioners in order to strengthen the theory‐to‐practice pipeline for interpersonal political interaction research.