Listening, Race, Partisanship, and Politics: How Socio-Demographics, Conversational Topics, and Dyadic Properties Affect Listening

In this paper, we test multiple individual level, dyadic, and contextual variables – many via experimental methods – to understand factors that influence apophatic political listening, which Dobson (2014) refers to as an “ideal” form of listening for democracy. Our findings are based on combined data (N > 3000) from two US quota sample surveys employing a 4 (topic) × 3 (discussant relationship) × 2 (racial similarity) × 2 (partisan similarity) factorial experimental design. Not only do some socio-demographics – such as partisanship (Democrat) and having friends who are members of racial or partisan out-groups – increase apophatic listening but above and beyond that three of the four manipulated contextual variables also affect listening, sometimes in surprising ways. Importantly, some significant interactions between our manipulated racial and partisan similarity factors and socio-demographic variables such as respondent race and outgroup friendships reveal that a complex mix of factors has implications for the extent of apophatic listening. For example, we found that Democrats were most likely to listen to fellow Democrats of the out-race and were least likely to listen to Republicans of the same race. By contrast, among Republicans, listening was least to Democrats of their same race, and higher and roughly equal for out-race Democrats and all Republicans.