Do They Even Care? Empirical Evidence for the Importance of Listening in Democracy

What role does listening play in the minds of American citizens? We test key theoretical ideas about listening in contemporary US politics: that listening should be a part of a wide range of political attitudes and considerations, that listening should be defined by citizens in terms of fair consideration, and that listening should have a significant impact on evaluations of government officials. We begin with open-ended questions on salient political topics to present evidence that Americans often think about listening as they think about important features of democratic politics. This is true when discussing different topics (such as responsiveness, extremism, and political problems) and across different parts of the American polity (the public, experts, and politicians). We then document how Americans define listening through the use of open-ended data, finding that Americans frequently think of listening as fair consideration of others’ ideas. Extending these findings with a conjoint experiment, we demonstrate that citizens react to listening from elected officials with more favorability and support in ways that are more powerful than other standard predictors (like policy responsiveness, partisanship, and shared group membership). After these analyses, we end with a discussion of how political science and politics broadly can benefit from an increased focus on listening.