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Talking Politics And Engaging Politics: An Examination Of The Interactive Relationships Between Structural Features Of Political Talk And Discussion Engagement, Ann Williams

Ann E Williams

This study takes a process-oriented approach to understand the current status of political discussion research and identifies discussion engagement—discussion attention and integrative discussion—as an unexplored but important facet of political discussion. As a block, these two variables of discussion engagement independently accounted for significant variance in two criterion variables of political engagement, political knowledge and political participation, after controlling for not only a host of demographic, attitudinal, and media use variables but also three most researched structural features of political discussion—network size, discussion frequency, and network heterogeneity. In addition, the study analyzes the interplay between various attributes of political discussion …