What Goes Without Saying

Taylor N. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Talking Politics: Political Discussion Networks and the New American Electorate (2020). She has received numerous awards for her research. Jaime E. Settle is an Associate Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary. Her first book, Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America, won the Best Book Award from the Experimental Politics section of APSA.

• 1. Opening the black box of political discussion; 2. The 4d framework of political discussion; 3. Data collection; 4. Detection: Mapping the political landscape (stage 1); 5. Decision: To talk or not to talk? (stage 2); 6. Discussion: The psychophysiological experience of political discussion (stage 3); 7. [further] discussion: Expression in political discussion (stage 3); 8. Determination: When discussion divides us (stage 4); 9. Individual dispositions and the 4d framework; 10. The costs of conversation; Index.

'The nature of democratic discourse is one of the most studied topics in the social sciences – and for good reason since it plays a large role in determining how democracies function. Yet, existing work has almost completely ignored the fundamental question of why people talk about politics in the first place. The authors make a seminal contribution by detailing the processes that drive political discussions or lack thereof. Their framework, which accentuates how social processes shape political interactions, will guide thinking for generations to come.' James N. Druckman, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University