Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Previous study have demonstrated that informal political communication plays an essential role in constructing democratic society. Interpersonal and small-group interaction about the broad topics of politics taking place in private setting may offer a chance for people to prepare for publicly expression. Since government decision can be influenced only when private word turn into public expression, it is important for us to know how political talk in private settings can turn into public political expression. Based on spiral of silence and the planned behavior theories, this study investigates three intervening variables, perceived opinion congruency, internal political efficacy as well as external political efficacy to explain the process by which private political talk leads to public political expression. Using data collected in online questionnaire survey with a sample of 423 Chinese mainland adults, this research found that private political talk was strongly positively associated with public political expression both in online and offline occasions. For online setting, both internal and external political efficacy positively mediated the relationship between private political talk and public political expression. However, whether or not people perceived public attitudes were consistent with themselves was unrelated with their intentions to express political opinion online. In contrast with computer mediated communication environment, for offline occasion, although external political efficacy was still a strong mediator between private political talk and public expression, people with higher internal political efficacy didn’t mean they had higher willingness of speaking out in real life. In addition, perceived political congruency was significantly positively associated with the probability of turning private talk into public expression in offline environment. These results can be explained by the differences between face-to-face and computer mediated communication environments. Since expressing political opinion publicly was always regarded as a risky act, some unique features such as anonymity, arbitrariness and heterogeneity of internet cyberspace may change some of the social-psychological influences on opinion expression. This research not only revealed the implication of interpersonal political talk by understanding the social psychological mechanisms of how private words translated into public, but also supplement deliberative democracy theory and the spiral of silence theory. Findings in this research also gave some suggestions for building “listening” government.