Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Surveys on interpersonal political communication are associated with at least three problems: First, political conversations are hard to remember as separated events as they are embedded in people’s everyday conversations on diverse topics (Eveland, Morey, and Hutchens, 2011). Second, respondents are likely to remember extraordinary conversations in the first instance, e.g. a dispute on a controversial political issue. Third, as different people are supposed to have different understandings of "politics" their answers are only comparable to a limited extend. To address these shortcomings and gain more valid and reliable results on people’s political conversation behavior, a covert field observation was conducted in the present case. The main research questions are: First, how important are political topics in people’s everyday conversations? Second, which factors can explain if people talk about politics with others?

In spring 2016, a team of 40 trained observers captured topics and opinion-forming processes of 2,573 everyday conversations with 6.515 interlocutors in two middle-sized German cities. Three out of four conversations were realized in cafés, restaurants or in public transport, 17 percent at universities and 10 percent in observers’ private environments, e.g. at their parents’ or friends’ homes. The sample of conversations was quoted by place, time, group size as well as by sex and age of the observed persons. Conversations were covertly observed for a period of 20 minutes and coded in real-time using a standardized coding schema (public environments) or recorded and coded afterwards (private environments). The observational study was funded by the German Research Foundation and approved by an Institutional Review Board.

In 41 percent (n=1,058) of the observed conversations, people were talking about a public topic, e.g. football, the weather, their favorite TV series or the election upcoming in one of the two cities. In the other cases, people were talking solely on private topics, e.g. relatives’ diseases or their coworkers. 204 conversations, respectively one fifth of all conversations on public topics were about politics in the strict sense. That means, that e.g. political actors were involved and issues were of public relevance. The European migrant crisis was the most talked political issue in spring 2016 (n=61 conversations). Groups talking political topics (n=204) differed from groups talking non-political public topics (n=854) in several characteristics. Regarding interlocutors’ characteristics, males and elderly people (older than 60 years) were more represented in groups that addressed political topics. Regarding the group size, it was mainly three-person-groups that talked political issues whereas dyads more often chose non-political public issues. Regarding the environment, it was particularly people’s homes were political conversations were held. In cafés, restaurants and in public transport people rather preferred public topics that were not related to politics.

References
Eveland, W. P., Morey, A. C., & Hutchens, M. J. (2011). Beyond deliberation: New directions for the study of informal political conversation from a communication perspective. Journal of Communication, 61(6), 1082-1103.