What It Means To Talk Politics: Citizens' Understanding and its Democratic Consequences
What It Means To Talk Politics: Citizens' Understanding and its Democratic Consequences
Name of applicant
Lea Pradella
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Vienna
Amount
DKK 2,653,084
Year
2026
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
What does it mean to "talk politics"? How is it different from other conversations? What is it good for, what does it feel like, and what should it be like? This project develops the first systematic framework for understanding how citizens perceive political discussions and tests how these perceptions shape whether people engage in or avoid political talk.
Why?
Democracy relies on citizens talking politics, yet many say they avoid it. However, people may not avoid political talk itself but what they perceive "politics" to be. Without understanding these perceptions, we cannot tell what citizens opt out of and why. What looks like disengagement may be a rejection of connotations of "politics" - a distinction key to accurately diagnosing democratic health.
How?
The project develops a systematic framework of how people understand political talk, grounded in their lived experiences. It starts with in-depth qualitative methods like focus groups and then develops novel techniques to study meaning-making at scale in survey designs. It then tests experimentally how these perceptions causally influence whether citizens engage in or avoid talking politics.