- If the political overload out of Washington has people
shutting down, tonight in keeping with expert heavy
hitters we turn to one of the ten authors of a paper in the
Journal of Communication this month titled "When We Stop
Talking Politics: The Maintenance and Closing of
Conversation in Contentious Times." "When We Stop Talking
Politics" actually looks at what happened in Wisconsin in the
midst of Act 10.
UW journalism professor Michael Wagner is here and thanks for
being here.
- It's my pleasure.
- Why did you look at Act 10 as a focus on this?
- Well, Act 10 came at a time of severe financial stress, both
in terms of growing economic inequality among regular
citizens and the need for a budget repair bill in Wisconsin
and it came at a time of growing political polarization both
within Wisconsin and around the country.
Act 10 itself became a symbol, a flashpoint for the divisions
between Republicans and Democrats, in some ways between
rural Wisconsinites and urban Wisconsinites.
In other ways between public employees and non-public
employees in other ways.
So there was lots of overlaps of clash that we really wanted to
understand in this context of financial stress.
- Now polling around this found that in the midst of Act 10, 32%
of all respondents said they stopped talking politics.
43% of public employees stopped.
Why did people stop?
- First of all, that's a really high number.
Typically if you ask somebody outside of a context like Act
10, have you stopped talking to someone because of their
political views, maybe one in ten say yes.
Certainly not a third of people.
So this is a remarkable finding that comes out of the Marquette
Law Poll surveys.
So one reason people stopped talking was that those who had
talked a lot, so people in rural areas who had talked a lot about
politics began to stop because they were encountering people
with whom they disagreed.
People who were public employee union members stopped talking
about politics because they were the center of this debate,
crisis, this set of proposals and protests.
And other people who were members of government unions as
well or private unions also kind of experienced that same sort of
situation.
And so it was -- the reason, I guess, is that politics affected
parts of lives that politics normally doesn't affect and it
highlighted other kinds of identities that we don't
normally think of overtly political, like being a farmer,
being a teacher, being a member of a union who works.
Those things became political and they became contentious,
resulting in some people stopping talking with their
friends, people who they had lived social and civic lives
with for years.
- So what is the consequence if people stop talking politics?
- So there's a few different things that could happen, right?
On the one hand, you could say we'll stop talking politics and
we'll redirect and talk about something else.
We'll talk about the Badgers or we'll talk about the weather or
something like that.
You could also just say we're going to stop talking
altogether.
And in some of the work done on this project, the work done by
Kathy Cramer, where she would go into communities and talk to
people who would get together and talk politics, she would go
back and back and back to these communities.
And after Act 10 she would find some people weren't showing up
anymore.
And she would say, "Well, gosh, what happened?"
And they would say, "Well, we've got different views on Act 10
than the person who's not here
and we've just stopped hanging out together."
So some of the consequences are the fracturing
of social networks that weren't political in the first place,
which is a pretty devastating consequence when you think about
how people just live their regular lives, especially when
they're not trying to be political in the first place.
- Because I know some of Charles Franklin's polling also
talked about it, it wasn't just kind of neighbors over the fence
who couldn't talk anymore, but families actually were split
in this way as well. - Right.
We saw that in the public opinion polling.
We also saw that in Professor Cramer's data where she would
talk to say, a farmer in a rural part of Wisconsin who would say
my daughter's a teacher and so now we're at odds because of
these decisions that are being made in Act 10 and where I stand
given what farmers believe are the set of scarce resources that
available and their perception that they're getting far less
and their perception that members of unions are getting
many more things.
And so it would even fracture families in some respects.
- Is what happened in Wisconsin happening at the national level,
in your mind?
- Many Republicans would like it to and so Governor Walker has
reportedly spoken with the White House and also spoken with
members of the Iowa state government about pursuing
similar kinds of legislation both in Iowa at the state level
and the White House is talking nationally.
So it could be that these sorts of things continue in terms of
policy, which we would then suspect would also begin to
affect national civic dialogues and informal conversations
people have about politics.
- So what kind of concerns do people who are -- who have gone
deep on this have if in fact the people stop talking politics
altogether?
- I think one consequence is an erosion of trust.
If we can't talk across lines of difference, it becomes very
difficult to see the world from someone else's point of view,
which makes it really hard to compromise, which is a central
requirement of a democrat system, especially in terms of
governing.
If different branches of government can't compromise with
each other, it becomes very difficult to get things done.
And if the citizens aren't encouraging lawmakers to
compromise because they're not talking to each other anymore,
then there's little incentive for lawmakers to compromise.
- Michael Wagner, thanks very much.