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How do residents of the United States connect anti-government attitudes with preferences for small government? The two are not necessarily the same, but claims that government is out of step with real working Americans are one common contemporary strategy of arguing against government spending and social programs. This study analyzes multiple conversations among 39 groups meeting of their own accord in 27 municipalities sampled throughout the state of Wisconsin to investigate current understandings of small government. The results illuminate the role of race and also rural identity in arguments that connect lack of government representation with support for small government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Americans connect their economic interests to their policy preferences? This paper analyzes conversations from multiple visits with 31 preexisting informal groups meeting in 23 communities sampled across a Midwestern state. The analyses focus on conversations about health care reform. They reveal that attitudes toward government are a central part of the way people structure their policy preferences. However, how this works varies by both individual and community economic background and perceptions of these backgrounds. In groups composed of people from more working-class backgrounds, people commonly express skepticism toward government as part of a general perspective of skepticism toward institutions of authority in general. In groups of professionals, people question and criticize government, but not authority in general. These perspectives are commonly intertwined with references to geography that operate as metaphors for resource inequalities, identification with sets of values and social classes, and perceptions of the exercise of authority. Recognizing these patterns is key to understanding the connections between economic interests and policy preferences and the possibilities for social policy reform. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do communities differ in the strategies they adopt to address the challenges of interracial relations? In this paper, I ask specifically why cities choose to pursue or forego provision of a particular type of social service, civic intergroup dialogue programs on race. I test arguments that such choices arise in response to postmaterialist values, in response to conditions of racial injustice, and in communities with larger stores of existing resident-government linkages. The empirical results support the resident-government linkages model, but support the postmaterialist model only among high-income cities, while supporting the social justice model particularly among low-income cities. The results suggest that community decisions to pursue dialogue are driven by the needs of marginalized racial groups as much as, if not more than, the desire among affluent community members to engage in talk about other racial cultures. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous democracies face the challenge of respecting differences while pursuing the good of the whole. Although deliberative democracy has been posed as a way to achieve this, serious doubts remain. In this paper, I investigate the prospects of a particular form of communication to attend to diversity while upholding unity. My focus is on city-wide dialogue programs on race and ethnic relations that are currently used throughout the United States. Their unique focus on perspectives, power and inequality make these programs especially likely to strike a balance between unity and diversity. I examine the practice of civic dialogue programs through survey studies of people doing dialogue in two cities, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with practitioners, participants, and public officials in 45 cities throughout the United States. By looking at the effects of the dialogue, listening to the way practitioners are using this communication, and observing what takes place within it, this study expands our understanding of the contributions of deliberation to heterogeneous democracies. We see that in practice, civic dialogue is predominantly focused on recognizing and understanding cultural difference. Although there is little attention to unity in the form of consensus or common ground, the way in which people are using dialogue around the United States suggests a revision of our ideas about the place of marginalized voices within the deliberative system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the practice of civic dialogue. I ask, what are the processes or mechanisms at work within civic dialogue programs being conducted by local governments and nonprofit organizations around the country? I investigate through direct observation of the dialogue, examination of its effects on participants, and investigation of practitioners? explanation of this form of communication. Pre/post comparison group surveys of participants, in-depth interviews, and participant observation suggest that residents of heterogeneous communities are turning to civic dialogue not to uncover shared understandings or forge superordinate social identities, but to understand differences across members of the community. Understanding these conceptualizations enlarges the reason we value cross-cutting, bridging, and intercommunal interaction, and brings an empirical face to demands for communication that involves the sharing of perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a presumption in the political behavior literature that class identity does not matter much for political preferences in the United States. However, growing income inequality, recent attention to the connection between the working class and the Democratic Party, and recent work showing a connection between class identity and orientations to government make this conclusion suspect. This paper investigates the relationship between social class identity and presidential vote choices. It treats individual-level identity stability and the political and economic environment during a given campaign as important intervening variables. I use a two-generation longitudinal panel study to examine the relationship between identifying with the working or middle class and presidential vote preferences during the elections from 1968 to 1996, combined with indicators of the political and economic context. I find that social class identity is strongly related to presidential vote choice once controlling for objective indicators of class—but only in several elections, particularly the 1980 and 1992 races, and primarily for people with stable class identities over the life course. These results, combined with the contextual indicators, suggest that class identity is especially likely to exert an effect on vote choice when it is emphasized by the information environment of the campaign, when the state of the economy is poor, and when there is a widespread perception that the economy is in a slump. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]