Editorial: When All Speak but Few Listen—Asymmetries in Political Conversation

This thematic issue looks at political conversation with a focus on political listening and seeks to advance an empirical approach to listening. Listening here means not just media exposure or co-presence in conversation, but as Benjamin Barber (2003, p. 175) argues in his book Strong Democracy, it means “I will put myself in his place, I will try to understand, I will strain to hear what makes us alike, I will listen for a common rhetoric evocative of a common purpose or a common good.”