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A sizable body of empirical evidence indicates political conversation—both face-to-face and online—drives participatory engagement. Digital, social, and mobile media provide new avenues and tools for political talk, with affordances that may be particularly conducive to expression effects—that is, the impact of message production on the sender. This essay contends that an emphasis on deliberative democracy has limited attention to the psychological implications of political expression and creative production via information technologies and digital media.

The mechanisms underlying the formation and sustenance of social capital on the individual level were explored with a structural model composed of the endogenous variables of civic engagement and interpersonal trust. Using the 1995 DDB Needham life style study, analysis of the model permitted an examination of the strength and direction of the causal relationships driving the "virtuous circle" of participation and trust; the demographic, situational/contextual, orientational, and attitudinal factors that are exogenous to these latent variables; and the linkage between these components of social capital and viewing preferences for specific television genres. The results indicate that (1) the direction of the linkage between civic engagement and interpersonal trust is mainly from participating to trusting; and (2) television viewing plays a conditional role in the production of social capital that is dependent on the use of particular genres.

Many scholars have bemoaned declining levels of social trust and civic engagement in our society. A decline in trust, some have argued, is linked to a decrease in civic engagement and vice versa. This study examines the processes through which this dynamic, termed social capital, is maintained. The authors differentiate three dimensions of social capital: social trust, life satisfaction, and civic engagement. They also examine the influence of demographic, personality strength, political interest, and informational variables (hard news media use) on these dimensions. The authors use data from DDB Needham's 1997 Life Style Study to test their hypothesized model. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that personality strength, an amalgam of self-confidence and opinion leadership, has a relatively strong direct impact on all dimensions of social capital, whereas informational variables have rather weak effects that are limited to civic engagement.

This study investigated the relationship between ethical and societal interpretations of issues and voters' decision-making strategies within systematically varied electoral issue environments. Analysis across two issue milieus using two measures of the decision-making process found that individuals who ascribed an ethical interpretation to issues were more likely to use a noncompensatory strategy, which focuses on one or two key issues in the decision-making process, than individuals who ascribed a societal interpretation to issues. This relationship held when the number of issues considered important and the importance placed on "social-moral" issues each were controlled.

Did media coverage contribute to Americans' tendency to favor national security over civil liberties following the 9/11 attacks? How did news framing of terrorist threats support the expanding surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden? Douglas M. McLeod and Dhavan V. Shah explore the power of news coverage to render targeted groups suspicious and to spur support for government surveillance. They argue that the tendency of journalists to frame stories around individual targets of surveillance - personifying the domestic threat - shapes citizens' judgments about tolerance and participation, leading them to limit the civil liberties of a range of groups under scrutiny and to support 'Big Brother'