Here & Now

UW Professor Discusses How Wisconsinites Talk About Politics

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Michael Wagner:

It's my pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why did you look at Act 10 as a focus on this?

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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?

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what is the consequence if people stop talking politics?

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is what happened in Wisconsin happening at the national level, in your mind?

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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?

Michael Wagner:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

Michael Wagner, thanks very much.

Michael Wagner:

My pleasure.