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Zusammenfassung Democratic politics is a collective enterprise! not simply because individual votes are counted to determine winners! but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens argue with one another and they generally arrive at political decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments; Part I. Democratic Politics and Social Communication: 1. The multiple levels of democratic politics; 2. A research strategy for studying electoral politics; Part II. Electoral Dynamics and Social Communication: 3. The social dynamics of political preference; 4. Durability, volatility and social influence; 5. Social dynamics in an election campaign; Part III. Networks, Political Discussants, and Social Communication: 6. Political discussion in an election campaign; 7. Networks in context: The social flow of political information; 8. Choice, social structure, and the informational coercion of minorities; 9. Discussant effects on vote choice: Intimacy, structure, and interdependence; 10. Gender effects on political discussion: The political networks of men and women; Part IV. The Organizational Locus of Social Communication: 11. One-party politics and the voter revisited: strategic and behavioral bases of partisanship; 12. Political parties and electoral mobilization: political structure, social structure, and the party canvass; 13. Alternative contexts of political preference; 14. Political consequences of interdependent citizens; Bibliography; Index.