Abstract
At the center of debates on deliberative democracy is the issue of how much real deliberation citizens experience on a regular basis in their core social networks. These “disagreements about disagreement” come in a variety of forms, with scholars advocating significantly different empirical approaches (e.g., Huckfeldt, Johnson, and Sprague 2004; Mutz 2006), and coming to significantly different substantive conclusions. In this paper, we tackle these discrepancies through methodological advances and an investigation into the effects that conceptual differences have on key findings relating interpersonal political disagreement to political attitudes and behaviors Drawing on the 2008 ANES panel study, we explore the consequences of making different assumptions about the definition and measurement of disagreement, ultimately speaking to the on-going debate over whether a deliberative society can also be a participatory one (Mutz 2006).