Without the experience of disagreement, political communication among citizens loses value and meaning. At the same time, political disagreement and diversity do not always or inevitably survive. This book, accordingly, considers the compelling issue of the circumstances that sustain political diversity, even in politically high stimulus environments where individuals are attentive to politics and the frequency of communication among citizens is correspondingly high.

Robert Huckfeldt is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. His interests lie in the areas of elections, public opinion, political communication, urban politics, and more generally in the relationships among groups and individuals in politics. He is the author of Dynamic Modeling (with Thomas Likens and Carol Weitzel Kohfeld, 1982), Politics in Context (2003), Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics (with Carol Weitzel Kohfeld, 1989) and Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication (with John Sprague, 1995). He has contributed articles to the American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, as well as other journals.

1. Communication, influence, and the capacity of citizens to disagree; 2. New information, old information, and persistent disagreement; 3. Dyads, networks, and autoregressive influence; 4. Disagreement, heterogeneity, and the effectiveness of political communication; 5. Disagreement, heterogeneity, and persuasion: how does disagreement survive?; 6. Agent-based explanations, patterns of communication, and the inevitability of homogeneity; 7. Agent-based explanations, autoregressive influence, and the survival of disagreement; 8. Heterogeneous networks and citizen capacity: disagreement ambivalence, and engagement; 9. Summary, implications, and conclusion.