A Case Study of Deliberative Democracy on Television: Civic Dialogue on C-SPAN Call-in Shows

Call-in programs have been specifically designed to give citizens a venue for offering their perceptions on various topics. The purposes of this exploratory study were to examine the extent to which callers brought in new political ideas and incorporated values, solutions, and consequences in their comments and to analyze the reactions of hosts/guests on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Content analysis of 225 callers revealed 27 percent of caller-generated topics presented new political information. Callers talked longer when the topic was new rather than old; seldom were values, solutions, or consequences discussed. The results are discussed in relation to Yankelovich's work on public judgment.