National Institute for Civil Discourse NICD

In this episode of NICD Chat, Timothy J. Shaffer, PhD speaks with Joshua Darr, PhD at Louisiana State University and Matthew P. Hitt, PhD at Colorado State University. They speak about their book Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization from Cambridge University Press coauthored with Johanna L. Dunaway. 

Local newspapers can hold back the rising tide of political division in America by turning away from the partisan battles in Washington and focusing their opinion page on local issues. When a local newspaper in California dropped national politics from its opinion page, the resulting space filled with local writers and issues. What comes from this experiment are lessons for all of us as we think about the role of local media, especially newspapers. As they argue, an opinion page that ignores national politics and, instead, focuses on news issues and concerns could help people think about public issues and politics differently. When we have so many outlets encouraging partisanship and polarization, Home Style Opinion is a good reminder that news can be produced and consumed without national politics and political polarization driving the discussion.

NICD's Timothy Shaffer facilitates an engaging discussion about the relationship of social media, misinformation, and civil discourse in democracy. Guests include three members of the NICD Research Network. Patricia Rossini is a Derby Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK and incoming Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Sarah Sobieraj is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Tufts University. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is Professor of Communication at the University of Delaware. How should we think about social media? Listen and find out!

Robert B. Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side (Oxford University Press, 2021). 

This conversation between NICD's Dr. Timothy Shaffer and Dr. Talisse highlights the challenge of what it means to wrestle with what Talisse calls the "democrat's dilemma:" the tension between the moral requirement to recognize the equality of political opponents and the moral directive to pursue and promote political justice. 

Recently, Oxford University Press has published The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, written by Joshua M. Scacco and Kevin Coe. In this episode of NICD Chat, Timothy Shaffer speaks with Scacco and Kevin Coe about their recent book, what it means to think about the modern presidency reaching back to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt to today.

Significantly, the book utilizes data to make arguments about the impact and significance of the presidency well beyond simply speeches.


Establishes a novel framework that incorporates the goals and contexts of modern presidential communication
Includes a wide-ranging variety of never before published quantitative and qualitative data, including thousands of presidential communications and media texts, massive Twitter datasets, national and regional survey data, and a national survey experiment
Provides detailed case studies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, examining how both presidential administrations shared similar communication goals and contextual circumstances, but responded quite differently



Joshua M. Scacco is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. He is an expert on political communication and news media, having published more than 50 academic articles, book chapters, and public research papers as well as provided commentary for national and local news outlets.

Kevin Coe is a Professor of Communication at the University of Utah. He has published more than 50 academic articles and chapters, and is the coauthor of The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.

Bob Bordone is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, author, coach, and teacher on negotiation, mediation, consensus-building, dialogue, and facilitation. He is the founder and principal at the Cambridge Negotiation Institute. He is also currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School and previously served as the Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for more than two decades where he also founded and directed the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. He is also a senior advisor to the National Institute for Civil Discourse. 

Bordone has taught thousands of executives, government leaders, and others over the last two decades through executive education and leadership programs as well as through Harvard’s Program on Negotiation’s Negotiation and Leadership Executive Education Program and through the Harvard Negotiation Institute at Harvard Law School.

In this episode, Bordone speaks about his work helping people address conflict and provides numerous examples through his work, including efforts as a member of the board of directors of Seeds of Peace and as a member of the advisory board for the Catholic Common Ground Initiative. 

Emily Sydnor is assistant professor of political science at Southwestern University who has recently published Disrespectful Democracy: The Psychology of Political Incivility from Columbia University Press. This episode explores the book and its implications for political discourse and the issue of incivility--and whether it is good or bad for democracy.
The majority of Americans think that politics has an “incivility problem” and that this problem is only getting worse. Research demonstrates that negativity and rudeness in politics have been increasing for decades. But how does this tide of impolite-to-outrageous language affect our reactions to media coverage and our political behavior?

Disrespectful Democracy offers a new account of the relationship between incivility and political behavior based on a key individual predisposition—conflict orientation. Individuals experience conflict in different ways; some enjoy arguments while others are uncomfortable and avoid confrontation. Drawing on a range of original surveys and experiments, Emily Sydnor contends that the rise of incivility in political media has transformed political involvement. Citizens now need to be able to tolerate or even welcome incivility in the public sphere in order to participate in the democratic process. Yet individuals who are turned off by incivility are not brought back in by civil presentation of issues. Sydnor considers the challenges in evaluating incivility’s normative benefits and harms to the political system: despite some detrimental aspects, certain levels of incivility in certain venues can promote political engagement, and confrontational behavior can be a vital tool in the citizen’s democratic arsenal. A rigorous and empirically informed analysis of political rhetoric and behavior, Disrespectful Democracy also proposes strategies to engage citizens across the range of conflict orientations.
Order the book from Columbia University Press: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/disrespectful-democracy/9780231189255