Recent research on political discussion has focused on whether aspects of interaction
create a 'democratic dilemma'for the mass public in which people face a choice between
political participation and political tolerance. This article argues that there are important
variations in how people react to their immediate social contacts. It explores this idea by
studying how social disagreement and expertise interact with gender to explain variance in
political participation. First, it shows that there are conflicting expectations in the literature …

Scholars of behavior remain focused on the citizenry's ability to acquire high quality
information that can enable political action and choice. One of the primary concerns to
emerge from sociallydriven investigations into this is whether networks yield similar effects
for all people. We extend this discussion to explore a source of variance widely ignored in
social network studies–gender. While there is near universal agreement that men and
women should experience different kinds and degrees of social influence, an extensive …