If there's anybody on campus focused on the presidential election this fall, it's going to be Walt Stone and Bob Huckfeldt from the Department of Political Science.

As you might expect from a pair of social scientists, partisanship is not their motivation. Rather, these two colleagues follow the behavior behind politics because they have a deep-felt concern about the state of democracy and what keeps it going.

Both are relative newcomers to campus but not to California, where they grew up. Stone was hired from University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2001 to chair the Department of Political Science. He helped persuade Huckfeldt, a political science professor at Indiana University, to join the faculty a year later.

In regard to the current state of democracy, they have good news, based on thousands of interviews and polling of ordinary citizens in the past decade about democratic dialogue and third-party politics.

Huckfeldt is co-author of a new book, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions Within Communication Networks, which examines the circumstances that give rise to persistent disagreement among citizens, as well as the consequences of disagreement for politics.

The standard wisdom that people are powerless to resist their friends' political opinions just isn't true, he says.

"You are likely to have three or four people with whom you talk politics, and typically you'll have at least one person in that network who disagrees with you," Huckfeldt said.

Huckfeldt's Political Disagreement proposes that democracy is alive and well in the United States with Americans talking among themselves and hearing ideas that conflict with their own political beliefs, Huckfeldt says.

While strongly partisan Americans certainly are less likely to encounter ideas and opinions that differ from their own, Huckfeldt says most Americans are coming into contact with people who differ with them over national politics.

"This is important," Huckfeldt says, "because it means that at least some people are regularly being forced to reconsider their preconceived opinions and beliefs. And these individual reconsiderations lie at the heart of a healthy democratic process."

One effect of having political disagreement among friends is that both parties tend to be less extreme in their positions and less interested in following the blow-by-blow of political issues.

Authors Huckfeldt, Paul Johnson of the University of Kansas, and John Sprague of Washington University interviewed more than 2,000 citizens as well as 1,500 of their associates to find out about people's closest political networks and the degree of disagreement.

"People don't typically choose friends for their politics but rather because they like to hunt, fish, play ball or talk across the fence," Huckfeldt says. "As a result, they like each other and they still have a fair amount of disagreement."

Tough times for third parties

When Huckfeldt's book was published in July, Stone was still putting the finishing touches on a book he is co-writing tentatively titled The Dynamics of Third Parties and Major Party Change. It's due to be published in summer 2005.

Stone says even when third-party candidates get a small percentage of the national vote, they can play a dominant role not just in determining the winners but in shifting party policies.

But he thinks most voters won't be listening to Ralph Nader and his third-party platform this season for one simple reason.

The voters see a clear choice between the Democrats and Republicans and won't be as interested in electing Nader to change the country's direction, says Stone.

"The Bush administration has followed a set of policies that clearly shows it as one of the most conservative administrations in history -- in some ways more conservative than the Reagan administration," Stone says.

"As a result the differences between the major parties are more apparent to most voters this year than they were in 2000 or 1992, leaving less room for a third-party candidate to get traction."

Even when voters think there's little difference in the two main parties, third parties only wield power when they field a nationally popular presidential candidate such as Perot or Nader, Stone points out.

Once Perot created his third party and articulated its concerns, the Republicans saw a possible voting bloc that could help their candidates win.

"But it came at a price because it meant expanding the platform to absorb the third-party concerns," Stone says.

The Republican takeover in Congress in 1994 was made possible when the Republican Party, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, made an overt attempt to appeal to the Perot constituencies.

Using the Contract With America, Republicans embraced their concerns, especially the need for internal reforms within Congress and the federal government's deficit.

Besides his expertise in the dynamics of third parties, Stone is co-director of the Candidate Emergence Study, which is increasing the understanding of the electoral process and exploring how prominent individuals decide whether to run for Congress. His books include Republic at Risk: Self-Interest in American Politics and Nomination Politics: Party Activists and Presidential Choice.

Huckfeldt studies public opinion, participation and voting in national elections. He is the author of several books, including Politics in Context, Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics and Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication.