If it were possible to control the characteristics of people's social environments in order to maximize democratic ends, what kind of political network would we ideally want them to have? Should the people in it be politically like-minded or have opposing political views? Those who are quick to jump to the conclusion that this network should be one that exposes people to as many oppositional political views as possible need to consider the quandary posed by the findings in Chapters 3 and 4: the kind of network that encourages an open and tolerant society is not necessarily the same kind that produces an enthusiastically participative citizenry. To be sure, some individual characteristics, such as levels of education and political knowledge, have uniformly positive implications for what is generally valued in democratic citizens. But the political diversity of people's face-to-face networks is unfortunately not one of these.

Political diversity poses a disturbing dilemma for images of the ideal citizen. There is a tendency to see the model citizen as a neat package of characteristics that all fit comfortably together into a single composite portrait. The problem is that for some very logical reasons these characteristics do not cohere. We want the democratic citizen to be enthusiastically politically active and strongly partisan, yet not to be surrounded by like-minded others. We want this citizen to be aware of all of the rationales for opposing sides of an issue, yet not to be paralyzed by all of this conflicting information and the cross-pressures it brings to bear.