| Abstract
| - Discussions and controversies make a journal livelier and thus more interesting to its readers. There is a lot of room for discussions in the sciences and particularly in the social sciences. However, the schedules of most academic journals, getting published four times a year, makes this a slow process. Therefore, IJPOR has decided to try a new format. Whenever a manuscript which has been accepted by the referees deals with a theory or major finding by a well-known author we will ask the original author for a short comment on this manuscript, which we then will publish together with the article. The authors of this article, will, of course, see this comment before it goes into print. It might be a little bit unusual that we start with a comment by one of the editors of our journal. However, the spiral of silence theory has received a lot of attention over the last thirty years and IJPOR authors have contributed to this discussion with many studies and replications, armative and critical. In the following, the discoverer of the spiral of silence, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, comments on the two preceeding articles by Scheufele and Eveland and by Hayes, Shanahan and Glynn.
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