Scott D. McClurg

Social Networks and Political Participation: The Role of Social Interaction in Explaining Political Participation

The argument advanced in this article is that interaction in social networks has a strong, though often over-looked, influence on the propensity to participate in politics. Specifically, I argue that social interaction creates opportunities for individuals to gather information about politics that allows them to live beyond personal resource constraints, thereby supporting the political activity of many people. Using relational data from the South Bend Election Study, this article provides evidence that the effect of social interaction on participation is contingent on the amount of political discussion that occurs in social networks. Additional analysis shows the substantive and theoretical importance of such interaction by explaining how it is distinct from the effect of social group memberships and how it enhances the effect of individual education on the probability of participation. This key contribution of this article is to show that models of political participation that do not account for informal social interaction will be theoretically underspecified. It also shows that such interactions play a crucial role in explicating the role of other factors that predict participation, such as group membership and individual resources.

Social Networks and Correct Voting

Work on the nexus between deliberation and democratic practice has considered the normative consequences of socially driven behavior. However, a common criticism of interpersonal networks is that most people have insular social circles and that when they do not they are unlikely to engage in politics. We show that such pessimistic assessments are unwarranted, though for unexpected reasons. Using data from the 1992 Cross-National Election Project and the 2000 ANES, we examine the conditions under which social networks promote interest-based voting in the United States. We find that networks facilitate connections between individuals’ vote decisions and their underlying preferences when they provide unambiguous signals regarding candidates—because many Americans reside in supportive social environments, networks often help citizens make “correct” voting decisions (Lau and Redlawsk 1997 ). Thus, social networks appear to help shoulder the demands of democratic theory, but not by helping people learn about po...

What Do They Know and How Do They Know It? An Examination of Citizen Awareness of Context

The connection between the individual and his or her aggregate geographic environment, usually defined as the neighborhood, is a key component of the contextual model of social influence. However, there is substantial anecdotal evidence that people have very little knowledge or connection to their neighborhood. In this article, the authors explore the connection by using data from the South Bend Study to answer two questions: What do people know about objective conditions of their neighborhoods? Second, do these conditions influence perceptions people have of their neighborhoods?The authors find that (a) people have a good deal of knowledge about the objective conditions, and (b) even after controlling for individual factors, these conditions positively influence how people perceive their status within the neighborhood. In short, there is a connection between the individual and the geographic context.

Indirect Mobilization: The Social Consequences of Party Contacts in an Election Campaign

Although direct contacts between campaigns and individuals are a central part of the process that encourages political participation, it is often argued that their effects extend beyond the initial contact via a secondary process of indirect mobilization. This article puts that argument to the test by investigating possible connections between direct party contacts and political mobilization in social networks. The results show that the primary social consequence of party contacts is to alter the substance, but not the volume, of politically oriented conversations that occur in social networks. These conversations, in turn, increase the salience of the campaign in the electorate but have only a mild effect on levels of campaign involvement. Although political mobilization does influence social communication, its effect on political involvement is restricted to socially based forms of involvement under limited conditions.

Political Networks: Editors' Introduction: A Relational Political Science

Political science is diverse in its methods, theories, and substantive interests. A quick perusal of our flagship journals reveals just how heterogeneous we are, with articles ranging from mathematical treatments of theoretical problems to textual exegesis of Plato, and qualitative studies of single countries standing in contrast to quantitative analyses of experiments designed to mobilize voters. At times, the disciplines boundaries are so fuzzy that our territory is alternatively claimed by philosophers, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Social Networks and American Politics Introduction to the Special Issue

This article overviews the special issue on “Social Networks and American Politics.” The authors explain that social network analysis is a multimethod set of approaches to examining the pattern of connections that are created among individuals and institutions when they engage in their daily activities. It is especially valuable when research problems are about (a) the flow of information; (b) coordination, cooperation, or trust; (c) informal organization; or (d) multiple levels of organization. In addressing these problems, network analysis has expanded during the last decade within the study of American politics, contributing to knowledge about political institutions, behavior, and network theory. Promising directions for future research include the study of power, preference aggregation, information flow and transaction costs, and network dynamics.

Living in a Battleground: Presidential Campaigns and Fundamental Predictors of Vote Choice

Little evidence links the strategic decisions of campaigns to individual-level voting behavior. Yet for campaigns to matter in the way that experts argue, exposure to campaigns must also matter, so there should be observable differences in the structure of vote choice between battleground and nonbattleground states. Combining presidential campaign data with the Senate Election Study, the authors show that intense campaigning can activate factors such as race, ideology, partisanship, and presidential approval. The authors find that the campaigns affected different variables in 1988 than in 1992, which they hypothesize is the consequence of campaign messages.

Voter Mobilization and the Obama Victory

As with the other presidential elections from this decade, the 2008 election was followed by considerable speculation as to how new efforts to mobilize voters affected the eventual outcome. Although the conventional wisdom implies that “Democrats benefit from higher turnout,” previous research in political science demonstrates that such a conclusion applies to actual election results inconsistently. In this article, we outline the difficulties involved with assessing turnout effects within a particular election and proceed to test the hypothesis that the Obama campaign benefited from higher turnout using three different methods. The evidence suggests that the Obama campaign benefited substantially from voter turnout, particularly in comparison with the Kerry campaign in 2004, yet they also were successful in changing the minds of already mobilized voters. Although various data difficulties suggest the presence of some bias in our estimates, the consistency of the results across tests supports the general conclusion.

A Neo-Institutional Explanation of State Supreme Court Responses in Search and Seizure Cases*

To better understand the relationship between the U.S. Supreme Court and state supreme courts, we examine how Supreme Court precedent affects state supreme court decision making. Examining state supreme court decisions in search and seizure cases decided by the Supreme Court between 1983 and 1993, we specifically test hypotheses about how state judicial context and Supreme Court behavior influences when the lower court is likely to be affected by Supreme Court precedent. We find that there is substantial variation in the responses to precedent by state supreme courts. We find that precedent has a substantial influence on the behavior of state supreme court justices, but judicial ideology and the level of historical conflict between the Supreme Court and the state supreme court also influence the dissemination of precedent to the states. Most interesting, the effect of judicial retention methods on the application of precedent are considerable.

He Said, She Said Sex, Social Networks, and Voting Behavior

This paper examines how interpersonal social networks relate to the voting behavior of men and women. We argue that underlying the gender gap in voting is related to social processes that depend on the partisan and sex composition of networks. Analysis of the 2000 American National Election Study identified two ways that sex differences are relevant to network explanations of voting behavior. First, men have more sex homophily in their networks than women. As men are more likely to be Republican than women, this leads to different discussion environments for men and women. Second, men—and not women—are more likely to share the political opinion of women discussants, but only when they are pro-Bush and the remainder of the network is also supportive. The results support a social model of voting behavior that highlights the importance of social factors (in this case sex) other than just partisan differences.