All in the family: partisan disagreement and electoral mobilization in intimate networks—a spillover experiment

Foos, Florian ORCID: 0000-0003-4456-3799 and de Rooij, Eline A. (2017) All in the family: partisan disagreement and electoral mobilization in intimate networks—a spillover experiment. American Journal of Political Science, 61 (2). 289 - 304. ISSN 0092-5853

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Abstract

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters' most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, combined with a detailed database of pretreatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intrahousehold mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15405907
Additional Information:	© 2016 Midwest Political Science Association
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Date Deposited:	20 Aug 2019 16:06
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2024 08:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/101419

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