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All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks—A Spillover Experiment
Author(s) -
Foos Florian,
de Rooij Eline A.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12270
Subject(s) - spillover effect , homogeneous , mobilization , turnout , politics , leverage (statistics) , causal inference , interpersonal communication , social mobilization , context (archaeology) , survey data collection , social psychology , political science , inference , economics , psychology , econometrics , microeconomics , voting , law , geography , mathematics , archaeology , computer science , machine learning , thermodynamics , statistics , physics , philosophy , epistemology
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.