In political science, the study of political choice and behavior—the focus of this collection of essays—has had a complex relationship with the social logic of politics. It is both obvious and well known that the immediate social circumstances of people’s lives influence what they believe and do about politics. Even so, relatively few political scientists incorporate these principles into their analyses. The founders of the behavioral revolution in political science-Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, Anthony Downs, Heinz Eulau, V. O. Key, Robert Lane, and Sidney Verba—those intellectual visionaries who set the agenda for...

Political interdependence and communication among citizens has little consequence if individuals reside in self-contained, politically homogeneous groups. In settings such as these, new information cannot easily penetrate the social barriers that surround the individual. If you are a liberal Democrat and all your friends are liberal Democrats, the odds are very high that you will never hear one of your friends make a passionately convincing argument in favor of tax cuts. Conversely, if you are a conservative Republican and all your friends are conservative Republicans, the odds are similarly high that you will never hear a friend make a passionately...

While it has long been recognized that primary groups are important in shaping, reinforcing, and modifying political beliefs, the formalization of these understandings through social-context and social-network theories is of more recent origin (e.g., Eulau 1986; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987; Weatherford 1982; Zuckerman, Kotler-Berkowitz, and Swaine 1998). Curiously absent from most of this literature, until recently (Beck 1991; Hays and Bean 1992, 1994; Kenney 1994; Straits 1991; Zuckerman and Kotler-Berkowitz 1998; Zuckerman, Fitzgerald, and Dasović, in this volume), is the context and mini-network that figures so prominently in the lives of most people: the family. Of course, the family has...

Couples sometimes support the same political party. How frequently? They do so less than half the time, during a ten to fifteen year period in the two countries analyzed here. How frequently do the partners support opposing parties? Hardly ever. The political preferences of persons who live together vary in systematic ways. These variations reflect two primary factors: hardly anyone offers consistent responses over time, and persons who reside in the same household influence each other. In this chapter, we account for the occasions when partners prefer the same political party and we specify how the partners influence each other....

The family is, perhaps, the universal social institution-present throughout history in widely ranging cultural settings. Although often difficult to specify, its influence is indisputable. Thus, any enterprise seeking to understand the place of primary institutions in political life must come to terms with the family. In general, the understanding of how families shape future members of the political community has drawn from a learning model: in the family children absorb explicit and implicit lessons about politics and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. In this chapter, we consider the impact of the families in which we are reared on our...

What accounts for the well-established association between social class and partisanship in european democracies? Consider three well known answers:

“Interest theory”: People usually support the party that represents their interests, which are linked in turn to their positions in the structure of social classes. (See, for example, Bendix and Lipset 1967, 12.)

“Interaction theory”: People usually support the party that is preferred by those with whom they interact. These interactions are conditioned by jobs, residences, and families, all of which are influenced by social class (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948, and the sources noted in the Preface and Chapter 1 in...

The shift away from the social logic of politics noted by alan Zuckerman in Chapter 1 has not only served to reinforce the perception that social location is a secondary, less important determinant of political choice but also led some to conclude that modern citizens have become largely independent of groups and social influence. For example, Dalton and Wattenberg (1993, 212–13), in their review of the voting literature, argue that the balance of research regarding voting behavior suggests that modern citizens are increasingly employing a more individualized approach to decision making, one that leads them to rely only marginally...

Very few people are social isolates who receive information only from impersonal sources such as the media. For almost all of us, the people with whom we interact—family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, and co-religionists—are important sources of information on topics ranging from essential concerns such as jobs, housing, and healthcare to the more pleasurable topics of entertainment and vacations. One important principle about our social interactions posits that the more people we know and the more different they are both from us and from each other, the more varied is the information we receive from them, and the...

Much recent research on social networks in politics has focused on the role of interlocutors in political decision making. Huckfeldt and Sprague make this point admirably: “Politics is a social activity imbedded within structured patterns of social interaction … political information is processed and integrated not by isolated individuals but rather by interdependent individuals who conduct their day-to-day activities in socially structured ways and who send and receive distinctive interpretations of social events in a repetitive process of social interaction” (1987, 1197; see also Preface and Chapter 1, this volume). Yet while this statement defines “politics” expansively, network research has...

Most analyses of voting behavior in the United Kingdom treat the electorate as so many atomized individuals whose decisions are made apart from any social context. With few exceptions, for example, there is no treatment of the household context within which most people are continuously socialized (but see Zuckerman, Fitzgerald, and Dasović, in this volume). And although there has been more attention to neighborhood and regional contexts, much written about these has been contested, and there is no consensus that people are influenced by such contexts. Indeed, Dunleavy (1979) challenged the notion of neighborhood effects on both procedural and theoretical...

Public opinion research has consistently found major differences in political socialization outcomes across racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that the political information circulating within ethnically distinct communities varies in both quantity and content. Here our focus is not on racial minorities but political ones. We investigate whether party identification and partisan context influence a variety of outcomes associated with the political socialization process. Racial minority status is not the only minority status that matters to the formation of attitudes that enable participation and crystallize public opinion. Political minorities are also worth investigation, particularly given that local settings across the nation...

Political philosophers and democratic theorists since Aristotle have considered political discussion—or at least its ideal version, democratic deliberation—an essential, albeit potentially conflictual element of the democratic process (Bohman 1996; Elster 1998; Fishkin 1991; Macedo 1999). Discussions about politics, it is argued, allow citizens to express their preferences, debate contentious issues, and even transform individual preferences to achieve a collective decision of superior quality. (For a discussion of these issues, see Knight and Johnson 1994.) Recent empirical studies suggest that at least some of these claims have merit (Conover, Searing, and Crewe 2002). For example, discussing politics generally improves...

Personal interactions bring people together and offer an opportunity for the exchange of political opinions. Survey research indicates that people who interact frequently disagree with one another and that sometimes persuasion occurs (see Huckfeldt, Johnson, and Sprague, in this volume; Huckfeldt, Johnson, and Sprague 2002, 2004). The observed disagreement levels are something of a thorn in the side of leading theories of political communication. Many theories of political interaction suggest that disagreement will be muted and gradually eliminated within social networks. In this project, we have sought to understand more thoroughly the causes of homogenization and to develop alternative theories...

How does the turnout decision of a single person affect an election? decision-theoretic models of voting show that the probability of one vote being pivotal in a large electorate is extremely small (Beck 1974; Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974; Fischer 1999; Fowler and Smirnov 2002; Riker and Ordeshook 1968; Tullock 1967). Empirical models use election returns to confirm this finding (Gelman, King, and Boscardin 1998; Mulligan and Hunter 2001). Because the number of individuals in modern electorates is quite large and interactions between individuals are complex and unobserved, these models of turnout assume that voters are independent of one another. In...