Causality in Political Networks

Abstract

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

Schools or Pools of Democracy? A Longitudinal Test of the Relation Between Civic Participation and Political Socialization

“…Fowler et al 2011). This is intuitive in the case of quasi-political organizations, such as environmental or humanitarian organizations.…”

A Primer on Multilevel Mediation Models for Egocentric Social Network Data

“…An analytical and methodological improvement has been heralded by social networks scholars in favor of a more accurate understanding of causal mechanisms within and across individuals' social networks (Fowler, Heaney, Nickerson, Padgett, & Sinclair, 2011), and there still remains a considerable possibility for further methodological development (Wang et al, 2016). Traditionally, multilevel modeling and the formal test of the mediation and the moderation have been proven to be useful across various disciplines of social sciences.…”

Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: the social flow of political communication in Italy

“…Cross-sectional data are indeed insufficient to test systematically whether our relation is produced by homophily or influence processes (Mollenhorst et al, 2008;Fowler et al, 2011;Lomi et al, 2011). Consequently, nothing forbids us to theorize that people who are more prone to vote for a certain coalition actively decide to be surrounded by homogeneous relations.…”