Social Network Disagreement and Reasoned Candidate Preferences

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of social network disagreement on candidate preferences. Although much research has explored the effects of disagreement on political tolerance and disengagement, less work has examined the relation between disagreement and political reasoning. We predicted that because disagreement reveals conflicting points of view and motivates people to consider these views, it should promote more effortful reasoning—and thus increased reliance on policy preferences and decreased reliance on party identification when choosing between candidates. Using panel data from the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections, we find that respondents in high-disagreement networks tend to shift their candidate preferences to align with their policy preferences regardless of their party identification. In low-disagreement networks, respondents tended to follow party over policy. In sum, the determinants of candidate preferences differ depending on individuals’ social networks. In some cases, disagreement may promote more normatively desirable political decision-making.

How education did (and did not) accentuate partisan differences during the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15

“…Bachelors, masters, and professional/doctorate degrees were coded as 4, 5, and 6 respectively. This ordinal method enables better modeling of a monotonic effect and it resembles an ordinal method used by other scholars (Appleby & Federico, 2018;Ekstrom, Smith, Williams, & Kim, 2019;Federico, Williams, & Vitriol, 2018). The results do not substantively change if a series of dummy variables is used to code levels of education (see the open dataset).…”

Social networks of independents and partisans: Are independents a moderating force?

“…The degree of disagreement among discussants does not necessarily impact overall political engagement or the likelihood that an individual will vote, but can change the way people vote (Ekstrom et al, 2020;Sumaktoyo, 2021). Those who engage in high-disagreement discussions tend to vote based on policy positions, while those who engage mainly in low-disagreement discussions tend to vote along partisan lines, regardless of how well partisan candidates represent a voter's views on political issues (Ekstrom et al, 2020).…”

“…Without partisans their social networks are far more ideologically homogenous. The benefits of cross-cutting conversations, including increased tolerance (Pattie & Johnston, 2008), ability to accurately assess whether information about politics is true (Garrett et al, 2016), and decreased likelihood of relying on partisanship for voting decisions (Ekstrom et al, 2020), are more likely to occur as a result of conversations between partisans and independents than as a result of conversations between Democrats and Republicans, given that the former conversations are more likely to occur frequently than the latter.…”

Failure to Share Reality and its Consequences for Self-Concept Clarity

“…However, the operationalizations used have the potential to confound two related by distinguishable variables-the level of disagreement experienced with network members, and the diversity of attitudes held by social network members. Indeed, the method of measuring social network attitudes used in studies 2 and 3 has been characterized as "attitudinal diversity" by some authors (e.g., Visser & Mirabile, 2004), and as "disagreement" by others (Ekstrom, Smith, Williams, & Kim, 2019;Huckfeldt, Mendez, & Osborn, 2004). One reason for this lack of clarity regarding the construct is that disagreement and diversity are predicted to be highly correlated.…”