Meredith Rolfe has a webpage with some interesting papers-in-progress on voter turnout and social networks–two important topics that are generally considered completely separately. (I guess one could say that the “research networks” of these two problem areas do not have much overlap.)
The separation of voting and social-network research bothers me. From one direction, it is traditional to study voting from a completely individualistic framework (as in much of the rational-choice literature) or else to work with extremely oversimplified “voter” models in which cellular automata go around changing each others’ minds–that is not empirical political science. On the other side, social network research tends to fall short of trying to explain political behavior.
Rolfe’s work is interesting in trying to connect these areas. I like her model of education and voter turnout (it’s consistent, I think, with our model of rational voting).
Also, her paper on social networks and simulations was a helpful review. I’ll have to interpret what’s in this paper in light of our own work on estimating properties of social networks. It’s a challenge to connect these network ideas to the some of the underlying political and social questions about clustering of attitudes.
Hey, check out http://www.fluff.info/klemens/klemens_convivialit… (Can I link in here?).
Ben,
Thanks for the pointer. Your paper is interesting although I'm a little skeptical that you can read this much into the kurtosis of a distribution. Could possibly also be some statistical artifact–i'd like to see the whole procedure repeated with some random data just to make sure that what you're seeing is real.
Also, instead of fitting one big model to all your cases, I'd fit a separate model to each year, then plot your estimates over time. (This is the so-called "secret weapon" which is one of our most powerful simple tools; see, for example, the graphs in this paper.)
P.S. I think html tags will work in comments.
I'm coming to this discussion late, but I thought you might be interested in my paper Turnout in a Small World. It investigates between-voter interactions in a social network model of turnout. I show that if 1) there is a small probability that voters imitate the behavior of one of their acquaintances, and 2) individuals are closely connected to others in a population (the “small-world” effect), then a single voting decision may affect dozens of other voters in a “turnout cascade.” If people tend to be ideologically similar to other people they are connected to, then these turnout cascades will produce net favorable results for their favorite candidate. By changing more than one vote with one’s own turnout decision, the turnout incentive is thus substantially larger than previously thought. I analyze conditions that are favorable to turnout cascades and show that the effect is consistent with real social network data from Huckfeldt and Sprague’s South Bend and Indianapolis-St. Louis election surveys. I also suggest that turnout cascades may help explain over-reporting of turnout and the ubiquitous belief in a duty to vote.