Delia writes,

The paper I was talking about with respect to the accuracy in reporting social attributes of friends is:

Laumann EO. 1969. Friends of Urban Men: An Assesment of Accuracy in Reporting Their Socioeconomic Attributes, Mutual Choice, and Attitude Agreement. Sociometry 32: 54-69

In general, they found that errors in reporting are less frequent for relatively objective characteristics (age, occupation) than for the less visible and public characteristics of the friend (political attitudes). Where errors occur, they are in the direction of the respondent ascribing his own characteristics to his friend. With respect to party ID they found that Democratic respondents tend to project their own political attitudes onto their friends. Republicans are a bit more accurate, however they tend to overestimate the number of Democrats! Data: subsample of the Detroit Area Study 1966.

I am pretty sure there is something more recent (80s), probably by Huckfeldt and Sprague (1995 etc). If anybody is interested, I’ll be able to be more precise on this soon since its part of my dissertation.

The other interesting piece is a book chapter by

Gimpel JG, Lay, J. Celeste. 2005. Party Identification, Local Partisan Contexts, and the Acquisition of Participatory Attitudes. in The Social Logic of Politics. Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior, ed. AS Zuckerman: Temple University Press

They use multilevel models to examine the ‘effect’ of party dominance at the local level (community level variables, like % Democrats, turnout and partisan diversity) on political socialization (pol discussion and knowledge, internal and external pol efficacy). They found that the more acute one’s political minority status, the worse political socialization outcomes will be. Being part of a perpetual minority is demoralizing. Minority status perpetuates itself over time by discouraging the participation of minor-party partisans.

This is pretty cool stuff, in that perceptions of political polarization can be as important as polarization itself.