Spatially Dispersed Ties Among Interdependent Citizens: Connecting Individuals and Aggregates

A continuing tradition in contextual analysis locates individual citizens within spatially defined, aggregate settings in an effort to provide a more complete account of individual behavior. Given the increasing individual mobility within society, it is less than clear that geography continues to define the boundaries on meaningful aggregate contexts—people have become less tied to their geographic contexts, and technology makes it possible for citizens to maintain relationships independently of space, distance, and location. In this paper we pursue an analysis and set of analytic techniques that are designed to connect individual voters, their communication networks, and the geography that surrounds them. The analytic techniques utilize a unique data set that captures spatial dispersion in an individual's social and political network, and from these analyses we can draw two conclusions. First, spatial dispersion in a network does have an effect on interaction within the network; the world is not full of voters who operate independently of their geographic contexts. Second, spatial dispersion provides opportunities to connect citizens living in different geographic contexts, thereby creating bridges for communication across different contexts. These findings suggest that scholars might profitably incorporate geography as an important component of the complex relationships among and between individual citizens in explaining the role of the individual in modern democratic politics.