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All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks—A Spillover Experiment

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  • Florian Foos
  • Eline A. de Rooij

Abstract

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters' most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, combined with a detailed database of pretreatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intrahousehold mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement.

Suggested Citation

  • Florian Foos & Eline A. de Rooij, 2017. "All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks—A Spillover Experiment," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(2), pages 289-304, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:61:y:2017:i:2:p:289-304
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12270
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    7. David Cutts & Edward Fieldhouse, 2009. "What Small Spatial Scales Are Relevant as Electoral Contexts for Individual Voters? The Importance of the Household on Turnout at the 2001 General Election," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 53(3), pages 726-739, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Manuel E. Lago & Ignacio Lago, 2019. "From the brady bunch to gilmore girls: The effect of household size on economic voting," Working Papers. Collection A: Public economics, governance and decentralization 1901, Universidade de Vigo, GEN - Governance and Economics research Network.
    2. Carolin V. Zorell, 2020. "Nudges, Norms, or Just Contagion? A Theory on Influences on the Practice of (Non-)Sustainable Behavior," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(24), pages 1-21, December.
    3. Bruno Arpino & Alessandro Di Nallo, 2022. "Sleeping with the enemy. Partners’ political attitudes and risk of separation," Econometrics Working Papers Archive 2022_06, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni "G. Parenti".
    4. Danie Ferreira, 2023. "Marketing Political Parties: Political Branding Elements and Voters' Preference: A Hypothesised Model ," GATR Journals jmmr320, Global Academy of Training and Research (GATR) Enterprise.
    5. Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare, 2020. "Causal Spillover Effects Using Instrumental Variables," Papers 2003.06023, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2021.
    6. Jizhou Liu, 2023. "Inference for Two-stage Experiments under Covariate-Adaptive Randomization," Papers 2301.09016, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.

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