Democratic politics is a collective enterprise, not simply because individual votes are counted to determine winners, but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens argue with one another and they generally arrive at political decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation. This book is dedicated to investigating the political implications of interdependent citizens within the context of the 1984 presidential campaign as it was experienced in the metropolitan area of South Bend, Indiana. Hence this is a community study in the fullest sense of the term. National politics is experienced locally through a series of filters unique to a particular setting and its consequences for the exercise of democratic citizenship.

We examine the effects of individual political preferences and the distribution of such preferences on the social transmission of political information. Our data base combines a 1984 election survey of citizens in South Bend, Indiana with a subsequent survey of people with whom these citizens discuss politics. Several findings emerge from the effort. First, individuals do purposefully construct informational networks corresponding to their own political preferences, and they also selectively misperceive socially supplied political information. More important, both of these individual-level processes are shown to be conditioned by constraints imposed due to the distribution of political preferences in the social context. Thus, individual control over socially supplied political information is partial and incomplete. Finally, these information-transmitting processes interact with the social context in a manner that favors partisan majorities while undermining political minorities.

As agents of electoral mobilization, political parties occupy an important role in the social flow of political communication. We address several questions regarding party mobilization efforts. Whom do the parties seek to mobilize? What are the individual and aggregate characteristics and criteria that shape party mobilization efforts? What are the intended and unintended consequences of partisan mobilization, both for individual voters and for the electorate more generally? In answering these questions we make several arguments. First, party efforts at electoral mobilization inevitably depend upon a process of social diffusion and informal persuasion, so that the party canvass serves as a catalyst aimed at stimulating a cascading mobilization process. Second, party mobilization is best seen as being environmentally contingent upon institutional arrangements, locally defined strategic constraints, and partisan divisions within particular electorates. Finally, the efforts of party organizations generate a layer of political structure within the electorate that sometimes competes with social structure and often exists independently from it.

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