Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: the social flow of political communication in Italy

Mancosu, Moreno

doi:10.1017/ipo.2016.13

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In most of the data used to study political discussions and voting behavior, alter's characteristics are ego‐reported, for instance in ANES (Erisen & Erisen, ), GLES (Schmitt‐Beck, Bytzek, Rattinger, Roßteutscher, & Weßels, ), and ITANES (Mancosu, ; Vezzoni, ; Vezzoni & Mancosu, ). As pointed out by Huckfeldt and Sprague (), this design is suboptimal, as respondents' perceptions are potentially affected by cognitive biases that could undermine the validity of such information, especially when referring to alters' political attitudes.…”

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confidence: 99%

Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications

Mancosu

Vezzoni

2017

Political Psychology

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Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the ActorPartner Interdependence Model as a useful tool to test bidirectional effects in dyadic data on political attitudes and behaviors. The model explicitly assumes that members of a dyad (reciprocally identified as actor and partner) involved in political communication are interdependent and influence each other. We apply the model to estimate the effect of partner's party identification on actor's vote choice, using 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis dyadic data. Results show that partner's party identification is significantly associated with vote choice. Moreover, we show that influence between dyad members is moderated by their intimacy and that an increased difference in socioeconomic status between dyad members tips the balance of the effect in favor of the individual with more resources. Our conclusions point to the effectiveness of APIM in modeling interdependent asymmetric relations and call for increasing efforts in collecting dyadic data and in developing proper tools for their analysis.

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confidence: 99%

Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications

Mancosu

Vezzoni

2017

Political Psychology

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“…First, because social networks are important providers of resources of all kind, they function as pool of information for the voters. In that perspective, citizens are influenced by the networks they form with people they closely interact, exchange, discuss, and disagree politics (Pattie and Johnston 2001;Huckfeldt et al 2004;Eveland and Hively 2009;Mancosu 2016;Butters and Hare 2020). The vote for populist parties in Italy has been consistently driven by informal share of information with close social network contacts (Vezzoni and Mancosu 2016).…”

Section: Social Network and The (Radical) Votementioning

confidence: 99%

Satisfied unlike me? How the perceived difference with close network contacts prevents radical and protest voting

Paulis

Ognibene

2022

Acta Polit

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Fitting with a common scheme across European democracies, the last election in Belgium led radical (left and right) parties to increase their vote share. One of the key drivers of the radical vote is political dissatisfaction (Droste 2011). Yet, the latter does not always translate into radical or protest voting behaviors. Using the 2019s RepResent Belgian Elections Study, we show the moderating effect of close social contacts in this relationship. For dissatisfied voters who believe that most contacts are similarly discontent, the probability to vote for radical parties (or, if not, to adopt other protest behaviors) is reinforced. However, the odds decrease the more they perceive their contacts different from themselves, i.e., as politically satisfied voters. Then, they become more likely to avoid protest/radical choices and to vote for institutionalized parties. Overall, our study yields findings showing that voting behaviors should be studied by considering also the voters' social networks, which seem to exert a role in defining the acceptability of voting choices. What matters is not only how one perceives politics but also how one believes his close contacts perceive politics too.

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“…In addition, there are good reasons to believe that the effect goes from interpersonal discussion to behaviour (and not the other way), due to the fact that choices of conversation partners are often constrained and many citizens find themselves confronted with views they do not share, even if they would prefer to avoid such views (Lazer et al, 2010). In the Italian context, there is evidence that political diversity is not rare and that Italian people often discuss politics with those who hold different views especially within weak ties (Campus et al, 2008;Baldassarri, 2009;Mancosu, 2016;Vezzoni and Mancosu, 2016).…”

Section: Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from the other side: how social networks influence turnout in a referendum campaign

Morisi

Plescia

2018

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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Interpersonal discussion is considered to be one of the most influential sources of opinion formation and behaviour. Yet, an unresolved puzzle remains within the literature: while some studies show that discussion with not like-minded citizens depresses political participation, other studies, on the contrary, indicate that the same type of interpersonal discussion can foster political engagement. In this study, we address this unresolved democratic dilemma for the first time in a context of direct democracy, by focussing on the campaign leading to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Specifically, we pay particular attention to the interaction between network diversity, ambivalence, and political knowledge. The findings show that frequent interactions with not like-minded citizens increase turnout. The results based on regression models and structural equation modelling indicate that this positive effect is channelled mainly through political learning, since network diversity increases factual knowledge about the constitutional reform, which in turn is associated with an increase in turnout. We do not find a significant effect of network diversity on ambivalence, as predicted by previous studies. These findings have important implications for deliberative theories and campaign strategies.

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Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: the social flow of political communication in Italy

Cited by 6 publications

References 43 publications

Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications

Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications

Satisfied unlike me? How the perceived difference with close network contacts prevents radical and protest voting

Learning from the other side: how social networks influence turnout in a referendum campaign

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