‘People Who Talk Together Vote Together’: An Exploration of Contextual Effects in Great Britain

Abstract

Many students of British voting patterns have tested for the existence of contextual effects, which postulate that voters are influenced by events and people in their local milieux. One of those contextual effects is the neighborhood effect, whereby individuals are influenced by the nature of the politically relevant information circulating within their social networks, many of which are spatially constrained to their local area. Although ecological analyses have identified patterns consistent with this hypothesis, there have been virtually no direct investigations of the effect, largely because of the absence of relevant data. Using information from a large, clustered survey of voters at the time of the 1992 general election, this paper uncovers clear evidence of such effects: people are much more likely to change their votes in a particular direction if those with whom they discuss political issues support that direction, especially if they are members of the respondent's family and are the individuals with whom they discuss politics most. Key Words: voting, neighborhood effect, Great Britain.

Conversation, Disagreement and Political Participation

“…The empirical evidence supports this theoretical expectation. Other things being equal, for instance, the more supporters of a particular party an individual talks to, the more likely he or she is to switch vote to that party (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995;Pattie and Johnston 2000). Similarly, political conversations between citizens have been associated with attitude change (Pattie and Johnston 2001).…”

A Two-Stage Theory of Discussant Influence on Vote Choice in Multiparty Systems

“…With few exceptions this research thus failed to take the more complex conditions of party competition and choice in such systems into account. 2 E.g., Campus, Pasquino and Vaccari 2008;Huckfeldt, Johnson and Sprague 2004;Sprague 1991, 1995;Ikeda 2010;Johnston and Pattie 2006, 127-43;Knoke 1990;Levine 2005;Magalhães 2007;Pattie and Johnston 2000, 2001, 2002Richardson and Beck 2007;Schmitt-Beck 2000, 2004Sinclair 2012;Zuckerman, Dasovic and Fitzgerald 2007. 4 relationship between them is unclear. While many studies have adopted one or the other perspective as untested premise of their research 8 , attempts to identify which of them describes better the influence taking place in voters' social networks have been rare 9 , and none has thus far investigated conditions under which one or the other of the two mechanisms prevails.…”

The Spatial Context of Voter Behaviour: How Do Local and Regional Factors Impact Voter Decisions

“…Eulau, Rothenberg 1986;Burbank 1995Burbank , 1997Pattie, Johnston 2000]. Eulau a Rothenberg [1986] i Burbank [1997] ve svém testu vycházejí z přesvěd-čení, že jsou-li lokální interakce nositelem kontextového vlivu, mělo by lokální prostředí silněji ovlivňovat jedince, kteří na interakcích v lokalitě svého bydliš-tě participují intenzivněji než ostatní.…”