Political Network Size and Its Antecedents and Consequences

The Structure of Communication Networks Matters: How Network Diversity, Centrality, and Context Influence Political Ambivalence, Participation, and Knowledge

“…By contrast, egonetwork diversity is likely to have less variability in the small, strongtie networks that dominate egocentric network studies because they tend to be relatively homogenous. Thus, our results shed further light on possible relationships that have been Downloaded by [New York University] at 20:29 08 June 2015 overlooked by research oversampling strong-tie networks when examining network effects on political outcomes (Eveland, Hutchens, & Morey, 2013).…”

Motivations for Political Discussion: Antecedents and Consequences on Civic Engagement

“…One unexpected finding in our study relates to how people's level of knowledge in time 1 negatively related to their level of political discussion in time 2. Most of current work has previously established a positive association between these two variables (see Eveland et al, 2011Eveland et al, , 2013Gil de Zúñiga & Valenzuela, 2011). In this study, political knowledge is introduced as a control to isolate its potential confounding effects as for how motivations for discussion, political discussion, and civic participation are related.…”

Uncovering the Structural Underpinnings of Political Discussion Networks: Evidence From an Exponential Random Graph Model

“…According to Barabási and Albert (), this global network feature emerges from the preferential attachment principle; since well‐connected nodes or actors could afford better chances of potential access to resources (such as new information) than those with only few connections, new nodes prefer making an association to already well‐connected nodes that already have large connections in the network. Eveland et al () further suggest that, by virtue of having large degree distribution, those network hubs are more likely to maintain a diverse set of contacts, and are more easily exposed to political discussions. Therefore, the degree distribution of political discussion networks will significantly explain the probability of ties being present in political discussion networks ( Hypothesis 7 ).…”

“…Over the decades since the Columbia School scholars' seminal study of voting behavior (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, ), communication scholarship has established a strong theoretical and empirical relationship between political discussions and their outcomes, such as political knowledge (Eveland & Hively, ; Kim, Wyatt, & Katz, ) or the quality of one's opinion (Cappella, Price, & Nir, ). Recent advances in political discussion studies have revealed that certain structural properties of discussion networks—such as exposure to disagreement (Mutz, ; Scheufele, Hardy, Brossard, Waismel‐Manor, & Nisbet, ), diversity of discussions (Eveland & Hively, ; Nir, ), network size (Eveland, Hutchens, & Morey, ), density (Eveland, Hutchens, & Morey, ), or network positions (Song & Eveland, in press)—are directly responsible for producing certain democratic outcomes, above and beyond the effect of simple political discussion frequency (Eveland & Hively, ; Song & Eveland, in press).…”