Essays in American Political Behavior

Abstract

How does the social environment in which people are embedded impact their political behavior and attitudes? This dissertation provides substantive and methodological advances in answering this key question in political science research. Chapter 1 analyzes a get-out-the-vote field experiment involving more than 61 million individuals. The results show that the messages influenced political self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting behavior of millions of people. The effect of social information versus non-social information differed by characteristics of the treated individual such as age, education, relationship status, and the number of social contacts the individual has. These results suggest that while social information increases participation for overall, it is especially effective for subsets of the population. Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of one individual's turnout on that of her social contacts. Results indicate that when a friend votes an individual is about 7% more likely to vote. Chapter 3 develops a statistical model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using Facebook data about which users publicly support which political figures by 'liking' them on the site. Then, using this measure, I study the topography of ideology across a social network of more than 6 million people, and show that those individuals who are embedded in diverse ideological networks are less likely to turnout to vote than those in homogeneous social networks