Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T11:58:19.130Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Keeping Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer? Information Networks in Legislative Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2012

Abstract

The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison (email: ringe@wisc.edu); Department of Public and International Affairs, George Mason University and Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, respectively. The authors wish to thank the European Union Center at the University of Wisconsin for its support. They are grateful for data collection efforts and research assistance from Peter Truby, Katie Renze, Ashleigh Baker and Christina Boyes. They also thank Stacy Bondanella and Jean-Dominic LeGarrec for translating the survey into French, and Jason Koepke for his technical advice and assistance. They are grateful to Simon Hix for providing the EP roll-call vote data used in the analysis, and to Giacomo Benedetto for sharing the burden of processing the data. Finally, they thank David Canon, Scott Gehlbach, Elisabeth Gerber, Jonathan Hurwitz, Scott Morgenstern, Laura Wills Otero, three anonymous reviewers and the Journal's editor Hugh Ward for valuable comments and suggestions. The authors regret that they cannot make replication data publicly available, given the sensitivity of their data about the personal connections between political actors. All respondents were assured complete anonymity, and the small sample of (actual and potential) respondents prevents the release of data including general attributes such as party affiliation and nationality instead of proper names. Two Supplementary Appendices containing additional information are available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000518.

References

1 Matthews, Donald R. and Stimson, James A., Yeas and Nays: Normal Decision-Making in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975)Google Scholar

John W. Kingdon, Congressmen's Voting Decisions, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981)Google Scholar

Ringe, Nils, Who Decides, and How? Preferences, Uncertainty, and Policy Choice in the European Parliament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar

2 Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar

Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Mathew D., Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar

Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Mathew D., Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Arnold, Douglas R., The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar

Hix, Simon, Noury, Abdul and Roland, Gerard, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar

Richard F. Fenno Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1978)Google Scholar

4 Schlesinger, Joseph A., Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1966)Google Scholar

Herrick, Rebekah and Moore, Michael K., ‘Political Ambition's Effect on Legislative Behavior: Schlesinger's Typology Reconsidered and Revisited’, The Journal of Politics, 55 (1993), 765776CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Victor, Jennifer Nicoll, ‘Legislating Versus Campaigning: the Legislative Behavior of Higher Office-Seekers’, American Politics Research, 39 (2011), 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Calvert, Randall L., ‘The Value of Biased Information: A Rational Choice Model of Political Advice’, The Journal of Politics, 47 (1985) 530555CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 European Parliament website, http://www.europarl.europa.eu (accessed 2 April 2007).

7 Kirkland, Justin, ‘The Relational Determinants of Legislative Outcomes: Strong and Weak Ties Between Legislators’, Journal of Politics, 73 (2011), 887898CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Koger, Gregory, ‘Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 28 (2003) 225246CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Fowler, James H., ‘Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks’, Political Analysis, 14 (2006), 456487CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Victor, Jennifer Nicoll and Ringe, Nils, ‘The Social Utility of Informal Institutions: Caucuses as Networks in the 110th U.S. House of Representatives’, American Politics Research, 37 (2009), 742766CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Porter, Mason, Mucha, Peter J., Newman, M.E.J. and Warmbrand, Casey M., ‘A Network Analysis of Committees in the U.S. House of Representatives’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120 (2005), 70577062CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Masket, Seth E., ‘Where You Sit is Where You Stand: The Impact of Seating Proximity on Legislative Cue-Taking’, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 3 (2008) 301311CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection, 1974Google Scholar

12 Poole and Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting, 1997Google Scholar

Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Ideology and Congress (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2007)Google Scholar

Krehbiel, Keith, Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Randall L. Calvert and Richard F. Fenno, Jr., ‘Strategy and Sophisticated Voting in the Senate’, The Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 349376CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Ferejohn, John, ‘Incumbent Performance and Electoral Control’, Public Choice, 50 (1986), 525CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jenkins, Jeffery A. and Munger, Michael C., ‘Investigating the Incidence of Killer Amendments in Congress’, Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 498517CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wilkerson, John D., ‘Killer Amendments in Congress’, American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Londregan, John, ‘Estimating Legislators' Preferred Points’, Political Analysis, 8 (1999), 3556CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Clinton, Joshua D., Jackman, Simon and Rivers, Doug, ‘The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data’, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), 355370CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Krehbiel, Keith, ‘Where's the Party?’ British Journal of Political Science, 23 (1993), 235266CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Krehbiel, Keith, ‘Paradoxes of Parties in Congress’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 24 (1999), 3164CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Sinclair, Barbara, ‘The 60-Vote Senate’, in Bruce I. Oppenheimer, ed., U.S. Senate Exceptionalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), pp. 241261Google Scholar

15 Matthews and Stimson, Yeas and Nays, 1975Google Scholar

Kingdon, Congressmen's Voting Decisions, 1981Google Scholar

Ringe, Who Decides, and How?, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Fowler, ‘Connecting the Congress’, 2006Google Scholar

Koger, ‘Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House’, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Young, James Sterling, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966)Google Scholar

18 Masket, ‘Where You Sit is Where You Stand’, 2008Google Scholar

19 Victor and Ringe, ‘The Social Utility of Informal Institutions’, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Carpenter, Daniel P., Esterling, Kevin M. and Lazer, David M. J., ‘Friends, Brokers, and Transitivity: Who Informs Whom in Washington Politics?’ The Journal of Politics, 66 (2004), 224246CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Koger, Gregory, Masket, Seth and Noel, Hans, ‘Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks’, British Journal of Political Science, 39 (2009), 633653CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Mooney, Christopher Z., ‘Information Sources in State Legislative Decision Making’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 16 (1991), 445455CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Austen-Smith, David, ‘Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision Making’, International Political Science Review, 13 (1992), 4558CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Kingdon, Congressmen's Voting Decisions, 1981Google Scholar

Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action, 1990Google Scholar

Krehbiel, Keith, Information and Legislative Organization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Raymond A. Bauer, Ithiel de Sola Pool and Lewis A. Dexter, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (New York: Atherton Press, 1963)Google Scholar

Milbrath, Lester, The Washington Lobbyists (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963)Google Scholar

Huckfeldt, Robert and Sprague, John, ‘Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information’, American Political Science Review 81 (1987), 11971216CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Hojnacki, Marie and Kimball, David C., ‘Organized Interests and the Decision of Whom to Lobby in Congress’, The American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 775790CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hojnacki, Marie and Kimball, David C., ‘The Who and How of Organizations’ Lobbying Strategies in Committee’, The Journal of Politics, 61 (1999), 9991024CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hojnacki, Marie and Kimball, David C., ‘PAC Contributions and Lobbying Contacts in Congressional Committees’, Political Research Quarterly, 54 (2001), 161180CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957)Google Scholar

25 Lazarsfeld, Paul, Berrelson, Bernard and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948)Google Scholar

Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Election (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar

Asch, Solomon E., ‘Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority’, Psychological Monographs, 7 (1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Mutz, Diana C. and Martin, Paul S., ‘Facilitating Communication across Lines of Political Difference: The Role of Mass Media’, The American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 97114CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Mutz, Diana C., ‘Cross-Cutting Social Networks: Testing Democratic Theory in Practice’, American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 111126CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Huckfeldt, Robert, Johnson, Paul E. and Sprague, John, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Huckfeldt and Sprague, ‘Networks in Context’, 1987, p. 1199Google Scholar

28 Mutz, Diana C., Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Huckfeldt, Robert, ‘Social Contexts, Social Networks, and Urban Neighborhoods: Environmental Constraints upon Friendship Choice’, American Journal of Sociology (November 1983), 651669CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Huckfeldt, Robert and Sprague, John, Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Festinger, Leon, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Matthews and James A. Stimson, Yeas and Nays, 1975Google Scholar

Mutz, Hearing the Other Side, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Fiorina, Morris P., ‘An Era of Divided Government’, in Bruce Cain and Gillian Peele, eds, Developments in American Politics (London: Macmillan, 1990Google Scholar

32 Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Congressmen in Committees (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Co., 1973)Google Scholar

33 Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Mathew D., ‘Bonding, Structure, and the Stability of Political Parties: Party Government in the House’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 19 (1994), 215231CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Schickler, Eric and Rich, Andrew, ‘Controlling the Floor: Parties as Procedural Coalitions in the House’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 13401375CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lupia, Arthur and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Democratic Dilemma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar

34 Calvert, ‘The Value of Biased Information: A Rational Choice Model of Political Advice’, 1985, pp. 545551Google Scholar

35 Note that a case in which a legislator seeks information from a source whose position is unknown is observationally equivalent to a situation in which the source of information is objective or neutral. This is because in both cases Legislator A can have no expectation of what her source's position ought to be and how it relates to her own predisposition. It is worth emphasizing, however, that a truly objective source should be a rare occurrence in the context of our discussion (if it exists at all) since our main focus is on contacts between legislators. We do not conceive of legislators as political actors who can be truly objective or neutral, because they seek to achieve distinct political objectives and they have a stake in the public policy they make. Moreover, even if a source were objectively neutral, the recipient of the information cannot be certain that she is, in fact, provided with unprejudiced information. As a result, the major categories that are meaningful in our theoretical context are legislators whose positions are either predictable or uncertain.

36 Betsy Sinclair, Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Seth E. Masket and Gregory Koger, ‘Agreement Scores, Ideal Points, and Legislative Polarization’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, 1–4 September, 2011.

37 Yordanova, Nikoleta, ‘Distributive, Informational and Partisan Perspectives: The Rationale behind Committee Assignment in the European Parliament’, European Union Politics, 10 (2009), 253280CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Hix, Simon, Kreppel, Amie and Noury, Abdul, ‘The Party System in the European Parliament: Collusive or Competitive?’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 41 (2003), 309331CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hix, Simon, Noury, Abdul and Roland, Gerard, ‘Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979–2001’, British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 209234CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jacques Thomassen, Abdul Noury and Erik Voeten, ‘Political Competition in the European Parliament,’ in Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, eds, European Integration and Political Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 141–164Google Scholar

40 Hix, Noury and Roland, ‘Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979–2001’, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Michael Shackleton, ‘Parliamentary Government or Division of Powers: Is the Destination Still Unknown?’ in Nicolas Jabko and Craig Parsons, eds, The State of the European Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar

42 Richard Corbett, Francis Jacobs and Michael Shackleton, The European Parliament, 7th edition (London: John Harper Publishing, 2007), p. 9Google Scholar

43 Ringe, Who Decides, and How?, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Kreppel, Amie, ‘Understanding the European Parliament from a Federalist Perspective: The Legislatures of the USA and EU Compared’, in Martin Schain and Anand Menon, eds, Comparative Federalism: The European Union and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar

45 Ringe, Who Decides, and How?, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Corbett, Jacobs and Shackleton, The European Parliament, 2007Google Scholar

47 DeGregorio, Christine, ‘Professionals in the U.S. Congress: Analysis of Working Styles’ Legislative Studies Quarterly, 13 (1988), 459476CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 DeGregorio, Christine, ‘Staff Utilization in the U.S. Congress: Committee Chairs and Senior Aides’, Polity, 28 (1995), 261275CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Hall, Richard L., ‘Participation and Purpose in Committee Decision-making’, American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 105128CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Salisbury, Robert and Shepsle, Kenneth, ‘Congressional Staff Turnover and the Ties-that-Bind’, American Political Science Review, 75 (1981), 381396CrossRefGoogle Scholar

DeGregorio, ‘Professionals in the U.S. Congress’, 1988Google Scholar

50 Whiteman, David, Communication in Congress: Members, Staff and the Search for Information (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995)Google Scholar

51 Romzek, Barbara S. and Utter, Jennifer A., ‘Congressional Legislative Staff: Political Professionals or Clerks?” American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 1251–1279CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 ‘MEPs’ Assistants: Parliament Wouldn't be the Same Without Them’, 30 March 2007, available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+IM-PRESS+20070209FCS02971+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (accessed 7 September 2012).

53 ‘MEPs’ Assistants: Parliament Wouldn't be the Same Without Them’, 30 March 2007.

54 Survey questions can be found in Appendix A. The survey was hosted by Surveymonkey.com.

55 English and French are the working languages of the EU. The great majority of legislative assistants, if not all, speak at least one of these languages. We also made the questionnaire available in German because more MEPs are native German speakers than any other language.

56 In fact, we tried collecting equivalent data in the US Congress and found not a single person who was willing to divulge this information.

57 Laumann, Edward O. and Knoke, David, The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar

Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., Nelson, Robert L. and Salisbury, Robert H., The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar

58 Simon Hix, The Political System of the European Union, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar

59 Ringe, Who Decides, and How?, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 We received one staffer response per office after sending a general request for a survey response to each MEP office. The sample of interview respondents shows that the staffers responsible for environmental issues were the ones who responded to our questionnaire, which gives us confidence that the network we identify is truly the EP ‘environmental policy’ network.

61 Frank, Ove, ‘Network Sampling and Model Fitting’, in Peter J. Carrington, John Scott and Stanley Wasserman, eds, Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 3156CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gile, Krista and Handcock, Mark S., ‘Model-based Assessment of the Impact of Missing Data on Inference for Networks’ (Seattle: University of Washington CSSS Working Paper 66, 2006)Google Scholar

Handcock, Mark S. and Gile, Krista, ‘Modeling Networks with Sampled or Missing Data’ (Seattle: University of Washington CSSS Working Paper 75, 2007)Google Scholar

62 Hix, Simon and Noury, Abdul, ‘Voting Patterns in the Sixth European Parliament’, Mimeo (London School of Economics/University of Brussels, 2008)Google Scholar

63 David Knoke and Song Yang, Social Network Analysis, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2008), p. 19Google Scholar

64 Three members, from Bulgaria and Romania, were excluded because they joined the EP in January 2007.

65 Interviews were conducted in June and July 2007.

66 This is ‘unbalanced’ in the sense that we will have had two opportunities to observe contacts for dyads consisting of two survey respondents, but only one chance to observe dyads with one respondent and one non-respondent. We suspect that the most careful way to handle this discrepancy would be to think of social contact as the latent variable of interest, which is then measured with error that depends on the opportunities to observe contact. We plan to explore this in a subsequent technical paper.

67 The dependent variable, percentage of votes in common, is of course itself an undirected relation.

68 Hix and Noury, ‘Voting Patterns in the Sixth European Parliament’, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 We are withholding further information about the party affiliation of these members, because to do otherwise would allow readers to identify the MEPs and we wish to protect the anonymity of our study participants.

70 Hanneman, Robert A. and Riddle, Mark, Introduction to Social Network Methods (Riverside: University of California, 2005)Google Scholar

Borgatti, Steve P., Netdraw Network Visualization (Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002)Google Scholar

71 Hix and Noury, ‘Voting Patterns in the Sixth European Parliament’, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 At the request of anonymous reviewers, we calculated alternative connectivity measures, such as maximum flow; however, we found our results to be sensitive to such specification changes. We are not altogether surprised about the sensitivity of the results, because we have a small sample size and have collected specialized and unique data. The only way to rectify this problem and increase the robustness of the findings is to collect further survey data on connectivity, which is of course impossible at this stage. We also find that as the EP becomes more professionalized over time, staffers are increasingly reluctant to reveal their social connections, thus emphasizing the great value of our data, even though it is imperfect.

73 Hanneman, Robert A. and Riddle, Mark, Introduction to Social Network Methods (Riverside: University of California, 2005)Google Scholar

74 To refrain from inadvertently disclosing the identities of individual MEPs or staffers, we do not indicate national identity in the figure.

75 Holland, Paul and Leinhardt, Samuel, ‘An Exponential Family of Probability Distributions for Directed Graphs’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 76 (1981), 3350CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wasserman, Stanley and Pattison, Philippa, ‘Logit Models and Logistic Regressions for Social Networks: I. An Introduction to Markov Graphs and p*’, Psychometrika, 61 (1996), 401425CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76 Gelman, Andrew and Hill, Jennifer, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar

77 Poole and Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting, 1997Google Scholar

78 There is no theoretical reason to suspect that comparable levels of seniority will predict the tendency to vote alike. However, since estimates of standard errors for coefficients on dyadic variables tend to suffer from attenuation bias, leading to a high incidence of Type I error, it may be comforting to find no apparent significance where none is expected.

79 Antoine Tremblay, ‘LMER Convenience Functions: A suite of functions to back-fit fixed effects and forward-fit random effects, as well as other miscellaneous functions’, R package version 1.6.3, 2011, available at http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=LMERConvenienceFunctions.

80 Tremblay, ‘LMER Convenience Functions’, 2011Google Scholar

R Development Core Team, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, 2011)Google Scholar

Tierney, Luke and Kadane, Joseph B., ‘Accurate Approximations for Posterior Moments and Marginal Densities’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 81 (1986), 8286CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81 Alternative specifications included a model with lagged votes as an independent variable and a model with joint membership in intergroups as an instrumental proxy. The data are sensitive to these specification changes; however, we find our current specification to be more theoretically consistent and valid than these alternatives. We also explored models with the reverse causality by estimating exponential random graph models with a dichotomous connectivity measure on the left-hand side. Such models, however, do not allow us to test our hypothesis about the conditional relationship between voting behaviour and social contact, based on ideology or anticipated agreement. We therefore find our current specification to be the best possible test of our theory.

Supplementary material: File

Ringe Supplementary Material

Appendix

Download Ringe Supplementary Material(File)
File 42.4 KB