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Citizens, Politics and Social Communication
Democratic politics is a collective enterprise, not simply because individual votes are counted to determine winners, but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens argue with one another and they generally arrive at political decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation. This book is dedicated to investigating the political implications of interdependent citizens within the context of the 1984 presidential campaign as it was experienced in the metropolitan area of South Bend, Indiana. Hence this is a community study in the fullest sense of the term. National politics is experienced locally through a series of filters unique to a particular setting and its consequences for the exercise of democratic citizenship.
Political Disagreement
Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.
Experts, Activists, and Interdependent Citizens
Machine generated contents note: 1. Experts, activists, and self-educating electorates T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 2. The imperatives of interdependence T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 3. Experts, activists, and the social communication of political expertise T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Jeanette Mendez, Tracy Osborn and John Barry Ryan; 4. Unanimity, discord, and opportunities for opinion leadership T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Jeanette Mendez and John Barry Ryan; 5. Informational asymmetries among voters T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 6. Expertise and bias in political communication networks T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Alexander K. Mayer a...
The Social Citizen
Human beings are social animals. Yet despite vast amounts of research into political decision making, very little attention has been devoted to its social dimensions. In political science, social relationships are generally thought of as mere sources of information, rather than active influences on one’s political decisions. Drawing upon data from settings as diverse as South Los Angeles and Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, Betsy Sinclair shows that social networks do not merely inform citizen’s behavior, they can—and do—have the power to change it. From the decision to donate money to a campaign or vote for a particular candidate to declaring oneself a Democrat or Republican, basic ...
Real Democracy
Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data abou...
The Political Influence of Churches
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Formal Theories of Politics
Formal Theories of Politics demonstrates the role of formal mathematical models in political science, and aims to convey a sense of the questions and methods which govern the political science research agenda. While there is still much interest in empirical patterns of voting behaviour and public opinion data, there has been substantial growth in emphasis on mathematical theory as a technique for the derivation of testable hypotheses. Topics discussed include: optimal candidate strategies and equilibria in competitive elections; voting agendas and parliamentary procedure in the multidimensional events; revolution, repression and inequality as outputs of dynamics systems. The mathematical techniques are widely varied, including game theory, functional analysis, differential equations, expert systems, stochastic processes and statistical models.
Working With Archival Data
The number of longitudinal data archives is growing almost daily, yet no resource exists to help understand the relationship between research questions and archival data--until now. Drawing on a single project, the Lewis Terman Study at Stanford University, the authors illustrate how to use the model-fitting process to select and fit the right data set to a particular research problem. Employing a step-by-step approach, this handy volume covers the measurement of historical influences, the adaptation of existing coding schemes to temporal patterns that are characteristic of life records, and the recasting of archival materials to illuminate contemporary questions that the data were not designed to answer.
Political Behavior and the Local Context
The study of the effects of context--defined here as a geographically bounded social unit--on individuals is a new and rapidly developing field. This unique volume reviews this development both quantitatively and qualitatively, examines how and why individual political behavior can be influenced by various contextual characteristics of the locality in which the individual resides, and proposes a conceptual framework to guide future research. A separate chapter is devoted to exploring methodological problems unique to this field of study. This is the first study to integrate and synthesize the diverse existing research and to provide an overall approach to the field. While the authors' conclu...
