Social Pressure for Political Engagement

In this report, I seek to further our understanding about the consequences of ideological homogeneity in social networks in political behavior. I explore how the homogeneity in party identification in the context of local communities and marriages impacts the individual’s political behavior, as signaled by turnout and party margins in elections. Do politically homogenous marriages and local communities encourage political participation of their members? I hypothesize that homogeneity of party identification in local communities and marriages increases political participation. In the case of a mostly homogenous local community, I hypothesize that discussions between extremely partisan and less partisan community members will lead to the polarization of the latter. Thus, I expect that politically homogenous local communities will show a high level of homogeneity (i.e., there should not exist communities with moderate homogeneity). I draw on county-level election results from the 2016 Presidential Election, county-level turnout statistics from the 2020 Presidential Election, and voter registration records to test these hypotheses. I also investigate the effect of polarization in the context of local communities using county-level election results from the 2020 Presidential Election.

Results offer support for the hypothesis that moderately polarized community members can become polarized by strong partisans. The analysis of the relationship between political homogeneity and political participation did not generate support for the hypothesis that local homogeneous social networks increase the strength of an individuals’ party identification. Finally, I found that the homogeneity in married couples is correlated with the political participation of spouses. Ultimately, the results of this research project are limited in scope and will not be able to prove causality because of the vastness of confounding factors determining political behavior. Nonetheless, this endeavor constitutes a first step in understanding whether the degree of political homogeneity in local communities can be used as a tool to explain the vast difference in political behavior between members of different local communities.