The Impact of Political Discussion Networks on Civic and Political Engagement
Chapter 6 examines the association among our network characteristics - partisan homogeneity, discussion frequency, and network size - and, civic engagement, self-reported political engagement, and validated voter turnout across our various social groups. Of course, we cannot causally distinguish between selection and social influence with our data. However, we uncover important associations nonetheless. We find that regardless of social position, across all groups, those who discuss politics more frequently are more politically engaged, but network size and partisan homogeneity are not uniformly associated with engagement. With regards to validated turnout, we observe that network size and discussion frequency are positively associated with voting for U.S.-born respondents, but none of the network characteristics are associated with voting among our foreign-born respondents.