(University of Cambridge, 2004)
Political debates are lively when held between candidates, but political debate is also faring quite well in American social circles, according to Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions Within Communication Networks by John Sprague, Ph.D., the Sidney W. Souers Professor Emeritus of Government in the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences.
His co-authors are Robert Huckfeldt, distinguished professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, and Paul E. Johnson, professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
More than 3,500 people were interviewed in St. Louis and Indianapolis before and after the 1996 presidential election, furnishing data for analysis. The authors also used data drawn from the 2000 National Election Study.
The findings were surprising in that they contrasted what traditional theory had taught — mainly, that people make friends with those who agree with their political views.
“We had pursued the line of investigation reported in the book for at least 20 years,” Sprague said. “The specific articles that form the fabric date from the last five years. The impetus, for me, perhaps not for my colleagues, is to emphasize the clear truth that political behavior is socially embedded, and attempts to explain mass behavior (public opinion, voting) as arising solely from the isolated beliefs of isolated individuals is simply wrong-headed.
“The critical result in the book is this: If you view the influence of political information as mediated in evaluation by the distribution of political opinion among a respondent’s political discussants, it is possible to produce a model world in which subsets of small groups with nonhomogeneous beliefs are maintained dynamically. This is new in the literature.”
One finding is that most people have a cluster of people with whom they share similar political views.
But when hearing a new view, that opposing view is discussed among the cluster of friends before deciding whether to accept or discount the view.
“The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement, even within the networks and contexts that comprise the micro-environments of democratic citizens,” the book jacket states. “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.”
— Andy Clendennen