TY - JOUR
T1 - Close Relationships in Close Elections
AU - Lee, Byungkyu
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank Peter Bearman, Delia Baldassarri, Philipp Brandt, Koji Chavez, Christina Ciocca Eller, Dalton Conley, Hyeyoung Kwon, Kinga Makovi, Barum Park, Adam Reich, Michael Schultz, David Stark, and Nicol Valdez for their helpful feedback. The earlier version of this paper was presented at Summer Conference on Economy and Society at Ringberg in Germany in 2017, at the workshop at Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University in 2018 and the 2019 Annual Meeting of American Sociological Association. I use data collected by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, NSF Grant 0818839, Jeremy Freese and James Druckman, Principal Investigators. Financial support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University is gratefully acknowledged. Replication materials are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/bk.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
PY - 2021/9/1
Y1 - 2021/9/1
N2 - Close elections are rare, but most Americans have experienced a close election at least once in their lifetime. How does intense politicization in close elections affect our close relationships? Using four national egocentric network surveys during the 1992, 2000, 2008, and 2016 election cycles, I find that close elections are associated with a modest decrease in network isolation in Americans' political discussion networks. While Americans are more politically engaged in close elections, they also are less likely to be exposed to political dissent and more likely to deactivate their kinship ties to discuss politics. I further investigate a potential mechanism, the extent of political advertising, and show that cross-cutting exposure is more likely to disappear in states with more political ads air. To examine the behavioral consequence of close elections within American families, I revisit large-scale cell phone location data during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2016. I find that Americans are less likely to travel following close elections, and that families comprised of members with strong, opposing political views are more likely to shorten their Thanksgiving dinner. These results illuminate a process in which politicization may "close off"strong-tied relationships in the aftermath of close elections.
AB - Close elections are rare, but most Americans have experienced a close election at least once in their lifetime. How does intense politicization in close elections affect our close relationships? Using four national egocentric network surveys during the 1992, 2000, 2008, and 2016 election cycles, I find that close elections are associated with a modest decrease in network isolation in Americans' political discussion networks. While Americans are more politically engaged in close elections, they also are less likely to be exposed to political dissent and more likely to deactivate their kinship ties to discuss politics. I further investigate a potential mechanism, the extent of political advertising, and show that cross-cutting exposure is more likely to disappear in states with more political ads air. To examine the behavioral consequence of close elections within American families, I revisit large-scale cell phone location data during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2016. I find that Americans are less likely to travel following close elections, and that families comprised of members with strong, opposing political views are more likely to shorten their Thanksgiving dinner. These results illuminate a process in which politicization may "close off"strong-tied relationships in the aftermath of close elections.
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U2 - 10.1093/sf/soaa101
DO - 10.1093/sf/soaa101
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113747477
SN - 0037-7732
VL - 100
SP - 400
EP - 425
JO - Social Forces
JF - Social Forces
IS - 1
ER -