Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: The Social Roots of Political Decision-Making

个人根据周围的人做出决定--买什么、吃什么，甚至如何投票。理解这些决定的社会成分是混淆的现实，个人周围的人喜欢自己沿着种族，社会阶级，甚至党派路线。社交网络可以导致对他人观点的理解和宽容，也可以导致观点的进一步根深蒂固。因此，虽然正式和非正式社会群体是民主的必要组成部分，但它们也为政治分裂提供了机会。了解个人如何在其社会背景下做出政治决策的过程和影响，对于理解和参与当前的政治气候至关重要。这项研究揭示了新的社会解释的投票决定和政治活动以外的投票占个人选择到群体的原因，以及如何组，然后影响他们的政治决策。该理论认为，进入社会环境的选择决定了那里发生的影响。例如，政治团体中的个人更有可能受到该团体的影响，因为政治规范是明确的，遵守这些规范的压力很大。换句话说，社会影响的机制取决于选择过程。本研究采用混合研究方法，探讨个人政治态度与社交网络的关系。 该项目首先对具有不同政治目的的组织团体中的个人进行三波小组研究。在用纵向数据记录社会关系导致的政治信仰变化的同时，研究人员还采用实验分析来阐明影响过程的机制。具体而言，研究探讨了社会学习（信息），群体动力学（社会压力），以及网络本身的大小和结构是否是社会环境影响政治信仰的机制。研究人员记录了个体被选择进入群体之前、期间和之后的情况，以揭示政治倾向如何影响个体对社会环境的选择，以及这些环境如何影响他们的政治信仰。该项目通过使用克服社会影响研究常见局限性的研究设计，为社会影响，网络分析和政治决策的研究做出了理论和实证贡献。最近的学术界在试图理解影响力时忽略了选择过程，很少注意理解社会对政治的影响是如何发生的。通过保持选择进入社会群体的原因不变，研究阐明了个人通过使用新的横截面，纵向和实验数据在政治上影响他人的机制。总的来说，这些努力集中在整个影响力过程中：从选择进入影响力群体到在这些环境中发挥影响力的机会。

Individuals make decisions in relation to those around them -- what to buy, what to eat, and even how to vote. Understanding the social component of those decisions is confounded by the reality that individuals surround themselves with individuals like themselves along racial, social class, and even partisan lines. Social networks can either lead toward increased understanding and tolerance of others views or further entrenchment in views. Thus, while formal and informal social groups represent a necessary component of democracy, they also present opportunities for political division. Understanding the process and implications of how individuals make political decisions in relation to their social context is imperative toward understanding and engaging the current political climate. This research sheds new light on social explanations of the vote decision and political activity beyond voting by accounting for the reasons individuals select into groups and how the group then affects their political decisions. The theory is that selection into a social environment conditions the influence that occurs there. For example, individuals in political groups are more likely to be influenced by that group because political norms are clear and the pressure to comply with those norms is high. In other words, the mechanisms of social influence depend on the selection process. Once selection is accounted for, the influence of the group on the individual can be better ascertained.This study utilizes a mixed-method approach to illuminate the relationship between individual political attitudes and social networks. The project begins with a three-wave panel study of individuals in organizational groups with varying amounts of political purpose. While documenting the change in political beliefs as a result of social ties with longitudinal data, the researchers also employ experimental analysis to illuminate mechanisms of the influence process. Specifically, the research explores whether social learning (information), group dynamics (social pressure), and the size and structure of the network itself are mechanisms through which the social environment affects political beliefs. The researchers record individuals before, during, and after their selection into groups in order to shed light on how political predispositions influence an individuals' selections into social environments and how those environments then influence their political beliefs. This project makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of social influence, network analysis, and political decision-making by using a research design that overcomes common limitations of social influence studies. Recent scholarship ignores the selection process in their attempts to understand influence and little attention has been given to understanding exactly how social influence on politics occurs. By holding the reasons for selection into a social group constant, the research illuminates the mechanisms through which individuals influence others in politically consequential ways using novel cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data. Taken together, these efforts focus on the entire influence process: from the selection into influence groups to the opportunities for influence in those settings.