Moving the First Mover: Campaigns, Social Influence and Political Behaviour

社会影响力--与社会有联系的个人对彼此行为产生因果关系--被用来解释一系列政治现象：从全球革命浪潮到选举投票率。学者和实践者都认为，当精英们能够动员他们的支持者施加社会影响时，政治运动和竞选活动的影响可以通过社交网络放大。当个人将信息传递到自己的网络时，社会影响力可能会呈指数级传播。因此，社会影响为政治行为者的行动提供了广泛和突然地连锁的可能性。尽管关于社会影响和政治行为的文献很多，但大多数工作都是观察性的，因此难以令人信服地区分社会影响与同性恋选择和共同原因解释，即为什么与社会有联系的个人同时改变了他们的行为。最近，现场实验被用来证明直接竞选接触的影响会溢出到社交网络中。在这些实验中，随机向网络传递外源处理区分了影响和选择效应。然而，到目前为止，这些研究还没有探索是什么中介了竞选效果的溢出。这个项目将研究中介社会影响的行为。这些行为包括人际间的政治讨论、在线政治交流，以及通过草坪标志和海报公开展示政治背景。我将研究这些行为的动机是什么，它们是否会对个人的社会关系产生因果影响，以及政治竞选活动如何战略性地动员支持者中的这些行为，以启动社会影响。将社会影响力概念化为竞选活动可以从支持者那里动员起来的资源，我将开发一个竞选发起的社会影响的理论模型。除了关于竞选活动如何要求支持者施加社会影响力以及个人实施的不同类型行为的描述性研究外，我将使用与英国政治竞选活动合作的实地实验来实证验证我的模型。这个项目将有助于我们理解公众舆论和政治参与是如何受到社会制约的。了解个人如何相互影响的机制，以及政治行为者可以在多大程度上启动社会影响进程，有助于解释为什么政治和社会变革的大规模级联发生得如此突然。

Social influence - where socially-connected individuals exert a causal effect on each other's behaviour - has been used to explain a broad range of political phenomena: from global waves of revolutions to turnout in elections. Both academics and practitioners believe that the effects of political movements and campaigns can be amplified through social networks when elites can move their supporters to exert social influence. Social influence can spread exponentially when individuals pass on messages to their own networks. Thus, social influence provides the potential for the actions of political actors to cascade widely and suddenly. Despite the breadth of the literature on social influence and political behaviour, most of the work has been observational and has thus struggled to convincingly distinguish social influence from homophilic selection and common-cause explanations of why socially connected individuals change their behaviour at the same time. More recently, field experiments have been used to show that the effects of direct campaign contact spill over in social networks. The random delivery of exogenous treatments to networks in these experiments distinguishes influence from selection effects. However, these studies have so far stopped short of exploring what mediates the spillover of campaign effects.This project will examine the behaviours that mediate social influence. Such behaviours include interpersonal political discussion, online political communication, and the public display of political affiliations with lawn signs and posters. I will examine what motivates these behaviours, whether they causally influence individuals' social connections, and how political campaigns strategically mobilize these behaviours amongst their supporters to initiate social influence. Conceptualising social influence as a resource that campaigns can mobilize from their supporters, I will develop a theoretical model of campaign-initiated social influence.As well as descriptive research on how campaigns ask their supporters to exert social influence, and the different types of behaviours that individuals carry out, I will use field experiments in collaboration with political campaigns in the UK to empirically validate my model. This project will contribute to our understanding of how public opinion and political participation are socially conditioned. Understanding the mechanisms of how individuals influence each other, as well as the extent to which political actors can initiate processes of social influence, is useful for explaining why mass cascades of political and social change occur so suddenly.