Examining Mass Attitudes through Social, Physical, and Psychological Distance

• In Event: Formation of Mass Attitudes

Abstract

In the wake of The American Voter, most work examining individual political attitudes and participation emphasized citizen characteristics (e.g., education, wealth, race, religion) and psychological dispositions. These explanations have proven useful across many elections and settings, though a growing literature has successfully reignited scholarly attention in the roles played by factors external to the individual. This research on social influence has emphasized the potential for friends and family to shape public opinion and civic engagement, but has actually overlooked the vast majority of citizens' social interactions. In this paper, we seek to understand how these broader sets of relationships affect the mass public, and more specifically, the ways that physical and social distance intertwine and diverge when it comes to political behavior in the United States.

Research on interpersonal interaction has tended to focus on only a few close friends, family, and acquaintances of individuals. Most of this work relies on social network data gathered with a ``name-generator'' battery, which asks respondents to identify 3-5 of their closest relationships, and to report on certain aspects of these named relationships. These time-intensive batteries provide useful information, though they rarely ask for more than five names to avoid mid-survey attrition. This emphasis on only a few associates limits the study of social influence since many members of the mass public maintain from 70 to 150 face-to-face friendships, and interact with even more causal acquaintances and service workers. Without measuring these relationships, we cannot examine their influence.

We move beyond the small group of social connections that is typically assessed by adding a new aggregate relational data (``ARD'') battery to four modules of the 2018 CCES. The batteries asked respondents to identify the number of individuals they know based on a variety of attributes (including the number who voted for Trump in 2016, voted for Clinton in 2016, own a gun, were born outside the United States, and so on). Data from these types of batteries have received little attention from political scientists, but have been used by sociologists and economists because they not only provide measures of an individual's social proximity to various social groups, but also the social proximity of these groups to one another (see McCormick et al., 2013, Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice). For instance, our data allow us to determine how socially-proximate each respondent is to gun owners, but also how socially-proximate gun owners are to Trump voters.

We use these data to address several important questions about political attitudes, leveraging a large number of respondents (pooling modules) and natural variation across the United States in the social proximity between groups. First, to what extent does social distance from different groups predict perceptions of the composition of these groups? Second, building on work by Enos (2017) and others linking physical space/geography to inter-group dynamics, how does this social distance influence expressions of tolerance? We suspect that because social networks vary from context to context, that they may help to explain why the effect of physical distance between groups varies across contexts---that is, we evaluate the extent to which social networks condition the effects of physical distance when it comes to political behavior.

Authors

• Anand Edward Sokhey, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Matthew Pietryka, Florida State University

• John Barry Ryan, Stony Brook University

• Yanna Krupnikov, Stony Brook University