How Homophily and Heterophily Interact: Political Talk as Groundwork for a Multilevel System

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Democratic Political Culture

Abstract

Everyday political conversations take place behind closed doors where people talk with their confidants, far from the so-called public spaces. By ‘stretching out’ the social and taking relationships as the main unit of analysis, I show how such relationships can actually furnish the groundwork for broader institutions, like the political system. I decompose dimensions of homophily, and assess whether certain individual similarities facilitate or hold back informal political talk while accounting for network-level characteristics as well. I use the Chicago Area Study “important matters” name generator from 2010 to execute the research.
My approach applies relational sociological theory to hierarchical linear modeling. The results suggest that individuals are active contributors to the system of politics through their everyday conversations: they are doing deliberation in personal relations as well as in workplaces. Moreover, it is the relational characteristics that affect the emergence of political talk; the similarities and differences between people in a social relationship are what matter, not their individual attributes per se. Through the analysis of interaction effects, I show that political talk is more likely to emerge when spatial heterogeneity has a homophily base and when a relationship connecting individuals of different citizenship status has a homogeneous network base. This research broadens the way we must think of the public sphere, calls for theorizing about homophily and heterophily as multilevel concepts, and shifts the focus on how they interact.

Author

• Tunde Cserpes, University of Illinois-Chicago