Ideological Systems and Individuals: Effects of Group level Ideological Network Attributes on Changing One’s Mind

• In Event: Analytic and Computational Approaches in Social Psychology (Co-sponsored by Mathematical Sociology Section)

Abstract

What people think and how beliefs change is of central importance to sociology, yet whether ideological structure beyond mere group membership shapes opinion change remains an open question. I build on Converse's classical theory of ideological constraint and argue that constraint is a consensus building process. As individuals interact with ideologically similar people, they index toward the popular consensus positions they encounter. The more constrained a belief, the stronger this process. To evaluate this argument, I use the 2006-2014 General Social Survey panels to examine how individuals change over time through the analytic lens of social network analysis. I use inductive network community detection to identify groups of people who share many beliefs, grouping individuals based on the broad set beliefs they hold rather than their personal identification. I then construct belief networks within each community and year to capture group level ideological constraint, and calculate degree centrality, core periphery structure, and modular density for each survey item. I then use mixed effect models to assess individual change trajectories across 18 policy areas to determine whether these network measures predict change toward or away from consensus positions. I find that only degree centrality is associated with movement toward community consensus. These effects appear in 7 policy areas undergoing substantial personal change during the studied period, concentrated in morally grounded issues such as LGBT rights, sexuality, and suicide. However, stable policy areas which are not undergoing change, such as government infrastructure funding, are unaffected. Effects are both statistically and substantively significant. These results contribute to contemporary debates on the effects of ideology and stability of beliefs, and suggest that ideological structure, net of self identification, can influence how beliefs change but not necessarily when beliefs change.

Author

• William Holtkamp, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill