CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Tóth, Gergő |
|---|---|
| Title | Social Interaction As Cues: A Low-Cost Tool For Changing Political Opinion |
| Summary | Social science literature has long investigated the relationship between political behavior and social networks, however, it is usually hard to excavate a true causal relationship between political views and social affiliations. The common feature of political science literature related to a social network is that they mostly focus on whether the individuals’ political views and their social networks co-evolve or not. According to the recent literature, social networks do not simply evolve but also stimulate our political behavior. Most of the literature finds that people seek individuals with similar political views to be friends with and individuals who often talk to each other tend to be more similar over time Although there is broad agreement on that while our social network is dynamically flourishing, it is also affecting our attitude, but the process of this impact is still not clear. This research aims to examine the channel between social affiliations to the changes of political behavior. The research uses network data collected from experiments to specify the social affiliation effects on the change of political views under a deliberation process. The results suggest that, on the one hand, political opinion significantly influences friendship network formation, which fosters social homophily. On the other hand, a significant spillover effect has found on the likelihood of political opinion change, where the spillover effect strongly depends on the peers’ network centrality. |
| Supervisor | Tóka, Gábor |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/toth_gergo.pdf |
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