Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CONPOL (Contexts, networks and participation: The social logic of political engagement)

Teaser

The statement that individuals’ immediate social circumstances influence how they think and act in the political sphere is a truism. However, both theoretical and empirical considerations have often prevented political scientists from incorporating this logic into analyses...

Summary

The statement that individuals’ immediate social circumstances influence how they think and act in the political sphere is a truism. However, both theoretical and empirical considerations have often prevented political scientists from incorporating this logic into analyses of political behavior. In the CONPOL project we argue that it is necessary to return to the idea that politics follows a social logic in order to push the theoretical and empirical boundaries in explaining political behavior. That is, people do not act as isolated individuals when confronting complex political tasks such as deciding whether to vote and which party or candidate to vote for. Instead politics should be seen as a social experience in which individuals arrive at their decisions within particular social settings: the family, the peer group, the workplace, the neighborhood. In what way do parents and other family members influence an individual’s political choices? What is the role of workmates and neighbors when individuals arrive at political decisions? Do friends and friends’ friends affect how you think and act in the political sphere?

The question of the factors that explain differences in political activity is fundamental for several reasons. The first is that politics and political activity is something that in a deeper sense is a characteristic of us as a species. This means that a deeper understanding of how we think and act in political contexts is an important part of our understanding of ourselves. A second reason why it is important to be better able to explain political attitudes and action is of a more normative nature. It is often asserted that the essence of politics, and therefore also the essence of the study of politics, is power and power relationships. This applies to the very highest degree to the subject that lies at the heart of this project: political participation. The idea behind the fundamental democratic right “one person, one vote” is that every citizen’s political preferences should carry equal weight when we take joint decisions. But at the same time we know from earlier research that political participation, and therefore political power, is unequally distributed. Some people vote more often and are also more involved in other political contexts and therefore gain a greater hearing for their wishes. From this point of view it is of course important to understand what explains why some citizens are more politically active than others. A better understanding of the reasons for political participation is a precondition for creating a more equal society.

To answer such questions the standard approach to gather empirical evidence on political behavior based on national sample surveys needs to be complemented by the use of population wide register data. The empirical core of the CONPOL project is unique Swedish register data. Via the population registers provided by Statistics Sweden it is possible to identify several relevant social settings such as parent-child relations and the location of individuals within workplaces and neighborhoods. The registers also allow us to identify certain network links between individuals. Furthermore, Statistics Sweden holds information on several variables measuring important political traits. A major aim for CONPOL is to complement this information by scanning in and digitizing election rolls with individual-level information on turnout across several elections.

Work performed

\"The project formally started in September 2016. At this point I hired a research assistant that started working on data collection, above all preparation work for scanning in and digitizing election rolls from the national elections in 1970 and 1994 and the EU referendum in 1994. Spring 2017 I hired three postdocs on two-year terms. One of the postdocs left the project after being offered a tenure track at a US university. However, she is still affiliated to the project and involved in several of the subprojects. Moreover, one of the other postdocs left for half a year of parental leave in the fall of 2017 and the third postdoc received half-time funding for a project of his own as from January 2018. For this reason I hired three more postdocs during 2018 (2 of them on a two-year basis and one of them on a one-year basis). During 2018 I also hired several research assistants on a short-term basis in order to finalize the data-collection.

Our main objectives so far have been to collect data and initialize many of the studies outlined in the proposal. As for data collection a central part of the project is to digitize individual-level turnout information for the whole Swedish population from a number of election between 1970 and 2010. We have recently finalized this work and handed over all data to Statistics Sweden. All of the data will be made publicly available as part of the Statistic Sweden\'s official registers at the end of the project period. Moreover, Statistic Sweden has shown a lot of interest in our work and has, after discussions with the project team, decided to digitize the election rolls in elections from 2018 and onwards and make the data available as part of the public registers.

Turning instead to the main results members of the project team have so far published three papers with direct relevance to the overall aims of the CONPOL projects. All of these papers are published in highly ranked peer-review journals. All papers concern the role of family, especially the intergenerational parent-child link, in explaining political participation (voting in elections and running for political office) among adults.

Currently members of the project team are working, in different constellations, on a dozen of papers directly connected to the overall aim of the project. These papers are related to the following four out of six subprojects outlined in the proposal: \"\"Intergenerational transmission in political activity\"\"; \"\"Sibling order and political participation\"\"; \"\"The importance of social contexts: neighborhoods and workplaces\"\"; and \"\"Politically connected: patterns of network influence on political engagement\"\". Several of these papers have already been submitted for publication and one of the is currently under revise and resubmit. We plan to submit the remainder of the papers during the spring or early fall.

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Final results

A fundamental idea running through the CONPOL project is that an expanded theoretical perspective on explanations of political participation requires new thinking about data and design. Much earlier individual-centred research into political participation is based on national surveys of randomly selected individuals. Such a design has evident weaknesses, however, when answering questions of how decisions on political participation are affected by the social context and the social relations surrounding different individuals. To obviate this problem researchers who have been interested in contextual effects and network effects have instead carried out focused studies of more locally restrictive areas. The problem with this design, however, is that there is little possibility of generalizing the results outside the given local context. Ideally we would naturally like to have access to data that make it possible to examine how both individual factors and also context and network factors are related to political participation. To improve the opportunity for making generalizations such data needs to be representative and not confined to a specific local context. We argue that our proposed studies based on Swedish register data combined with a more developed causal design may take us a good bit of the way towards this ideal.

The results obtained so far in our studies corroborate these expectations. In several of our studies we have been able to conduct very precise tests of long-standing but hitherto untested hypotheses about how political participation is formed in different social contexts. For example, our studies on the family context and political participation show that different relations within the family as adolescents - parent-child, sibling-sibling - influence participation patterns as adults. Moreover, we can separate these social effects from a host of possible genetic confounders and also pinpoint under which circumstances the family context matters more or less. Likewise, in several of our studies we have been able for the first time to provide evidence of credible causal effects of residing in specific local neighborhoods or belonging to certain peer groups on one\'s inclination to be politically active.

We expect to continue and expand this line of research during the remainder of the project period. Above all, we have just finalized the collection of voter turnout data for several elections stretching over several decades. This will enable us to conduct further detailed tests of the social logic of political engagement.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.conpol.org.