Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CONPOL (Contexts, networks and participation: The social logic of political engagement)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-03-01 do 2021-08-31
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. We know from earlier research that political participation, and therefore political power, is unequally distributed. 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.
The empirical core of the CONPOL project is unique Swedish population-wide 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.
Using this data we have completed a large number of studies showing that when and how social contexts such as the family environment, residing in specific local neighborhoods or belonging to certain peer groups influence one's inclination to be politically active.
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. We know from earlier research that political participation, and therefore political power, is unequally distributed. 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.
The empirical core of the CONPOL project is unique Swedish population-wide 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.
Using this data we have completed a large number of studies showing that when and how social contexts such as the family environment, residing in specific local neighborhoods or belonging to certain peer groups influence one's inclination to be politically active.
Our main objective in the first half of the project period was 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 finalized this work in 2018 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 onward and make the data available as part of the public registers.
During the second half of the project period our focus has been on finalizing the studies outlined in the proposal. These studies and the resulting research papers are related to the all six sub-projects outlined in the proposal: "Intergenerational transmission in political activity"; "Sibling order and political participation"; "The politics of mate choice"; "The importance of social contexts: neighborhoods and workplaces"; "Politically connected: patterns of network influence on political engagement"; and "Contagious turnout: a field experiment". So far 21 papers with direct relevance to the overall aims of the CONPOL projects have been published. All of these papers are published in highly ranked peer-review journals. Several of the studies have attracted media and general public interest. For example, several newspapers, radio shows and podcasts have discussed and reported the results from our studies on sibling-order effects.
The members of the research team are currently working on finalizing a number of additional papers directly connected to the overall aim of the project. These papers have been submitted for publication and several of them are currently under revise and resubmit.
During the second half of the project period our focus has been on finalizing the studies outlined in the proposal. These studies and the resulting research papers are related to the all six sub-projects outlined in the proposal: "Intergenerational transmission in political activity"; "Sibling order and political participation"; "The politics of mate choice"; "The importance of social contexts: neighborhoods and workplaces"; "Politically connected: patterns of network influence on political engagement"; and "Contagious turnout: a field experiment". So far 21 papers with direct relevance to the overall aims of the CONPOL projects have been published. All of these papers are published in highly ranked peer-review journals. Several of the studies have attracted media and general public interest. For example, several newspapers, radio shows and podcasts have discussed and reported the results from our studies on sibling-order effects.
The members of the research team are currently working on finalizing a number of additional papers directly connected to the overall aim of the project. These papers have been submitted for publication and several of them are currently under revise and resubmit.
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 was 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 studies based on Swedish register data combined with a more developed causal design take us a good bit of the way towards this ideal.
The results obtained 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.
The results obtained 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.