Political Talk and Attitude Stasis

• In Event: Social Networks and Political Sorting

Abstract

In recent years, the study of social influence in political behavior has seen a resurgence. More specifically, research has shown that discussion of politics has important effects on participation and attitude formation. But researchers have only begun to examine the effects that discussion has on the two phenomena that have attracted perhaps the more attention than any others among scholars of American political behavior: polarization and issue sorting. It is possible that people who talk about politics surround themselves with l ike-minded others and become more entrenched in their attitudes. In this paper, I use pre- and post-election data from the 2020 American National Election Study to determine whether respondents who discuss politics more frequently tend to make up their minds earlier in the campaign, change their opinion less, and become more likely to "correctly" vote for the candidate whose issue positions match their own. Using multiple regression and logistic regression models, I find that political discussion is correlated with earlier vote decisions and attitudes that are more partisan and unchanging, though the results vary. This suggests that talking about politics hardens attitudes, but not overwhelmingly so.

Author

• Patrick Tate, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa