Replication Data for: All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks - a Spillover Experiment

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters’ most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the UK, combined with a detailed database of pre-treatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intra-household mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies, and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement.

本研究针对网络研究中常见的因果推断问题，聚焦选民人际影响最为关键的场景——家庭，推进了关于社交网络中政治分歧对选举参与影响的学术讨论。我们依托英国开展的随机溢出实验，结合预处理阶段政党偏好与公开投票率记录的详细数据库，识别了异质性与同质性党派家庭内部的社会影响效应。研究结果显示，相较于同质性党派家庭，异质性党派家庭在接受竞选宣传接触后，其家庭内部动员效应更为显著；而当宣传信息的党派倾向强度被外源性提升时，该效应会进一步增强，这表明其作用机制为观点讨论而非行为传染。本研究结论修正了此前具有影响力的观察性研究发现，并表明在亲密社交网络中，政治异质性与选举参与之间的负相关关系不太可能由政治分歧本身所导致。