Important Matters in Political Context

2004 General Social Survey reported significant increase in social isolation and decrease in ego network size. This paper argues that this may be due to the timing of the survey—during the highly polarized election period.

The difference in network size between partisan and nonpartisan voters is larger than other GSS surveys. It also finds that the core discussion network size decreases around the first presidential election, making the political matters as “important matters”.

Other potential explanations: - data issues: correcting it doesn’t remove the effect. - Social media: Facebook was not there yet. -> how about other social networks? Myspace, livejournal, etc. - less civic engagement and participation in community: it didn’t change significantly between 1985 and 2004.

“Important matters” name generator has been instrumented in many surveys and captures more or less the strong ties (see also Weak tie). The actual information that flows through the “important matters” ties can be trivial and dynamic, but it still signals important, close, and strong ties. The hypothesis is that this would have captured the salient topics at the time of the surveys and the saliency of politics affected it.

The attention is highly temporal, changing day by day, especially during the election cycle. The spatial context also matters because if a place is more polarized, people would simply keep talking with like-minded others.

So, the survey date is used as a level-2 unit in a random-intercept Poisson regression model to tease out the temporal effect. Difference in differences is used to tease out the effect of being a partisan, showing that nonpartisans “are less likely than partisans to talk about important or political matters, depending on political context”. Given Google trend attention data, they identified the first presidential debate as the treatment for the Regression discontinuity design using the date as the instrument.

For a couple of weeks in the middle of the field period, Americans really talked to fewer people about “important matters” because the first presidential debate and the entire presidential election period primed respondents to think that “important matters” were “political matters” and eschewed potentially conflicting conversations.