Interpersonal Networks and Democratic Politics

Some of the most fundamental concerns about democratic politics involve information – who has access to it, how do they get it, and of what quality and type is it? The answer to each of these questions invariably involves other people, and it is for this reason that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of social networks. Fully understanding democratic politics requires us to wrestle with the choices and constraints that individuals face as they navigate the political world and acquire political information. By “choice ” we are referring to the decisions that individuals make about what environments to inhabit – what neighborhood to live in, what church to join, and what people to befriend. Individuals frequently make those choices for reasons unrelated to politics and then live within the “constraints, ” or range of available information defined by those choices. The distribution of politics in socially-defined contexts – geographical or otherwise – then limits subsequent political decisions; for example, the neighborhood may be politically homogenous but dissimilar to the individual, and the trusted friend might be ignorant of politics. In this essay, we consider the choices individuals make and the constraints that follow as we discuss what social network research has taught us about 1) how citizens form reasoned opinion