Innovating in election surveys: social network analysis to go beyond individual-level data

Large-scale surveys are the most common sources of data for political scientists who study political behavior. However, these surveys have often heavily focused on individuals and ignored their environment, i.e. the social and political networks of respondents. There are some exceptions to this, which imported network measurements from Social Network Analysis in national election survey. Based on this type of data, scholars emphasized how voting and election behavior is influenced by the peers that citizens talk politics with. This paper capitalizes on this perspective and first proposes to innovate in Belgian election survey by implementing one specific network battery of questions: name-generator of political discussants. Second, to support that it might help to find out new explanatory tracks, the second part exposed empirical results of a research that measured and analyzed the effect of political discussion networks (IV) on political participation (DV) in Belgium. The latter relied on an online panel survey of Belgian citizens (N=2,800) to generate data both on networks and participation. We show that the investigation of networks may definitely constitute a methodological innovation, but also potentially a theoretical one, by allowing to go beyond traditional socio-demographic and attitudinal explanations of political choices.