Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

This paper reports on the development of social network analysis, tracing its origins in classical sociology and its more recent formulation in social scientific and mathematical work. It is argued...

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Social Network Analysis

This book introduces the non-specialist reader to the principal ideas, nature and purpose of social network analysis. Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals achieve their goals. Social network theory maps these relationships between individual actors. Though relatively new on the scene it has become hugely influential across the social sciences. Assuming no prior knowledge of quantitative sociology, this book presents the key ideas in context through examples and illustrations. Using a structured approach to understanding work in this area, John Scott signposts further reading and online sources so readers can develop their knowledge and skills to become practitioners of this research method. A series of Frequently Asked Questions takes the reader through the main objections raised against social network analysis and answers the various queries that will come up once the reader has worked their way through the book.

What is social network analysis

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

Acknowledgments Part I. Democratic Politics and Social Communication: 1. The multiple levels of democratic politics 2. A research strategy for studying electoral politics Part II. Electoral Dynamics and Social Communication: 3. The social dynamics of political preference 4. Durability, volatility and social influence 5. Social dynamics in an election campaign Part III. Networks, Political Discussants, and Social Communication: 6. Political discussion in an election campaign 7. Networks in context: The social flow of political information 8. Choice, social structure, and the informational coercion of minorities 9. Discussant effects on vote choice: Intimacy, structure, and interdependence 10. Gender effects on political discussion: The political networks of men and women Part IV. The Organizational Locus of Social Communication: 11. One-party politics and the voter revisited: strategic and behavioral bases of partisanship 12. Political parties and electoral mobilization: political structure, social structure, and the party canvass 13. Alternative contexts of political preference 14. Political consequences of interdependent citizens Bibliography Index.

Citizens, Politics and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign

Social Capital is created through the patterns of interdependence andsocial interaction that occur within a population, and we attempt to understand the participatory consequences of these patterns relative to the effects of human capital and organizational involvement. The production of social capital in personal networks was examined with the use of social network and participation data from the 1992 American study of the Cross National Election Project. The results suggest that politically relevant social capital (that is, social capital that facilitates political engagement) is generated in personal networks, that it is a by-product of the social interactions with a citizen's discussants, and that increasing levels of politically relevant social capital enhance the likelihood that a citizen will be engaged in politics. Further, the production of politically relevant social capital is a function of the political expertise within an individual's network of relations, the frequency of political interaction within the network, and the size or extensiveness of the network. These results are sustained even while taking account of a person's individual characteristics and organizational involvement. Hence, the consequences of social relations within networks are not readily explained away on the basis of either human capital effects or the effects of organizational engagement.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3792178.pdf

Social Capital, Social Networks, and Political Participation

We examine the effects of individual political preferences and the distribution of such preferences on the social transmission of political information. Our data base combines a 1984 election survey of citizens in South Bend, Indiana with a subsequent survey of people with whom these citizens discuss politics. Several findings emerge from the effort. First, individuals do purposefully construct informational networks corresponding to their own political preferences, and they also selectively misperceive socially supplied political information. More important, both of these individual-level processes are shown to be conditioned by constraints imposed due to the distribution of political preferences in the social context. Thus, individual control over socially supplied political information is partial and incomplete. Finally, these information-transmitting processes interact with the social context in a manner that favors partisan majorities while undermining political minorities.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1962585.pdf

Networks in context: the social flow of political information

Individuals with similar political orientations may find themselves in dissimilar social and political surroundings, with important consequences for the flow of political information among citizens. Analyses of data from the post-election survey of the 2000 National Election Study show that some individuals reside within extensive networks of political discussion and communication, whereas others are politically isolated. With respect to presidential candidate preference in 2000, some citizens in networks were surrounded by discussants who agreed with their preference, others by discussants who held ambiguous and undetermined preferences, and still others by discussants who held politically divergent preferences. These preference distributions have various implications for the formation of political opinion and for levels of political engagement and turnout.

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.

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Robert Huckfeldt

Papers

Citizens, Politics and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign

Social Capital, Social Networks, and Political Participation

Networks in context: the social flow of political information

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks