Bound by Borders: Voter Mobilization through Social Networks

Gary W. Cox, Jon Fiva and Max-Emil M. King

No 10718, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: A vast and growing quantitative literature considers how social networks shape political mobilization but the degree to which turnout decisions are strategic remains ambiguous. Unlike previous studies, we establish personal links between voters and candidates and exploit discontinuous incentives to mobilize across district boundaries to estimate causal effects. Considering three types of network—families, co-workers, and immigrant communities—we show that a group member’s candidacy acts as a mobilizational impulse that propagates through the group’s network. In family networks, some of this impulse is non-strategic, surviving past district boundaries. However, the bulk of family mobilization is bound by the candidate’s district boundary, as is the entirety of the mobilizational effects in the other networks.

Keywords: political participation; social networks; electoral geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D72 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-net, nep-pol, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10718.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bound by Borders: Voter Mobilization Through Social Networks (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10718

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().