Diffusing Political Concerns: How Unemployment Information Passed between Social Ties Influences Danish Voters

James E. Alt, Amalie Jensen, Horacio Larreguy, David Lassen and John Marshall
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James E. Alt: Harvard University
Amalie Jensen: ITU - IT University of Copenhagen
John Marshall: Columbia University [New York]

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Abstract: While social pressure is widely believed to influence voters, evidence that information passed between social ties affects beliefs, policy preferences, and voting behavior is limited. We investigate whether information about unemployment shocks diffuses through networks of strong and mostly weak social ties and influences voters in Denmark. We link surveys with population-level administrative data that log unemployment shocks afflicting respondents' familial, vocational, and educational networks. Our results show that the share of second-degree social ties—individuals that voters learn about indirectly—that became unemployed within the last year increases a voter's perception of national unemployment, self-assessed risk of becoming unemployed, support for unemployment insurance, and voting for left-wing political parties. Voters' beliefs about national aggregates respond to all shocks similarly, whereas subjective perceptions and preferences respond primarily to unemployment shocks afflicting second-degree ties in similar vocations. This suggests that information diffusion through social ties principally affects political preferences via egotropic—rather than sociotropic—motives.

Keywords: Beliefs; Information; Social networks; Unemployment; Voting behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
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Published in Journal of Politics, 2022, 84 (1), pp.383-404. ⟨10.1086/714925⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03566206

DOI: 10.1086/714925

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