Social Networks and Political Life: Attitudes, Behavior, and Cleavages

Political attitudes and behavior are routinely explained as individual preferences, ideological positions, or direct expressions of class, education, status, or group identity. This session begins from a different premise: people are embedded in networks of interpersonal ties that channel exposure, social influence, normative pressure, and closure, shaping how they perceive, evaluate, and act in political life.

We invite contributions that take network structure seriously as an explanatory object. We are interested in how mechanisms such as homophily, transitivity, preferential attachment, structural equivalence, the focused organization of ties (Feld), and small-world connectivity generate, sustain, or transform political attitudes and behavior, including far-right voting, discriminatory attitudes, inequality beliefs, affective polarization, social trust, and prosociality. Equally, we welcome work that follows these micro-level processes to their aggregate consequences: political cleavages, social segregation, and the balance between cross-cutting and reinforcing affiliations.

We welcome empirical, methodological, and theoretical work using quantitative, qualitative, comparative, experimental, or mixed-method designs, especially studies that measure or reconstruct social ties directly through egocentric, whole-network, or aggregate relational data, and comparative work beyond familiar Western cases.

We encourage papers bridging network analysis and broader traditions in sociology and social psychology: intersecting social circles and cross-cutting ties (Simmel, Blau), social capital and closure (Coleman, Bourdieu), identity and control in concrete social relations (White), intergroup contact and prejudice reduction (Allport, Pettigrew), and social identity and group boundaries (Tajfel, Turner).

By convening scholars working across these themes, the session seeks to consolidate an emerging agenda on how everyday social ties shape political life.