Content area
Full text
Voting choices are a product of both personal attitudes and social contexts, of a personal and a social calculus. Research has illuminated the personal calculus of voting, but the social calculus has received little attention since the 1940s. This study expands our understanding of the social influences on individual choice by examining the relationship of partisan biases in media, organizational, and interpersonal intermediaries to the voting choices of Americans. Its results show that the traditional sources of social influence still dominate: Interpersonal discussion outweighs the media in affecting the vote. Media effects appear to be the product of newspaper editorial pages rather than television or newspaper reporting, which contain so little perceptible bias that they often are misperceived as hostile. Parties and secondary organizations also are influential, but only for less interested voters-who are more affected by social contexts in general. Overall, this study demonstrates that democratic citizens are embedded in social contexts that join with personal traits in shaping their voting decisions.
How are political choices shaped by a decision maker's immediate social and informational context? This question has interested scholars of both elite and citizen decision making across many different political systems. The recognition that these contexts can vary to a considerable degree and that the cost of acquiring political information is high has created an appreciation for how much political choices are circumscribed by the social and informational contexts within which individuals reside.
These considerations apply to the occasional political decisions made by citizens just as much as they apply to the routine decisions of their leaders. At any given time, in any given place, citizens confront specific sources of political information: their own personal networks of social interaction and political communication, particular newspapers, a range of electronic media outlets, and a variety of organized efforts at political persuasion. Political choice takes on meaning within these contexts. Thus, theories of democracy and democratic citizenship increasingly focus on the sources and consequences of political information. These contexts are especially important because alternative sources of information typically vary in the extent to which they carry distinctive political biases. By relying on one information source rather than another, citizens are more or less likely to encounter information that encourages some choices and outcomes while...