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* Taylor N. Carlson, PhD Candidate, University of California, San Diego, [email protected].
I thank James Fowler, Seth Hill, Marisa Abrajano, Margaret Roberts, Charles McClean, Andrew Engelhardt, Matthew Pietryka, and Nazita Lajevardi for invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and the research design. I am grateful to Jaime Settle for endless support and encouragement. I thank participants at UCSD’s integrated and American Politics workshops, and Human Nature Group. I am also grateful for feedback from MPSA 2018, New Faces in Political Methodology X, Yale’s CSAP conference, the 2018 Political Networks Conference, the College of William and Mary Government Department, and the 2018 Political Communication APSA Pre-Conference. This research was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (SES 1423788). Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NOWHWG.
Today, technological innovations enable individuals to learn about politics from countless sources. With the growth of online news and the spread of information on social media, individuals arguably have access to more information now than ever before. Yet, Americans still seem relatively unwilling to access the news. Only four percent of Internet users read at least ten news stories and two opinion pieces over three months (Flaxman, Goel, and Rao 2016). Where, then, are Americans getting their news? Even with the proliferation of news options, 41.7 percent of Americans report getting information from talking with friends and colleagues daily.1 Some of these social information exchanges might be occurring online, given that two-thirds of American adults get news from social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016). This tendency to rely on others for information characterizes the “two-step flow” of information, which suggests that information flows from the media, to the interested individuals known as opinion leaders and to others (Katz 1957; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). The idea is that because many Americans are not particularly interested in or knowledgeable about politics (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996), they find it easier to ask others for information about politics instead of spending time looking it up on their own. Indeed, classic theories in political science suggest that relying on others who are more knowledgeable about politics and have similar preferences can be a rational information shortcut (Downs 1957; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). But, just as information...