social networks
Talking Politics with People Unlike Ourselves
The “Talking Politics with People Unlike Ourselves” workshop provides new tools for reaching the uncommitted, the wavering, and people unlike oneself. Workshop participants become more effective in talking with others and are better able to move them to action. They learn how to apply lessons from social psychology and personal experience in discussing politics with family members, neighbors, work colleagues, and/or strangers.
The Time to Grow Stronger Is Between Elections
This paper, based on a presentation at the Third Annual Democracy Fest in 2004, discusses some of the things that grassroots activists can do between campaigns to strengthen their groups and enhance the position of progressives in their communities.
It's the Conversations, Stupid! The Link between Social Interaction and Political Choice
Valdis Krebs explores the behavior of voters, focusing on how social knowledge greatly affects voter choice. As he writes, "after controlling for personal attitudes and demographic membership, researchers found that the social networks, [which] voters are embedded in, exert powerful influences on their behavior." This is related with two other models of voter behavior. The first, the atomized model, has "the voting public [as] an aggregation of autonomous decision-makers, each making a decision based on personal rationale and/or emotion" while the second is the demographic voter, "here the voter is not viewed as isolated and autonomous, but as a member of a demographic group which can influence or predict the voter's choices."
Read the document here (pdf)
