ABSTRACT
A significant body of evidence demonstrates that voters are politically interdependent. They talk, they quarrel, they display yard signs and bumper stickers, and at times they persuade one another to adopt new and different opinions regarding parties, issues, and candidates. Specifying the mechanisms that translate social contexts into a source of influence for individual citizens has progressed over time. Some of the earliest work stipulated a political effect that was mediated through social loyalties. The importance of social networks and social contexts for the exercise of citizenship has produced an avalanche of important questions and issues with respect to democratic politics. Anti-democratic as well as democratic values carry the potential to generate motivated reasoning. Moreover, the sophisticated members of all tribes are susceptible: liberals and conservatives, radicals and reactionaries, Democrats and Republicans. Political scientists have employed the seven-point party identification battery in interviews with voters for nearly 70 years.
