ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I propose the concept of the interpersonal political environment (IPE) and also emphasize the importance of autonomously driven political action that arises from everyday interaction, to improve our understanding of how social networks affect political behavior. By focusing empirically on these points, this chapter covers an often neglected aspect of political discussion in some of the other chapters in Part II of this volume, but which contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of political discussion in democratic politics. Two intertwined approaches in recent social network research compete to explain the functions of social networks; one approach focuses on the properties of the links between network nodes, such as bonding or bridging, and the other approach focuses on the meso-level network properties of cliques, such as homogeneity or heterogeneity. Common to both approaches is that researchers have been interested in revealing the effects of network properties on discussion and persuasion. In this chapter, however, I will view social networks differently than these approaches by focusing on how individuals are embedded in and surrounded by their social networks, acting as IPEs for individuals. This approach emphasizes the general perceived effects of peer interaction on the social reality of individuals, rather than the effects of specific network dynamics such as bridging or homogeneity. Next, I will proceed to my second point about the autonomous dimension of network influence: passive versus active political decision-making. By focusing on this dimension, I stress its macroscopic implication for democratic politics. If interpersonal political influence is dominated by passive processes such as conformity or coerciveness, it is a serious demerit for the proper functioning of grass-roots democracy. In other words, in relation to the importance of political discussion, which is the main theme of this book, I argue that political discussion is important, not because it forces others to accept arguments passively and conformingly, but because it inspires active and deliberative thoughts that in turn lead to more mutually independent decision-making by exposing people to alternative opinions and arguments. If the actual practice of democracy is

through the passive process, the significance of discussion in democracy will be of little worth. In this sense, the autonomy logic is a critical part of liberal democracy. Third, based on these theoretical positions, we test two hypotheses using a multi-wave dataset obtained from the Japanese Election Study III which has four different pre-post national election studies in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005 in Japan (all of which composes a four-year panel survey). The hypotheses tested and basically confirmed are on the power of the IPE to determine voting behavior and political participation congruent with the political color of the IPE, the effect of which are differentiated by the ‘bonding’ network property (or homophily) of the target IPE. The next analyses show the autonomous nature of network effects in the context of Japanese political behavior, despite conformity (nonautonomous) pressure often being presupposed in social psychology as the main power mechanism of the group (especially in the cultural context of Japan). We emphasize the importance of this finding because it is essential for a liberal democracy to function well.