Political Environments, Political Dynamics, and the Survival of Disagreement

Abstract

This paper addresses a series of questions related to the survival of disagreement among interdependent citizens during an election campaign. Do campaign-stimulated processes of collective deliberation result in the elimination of disagreement within networks of social communication? If not, what are the factors that sustain political heterogeneity and disagreement? And what are the consequences of political heterogeneity within these communication networks for patterns of political influence between and among citizens? Finally, in what manner is the influence of one citizen on another conditioned by the structure of communication networks and the distribution of preferences in the remainder of these networks? We address these questions based on a study of electoral dynamics in the 1996 presidential campaign as it took place in the Indianapolis and St. Louis metropolitan areas.