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Social Citizens: How Peer Networks Influence Elections

13 min • 3 november 2016

When you walk into a voting booth in less than a week to vote for the future president of the United States, you'll be all by yourself making a very personal decision - right? Betsy Sinclair, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior, believes that in reality, politics is often more social than personal. Here she discusses the place of Facebook, YouTube, and face-to-face interactions in political decision-making, and explains how social science experiments reveal the true importance of social networks in politics.