How analyzing social media data can help determine whether or not people will vote

Political scientists have been trying to understand how political campaigns affect voter turnout for decades. Now, with the rise and ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook, those who study political campaigns have access to a new and potentially vast data source on voters’ intentions. In new research, Jaime Settle analyses over 100 million Facebook updates, finding that 1.3 percent more users in battleground states posted status updates about politics, and that this increased their likelihood of voting by nearly 40 percent

Friendships Moderate an Association between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology

Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.Sociolog

Yahtzee: An Anonymized Group Level Matching Procedure

Researchers often face the problem of needing to protect the privacy of subjects while also needing to integrate data that contains personal information from diverse data sources. The advent of computational social science and the enormous amount of data about people that is being collected makes protecting the privacy of research subjects ever more important. However, strict privacy procedures can hinder the process of joining diverse sources of data that contain information about specific individual behaviors. In this paper we present a procedure to keep information about specific individuals from being leaked\u27\u27 or shared in either direction between two sources of data without need of a trusted third party. To achieve this goal, we randomly assign individuals to anonymous groups before combining the anonymized information between the two sources of data. We refer to this method as the Yahtzee procedure, and show that it performs as predicted by theoretical analysis when we apply it to data from Facebook and public voter records

Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement

Civic engagement is a classic example of a collective action problem: while civic participation improves life in the community as a whole, it is individually costly and thus there is an incentive to free ride on the actions of others. Yet, we observe significant inter-individual variation in the degree to which people are in fact civically engaged. Early accounts reconciling the theoretical prediction with empirical reality focused either on variation in individuals\u27 material resources or their attitudes, but recent work has turned to genetic differences between individuals. We show an underlying genetic contribution to an index of civic engagement (0.41), as well as for the individual acts of engagement of volunteering for community or public service activities (0.33), regularly contributing to charitable causes (0.28) and voting in elections (0.27). There are closer genetic relationships between donating and the other two activities; volunteering and voting are not genetically correlated. Further, we show that most of the correlation between civic engagement and both positive emotionality and verbal IQ can be attributed to genes that affect both traits. These results enrich our understanding of the way in which genetic variation may influence the wide range of collective action problems that individuals face in modern community life

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Replication data for: From Posting to Voting: The Effects of Political Competition on Online Political Engagement

copy directly from abstract in PSRM publicatio

Political competition, emotions, and voting : the moderating role of individual differences

Why does the competitiveness of an election affect voter turnout? Previous research has focused on elite behavior in mobilizing political participation and voters' altered assessments about the importance of their vote. However, I argue that exposure to political competition activates voters' emotions---which in turn affect the decision to turnout---and that individual differences in threat sensitivity moderate this mediated relationship. After first elaborating a theory for these relationships, I use data from the 2008 National Election Study to demonstrate that heightened electoral competitiveness is associated with stronger emotional evaluations of the presidential candidates. To further elucidate the relationships, I collect a sample of 113 million status messages posted on the online social networking site Facebook during the 2008 presidential election. Automated content analysis reveals that users living in competitive "battleground" states are more likely to express emotion when they discuss politics on the site, and that emotional activation in status messages partially mediates the relationship between exposure to competition and self-reported voting. I next explore whether a genetic sensitivity to threat conditions the way that exposure to political contention affects voter turnout. The nascent genopolitics literature theorizes that genetic, psychological, and physiological differences should be integral in interpreting political stimuli from the environment, but there have been few empirical confirmations of this expectation. I find in two distinct datasets that people who carry a version of a gene that makes them especially sensitive to social stress are more responsive to the level of contention in their political environment. I follow up on this finding with a mobilization field experiment designed to activate emotions toward political competition. My dissertation is one of the first attempts to identify the specific causal mechanisms that underlie the effects of individual biological differences on political outcomes. This research topic is relevant and timely: as our country continues to polarize and the consequences of people's emotional reactions to political disagreement intensify, it is important to understand the causal mechanisms that relate political contention to political behavio