Alex Hughes | Social Coordination

Individuals who take political action don’t live in isolation. They talk with one another, sometimes about politics. We’ve known and accepted this reality in modern political science at least since the 1940s. However, for decades we rarely took this seriously when testing models of political action – our political science theories weren’t well-enough developed and the models intractable.

However, in the past decade new developments in measurement, computing, and theory have led scholars to again examine explanations for political action that extend beyond the individual.

In this project, I develop a theory that predicts when and how connections between individuals can lead groups to coordinate on a common purpose. Individuals gather information about others in their everyday lives – who knows whom, who is respected in the community – and when asked to take action they utilize this information.

To test this theory, I gathered face-to-face social network data from 5,000 people living in rural Honduras, constructing the first-ever social network mapping of more than 30 towns in this remote region.

Main street, La Union. I conducted research in more than 30 villages in the local area. Juan worked with us during his summer break.

After collecting this social network information from residents, we partnered with a local development agency to hold informational meetings, but we experimentally manipulated where, in the social network, the information about this meeting was seeded. In some cases, we seeded this information with individuals who held many social connections in the community; in other cases we seeded this information with individuals who held very few social connections in the community.

Consistent with theoretical predictions:

Information and attendance at the meeting was associated with social distance – the better connected to a mobilizer was a resident, the more likely she or he was to attend the meeting;
The more social connections a randomly selected mobilizer held, the more residents she or he brought to the meeting.

On the right is a village meeting, where one mobilizer was socially well connected and while another mobilizer was socially poorly connected. In the social network of the community, plotted on the left, the well connected mobilizer is in purple and the poorly connected mobilizer in blue.

This project was a part of my dissertation. Contact me, I would love to share a copy with you.