Recent European elections have witnessed a rightward shift, with populist and far-right parties gaining ground. Many explain this shift through demographic polarization. It pertains to a growing divide between urban and rural voters, younger and older generations, and those with differing education levels, driven by economic and migration concerns. However, demographic polarization goes beyond mere group identity; it is shaped by lived experiences. Where and how people live, work, and whom they interact with influence their views on social change. This study expands the traditional sociodemographic lens.

We hypothesize that, beyond voters' sociodemographic profiles, it is the social networks they are embedded in, that shape political behavior, specifically turnout and polarization. The key characteristics of these networks include size, the degree of closure, and composition with respect to socioeconomic status, education, and migration background. Additionally, we examine the spatial dispersion of an individual's social environment. We focus this analysis on the 2023 Dutch general elections. We enrich neighborhood-level election results with insights into the social networks of residents. Social networks are sourced from Dutch registers covering the country's population and providing information on one’s socio-demographic profile as well as comprehensive mapping of social networks. The relational aspect of registers sheds light on formal links such as kinship, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, and household members. By integrating population-scale network analysis with electoral outcomes, we aim to uncover how social structures mediate the relationship between demographic factors and political behavior, offering a nuanced understanding of polarization dynamics in contemporary European democracies.

LGBTQ+ activism has a long history in the U.S., but it is not always clear who participates and why, especially given the risks involved. Recent work investigates individual drivers of participation in LGBTQ+ activism and, consistent with other groups, finds that experiences of victimization increase the likelihood that LGBTQ+ people participate in protest. Building on that work, this study identifies network drivers of participation in LGBTQ+ activism, including political marches, demonstrations, and protests. We use novel data from Wave III of the LGBTQ+ Social Networks, Aging, and Policy Study (QSNAPS), which includes 981 midlife and older LGBTQ+ adults who report on the characteristics and political behaviors of 13,412 network ties. Data were collected throughout 2023 from adults in 22 US states. We test the hypothesis that network characteristics and perceived alter behaviors are associated with respondent’s participation in LGBTQ+ activism. Specifically, we observe whether the respondent discusses politics or differs in political opinion from each alter and alters who the respondent thinks are also LGBTQ+, are kin, or who attended a protest, march, or political demonstration in the last year. Regression analyses show that greater discussion of politics is associated with a higher share of LGBTQ+ ties and a higher share of ties who know the respondent’s LGBTQ+ status in one’s network. Respondent’s participation in LGBTQ-related but not general protest is significantly associated with protest participation within one’s network. These results contribute to understandings of how networks shape political activism among a minoritized, politically targeted group in the US context.

Everyday political talk is key to deliberative democracies, and political talk solely between similar persons leads to echo chambers and polarization. Here we study how social networks influence the willingness to engage in political discussion with others. We do so with a focus on tie strength, similarity (opinions and identity dimensions), and extended network size and diversity. As such, we contribute a novel consequence of extended networks: whether discussing politics with others depends on how acquaintanceship networks are structured. We capture the willingness to engage in everyday political talk with a unique factorial survey experiment. We describe fictive situations and political discussion partners, and respondents then rate willingness to engage in political talk. This approach comes closer to a causal effect of extended networks compared to previous work. We introduce a multi-ethnic group perspective, scrutinizing how the impact of one’s extended network on engaging in political discussion depends on ethnic background, because, social network effects likely vary by ethnic group. We test our conjectures by analyzing novel data from 2022: the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS). This data sources includes an oversample of Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch persons in the Netherlands. It includes an innovative survey experiment on political discussions, and a pre-tested Network Scale-Up (NSUM) instrument to tap into the size and composition of extended networks of acquaintances. We employ multilevel models with random intercepts and random slopes, interaction terms between our vignette attributes (e.g., background and political opinion of discussion partner), and respondent-level variables (e.g., extended network size/composition).

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are believed to stimulate trade among their members, even without being explicitly designed to do so. Yet the relationship between IGOs and trade is frequently acknowledged to be bidirectional: IGOs stimulate trade, and trade stimulates joint IGO membership. This endogeneity is a fundamental characteristic of the social structure of the international system, as bilateral and multilateral relationships co-evolve in tandem with each other. Therefore, examining only one direction of the bidirectional relationship at a time may produce invalid estimates of effects. Implementing a co-evolutionary SAOM, this study demonstrates that these effects do operate in a co-evolutionary fashion, but differently than expected. Trade fosters joint IGO membership, but it is the similarity of IGO portfolios, rather than the raw strength of the IGO connection, that best predicts major trade relationships among countries.