| Abstract: |
Political homophily has been extensively examined as an individual tendency,
but we know little about the social, cultural, and economic conditions that
foster homophilic connections. We offer a contextual explanation of political
homophily and shed light on spatial polarization from a social-communication
network perspective by combining GLMNet models, spatial lag regressions, and
geographically weighted regressions to examine various ecological factors’
roles in the political homophily observable in county-level physical mobility
and Facebook friendship networks. Overall, our analyses suggest that urban
culture characterized by large population, robust local news provision,
racial-ethnic diversity, and progressive political culture tend to foster
politically inclusive connections. More specifically, the proportion of
Democrats is strongly associated with more cross-cutting connections, both
online and offline. While population size is associated with lower offline
homophily, racial-national diversity and local news availability play more
important roles in lowering online homophily. Geographical contexts matter in
the way people socialize with one another, even in the era of internet and
social media. |