Friends from Across the Aisle: The Effects of Partisan Bonding, Partisan Bridging, and Network Disagreement on Outparty Attitudes and Political Engagement

Research on the influence of social networks on political behavior has led to findings showing an apparent trade-off between positive attitudes toward the outparty and political engagement. The prevalent sentiments have been that partisan bonding or ties with fellow partisans hurts evaluations of the outparty but helps political engagement. Partisan bridging or ties with opposite partisans, on the other hand, improves evaluations of the outparty but hurts engagement. I argue that this trade-off is essentially an illusion driven by a mistaken assumption that bonding and bridging are two opposite ends of the same continuum. Analyzing two original national surveys of the American public, I show that bonding and bridging are independent constructs with different consequences. Consistent with previous studies, I find that bonding hurts and bridging helps outparty attitudes. Both bonding and bridging, however, are positively related to political engagement. I also show that network disagreement partially mediates the effects of partisan bonding, but not the effects of partisan bridging. This suggests that the efforts to encourage voters to build relationships with politically different others can be done without having to worry that they will lead to decreased engagement.