Do Political Discussion Partners Share Policy Priorities and Policy Frames?

To understand politics, people often rely on political discussion. Among the many ways that discussion may shape political perceptions, one possible mechanism is by promoting a shared sense of priorities— which issues are important. A second mechanism is by framing how people think about important issues. We examine these potential mechanisms by answering the descriptive question: Do policy priorities and policy frames tend to co-occur within political discussion networks? We answer this question by reanalyzing the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis Study in which participants—and their discussion partners—described the most important problem facing the United States in their own words. We show that the modal outcome is for people to hold both different priorities and different frames than their discussion partners. This finding stands in contrast to network scholarship suggesting that homophily is so often the norm. Yet we also show that people disproportionately share the same policy priorities as their discussion partners, and adopt the same frames in thinking about policy topics, especially when their policy priorities match. This finding suggests that some policy priorities are so embedded in certain frames of thinking that the topic and frame stay linked even as the topic may diffuse through a social network.