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Samuel Abrams

AB, Stanford University. AM, PhD, Harvard University. Fellow at the Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University; member of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Program on Inequality and Social Policy; research fellow with Harvard’s Canada Program. Main topics of research include social policy, inequality, international political economy, and comparative and American politics; special interest in network analysis, the media, Congress, political behavior, urban studies and cities, public opinion and survey research, political communication and elections, and the social nature of political behavior; conducted fieldwork throughout Europe and North America. Two substantial projects are presently in progress: a comparative, historical study to understand political participation in western democracies (i.e., Why do some people vote, while others do not?) and an examination of American political culture and the nature of centrism and polarization in the United States. SLC, 2010–

Undergraduate discipline: Politics

Courses taught in Politics

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Publications

  • Informal Social Networks and Rational Voting
    British Journal of Political Science, Samuel Abrams, Torben Iversen and David Soskice; April 2011 volume #41, issue #2: pp 229-257

    Classical rational choice explanations of voting participation are widely thought to have failed. This article argues that the currently dominant Group Mobilization and Ethical Agency approaches have serious shortcomings in explaining individually rational turnout. It develops an informal social network (ISN) model in which people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa. Using results from the social psychology literature, research on social groups in sociology and their own survey data, the authors argue that the ISN model can explain individually rational non-altruistic turnout. If group variables that affect whether voting is used as a marker of individual standing in groups are included, the likelihood of turnout rises dramatically.