Bill Support and Social Contagion
In an Axios article titled “The Tax Bill in Not Looking So Popular”, writer David Nather, uses analytical data to highlight the fact that American voters did not accept a Republican / GOP tax bill. A graph in the article shows general GOP bill support at an all-time low and explains how the Republican party can’t afford to lose any more political battles. The quote ” they’re going to have serious headaches if they can’t win more support from the public.” (Nather) exemplifies this. In an interpretation of the graph in the article, there seems to be a general decline at a steady pace of support for bills that are let out by the GOP. For the first specific bill that that article mentioned that is was at a low of about 30% support for this tax bill. Support for this tax bill was that low, but it was mostly not because most voters actually read up on the bill to decide if they agreed with it. The voters are split into parties and when a small group in a party decides a side to support, the rest of the party follow by accepting that support side.
This genesis of bill support or no bill support can be explained from and linked to our class topic of social contagion. Two parties can be represented by clusters of nodes where nodes are people. Once a node has a certain belief it spreads to other nodes in a cluster if a percentage of their friends have adopted this belief or support side and if it’s above a certain threshold. This perpetuates the act of conforming to an opinion by the occurrence of an information cascade where a belief spreads. In other words, the is a certain value of q, the number of nodes that have connections of a certain belief, such that it meets a threshold value that switches beliefs of all nodes in that cluster. This quick shift is opinion can be explained to be a cascade, it did most likely not spread the other cluster or party at the same rate because of minimal edges between parties or clusters which indicate a division in beliefs across parties.
https://www.axios.com/the-tax-bills-not-looking-so-popular-2510374452.html