To Support or Not To Support: Information Cascade in the 2016 Election
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/why-republicans-are-flip-flopping-on-their-endorsements/503930/
If there is one thing that has been consistently true during this 2016 Presidential Election race, it’s that by and large…just about everything is inconsistent. While sounding very much like an oxymoron, it really does seem like in any given time or current state when it comes to public & political opinion regarding Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, all one has to do is wait a moment and some new headline/reveal/soundbite etc. will crop up and change things. Both candidates have experienced this, but one of them easily takes the cake for outright quantity and frequency of these: Donald Trump.
So, how does this relate to recent topics in our Networks course? The article linked above entitled: “Why Republicans Are Flip-Flopping on Their Endorsements” offers the answer, by using the idea of information cascade as a lens for understanding the influx and outflow of public endorsements that Donald Trump receives. The main problem for Republican politicians involved is that issuing an endorsement is implicitly condoning by and large what Donald Trump says or does but that those endorsements are given without complete knowledge of what that could entail, they only have the information/’events’ that are public knowledge thus far and so have to make their decision considering the probabilities of what other yet unknown positions/statements of Donald Trump they might end up ‘supporting’. As new information/new headlines are revealed, that shifts those variables. The other issue is the one of the actual ‘cascade’ where the opinions of politicians is also affected by the current momentum/political climate of others in their party. When opinion changes on Donald Trump, it isn’t a bit by bit process, it’s a wave of politicians shifting their support (positively or negatively) all at once and rather suddenly like a knee-jerk reaction, even if the story is still developing. In this way in distinctly calls to mind the discussion in lecture of how large crowds can end up jumping to conclusions very quickly, even if those conclusions can most definitely be wrong. That’s not to say the changes in opinion over yet another outrageous statement or reveal of transgression in the past is wrong, but it often times does happen before the dust has settled and everything is in plain view, because the cascade of other politicians issuing statements and un-endorsing, etc. influences others to as well.
In essence, very briefly: for Republicans supporting (or not) Donald Trump, it seems to be a calculation of likelihood that you will continue to condone his actions even as new information appears, and that decision is most definitely affected by the cascade of other Republican politician opinions which form the metaphorical crowd that leaps to conclusions.