Social Voting & Election Coordination in Rural Hondurans

Models of voter choice frequently assume voters behave as independent actors who make decisions in a social vacuum. Recent work has demonstrated that social connections play a formative role in the decision to turnout to vote, to take expressive political action, and in the formation of political identity. Yet, no work has examined how social connections influence voters’ choices in an election. Here, I argue that political actors use social information to solve many types of coordination problems, including coordinating to vote for winning candidates. I present a novel data set where I measured the real-world social connections of more than 4,000 political actors and then randomly assigned 113 individuals to serve as a candidate for one of thirty political offices. I find that that better socially-connected candidates fare better in this election, and that voters use social information to coordinate their votes for winning candidates. These results suggest that social networks play a fundamental role in coordinating human actions that extend from our daily lives into explicitly political activities.