Red-Blue Roundtable: Valdis Krebs

Voting is simple... precinct, district, state, add 'em up, send 'em in. Outside of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 this hierarchy of geographical boxes works well. Boxes are simple, you are either in this one or that one, or not eligible to play. Simple clear rules. Simple clear math.

We vote in boxes, but most of us don't think in boxes. We think in networks -- those near to us [in social, not physical distance] influence what we know, how we think, and who we vote for. We are social animals, not logical animals, nor economically maximizing animals. Many vote against their economic self-interest. Many make illogical choices... or so it appears.

Are we stupid? Are we sheep? Are we random? Our behavior often appears that way -- especially to outsiders who do not know the social ecosystem we are embedded in. Political pundits often get voting behavior wrong because they look at voters as independent, logical, demographically-driven, self-maximizing individuals. They miss the 800-pound gorilla in the room -- various social networks and their power to influence behavior and overwhelm demographics, economics, and geography.

Birds of a feather flock together. This is a strong driver of human behavior and found throughout living systems in nature. Besides being a fascinating read, The Big Sort is a verifiable and happening dynamic.  Yet, we will never live in totally homogenous tracts bereft of diversity. Even if we appear to do so on the surface -- "gee, they all look and dress the same" -- our largely invisible social ties may not be so homophilous. 

Simple organizing systems such as hierarchies and neighborhoods are never as they appear on the surface. Below is a picture of a corporate hierarchy -- simple reporting relationships, everyone in their own group. Blue nodes are managers, green nodes are directors, and the magenta colored node is the VP. It could be a picture of our state political structure. Precincts reporting into districts reporting into the state. Or broken down further, households into neighborhoods, into precincts. The simple organized hierarchy of boxes.

The hierarchy below is viewed as a hub-and-spoke network, or tree, with the black lines showing reporting relationships and gold boxes being either departments or districts.

In organizations we know that the interesting stuff -- learning, innovation, adaption -- usually does not happen within formal reporting structures. The good stuff happens in the "white space" on the organization chart -- between boxes, across groups, spanning boundaries. The invisible network that permeates every organization and every neighborhood is shown by the grey links below. Of course, in the age of the internet many of these grey lines cover large geographical distance.

Votes are counted along the black links in the hierarchy, but votes are created, influenced and reinforced along the grey links which represent overlapping social networks that we are all embedded in. Our friends, family, and colleagues, who influence our vote, are distributed through many neighborhoods, precincts, districts, and states near and far. This is why it is not only important to look at quantity of book sales by geography, but to look at networks of books and how they reveal the influence factors in each of our political sense-making processes.

Networks of books?  Do books have a social life?  Not really, but Amazon provides us data to evaluate book purchases as a social system. Amazon's consistent feedback on every product page -- people that bought [this] also bought [those] –- allows us to create a social network of books. Of course what we are really evaluating are not the social dynamics of books but the social dynamics of buyers and readers of those books –- all without revealing the identity of the Amazon customers making their consumer choices.

So, what do you think our network of books will reveal for this election? --Valdis Krebs

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable