What makes Wisconsin swing?

… For the past seven years, our Communication and Civic Renewal research group has been studying contentious politics in Wisconsin. We are particularly interested in how the state’s communication ecology interacts with political, economic and social contexts to affect how people engage in politics.

The graphs below show that people’s polarized attitudes are related to how politically diverse the people they talk to are. The further to the right on the horizontal axis, the more people talk politics with a particular group. Using data from several 2012 Marquette Law School Polls, we found that the Wisconsinites who talked more with family and friends — which tend to be more politically homogeneous groups — also expressed more polarized attitudes about Barack Obama, Scott Walker, the Tea Party, and public labor unions. CONT.

Michael W. Wagner, Jiyoun Suk, et al, Mischiefs of Faction