Social Networks and Citizen Response to Legal Change

Our goal is to extend the research on the political importance of social networks by investigating the role of networks in shaping citizen responses to changes in the law. We emphasize the development of special-purpose social networks to cope with changing legal requirements and analyze these networks from a problem-solving perspective. The empirical focus of the work is taxpayers' adaptation to the 1986 Tax Reform Act. The results from a panel survey of 475 taxpayers demonstrate that specialized, weak-tie networks play a critical role in shaping responses to legal change. More important problems (i.e., tax increases) stimulate search among broader networks. Broader networks, in turn, lead to greater knowledge about the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Network search is biased by both taxpayer attitudes and motivation: taxpayers seek likeminded discussants, and bigger tax increases lead to more noncompliant weak-tie discussants. Finally, the attitudes of weak-tie discussants produce changes in taxpayers' attitudes about compliance, confirming the important role of networks in shaping compliance behavior. he social context has been viewed as a critical constraint on the information-gathering opportunities of the citizen at least since the Columbia voting studies by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1948). Information about the political system is filtered through existing social networks, with political attitudes and knowledge strongly influenced by discussions with friends, neighbors, relatives, and government officials to whom the citizen is "networked" in a variety of settings (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987, 1991, 1995). Our goal is to extend the research on social networks in two directions. First, we investigate the role of networks in shaping citizen responses to changes in the law. Few citizens actually read new statutes, but rely instead on information, interpretations, and evaluations of the law available from various intermediate sources. Although recent research has explored the role of social networks in voting behavior (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995), we know less about the role of networks in shaping knowledge of and willingness to obey new laws. Yet such knowledge is a precondition for compliance with citizenship obligations (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Second, we emphasize the problem-solving aspects of network analysis, an approach to citizen behavior that provides a fruitful middle ground between the extremes of individual rationality and social determinism. While research in sociology has examined the role of networks in solving problems (Warren 1981; Stoller and Pugliesi 1991), most of these studies focus on the role of a single personal network. We assume instead that boundedly rational citizens are capable of developing multiple, specialpurpose discussion networks to deal with specialized problems. Although the single, multi-purpose network considered in most network analyses is primarily determined by social structure, specialized networks are also