Many people believe that idealism motivates them to open their wallets for a favorite candidate or that civic duty motivates them to go to the polls to vote. But don’t discount peer pressure as an important factor in elections, a political scientist says.

“We operate as a family, a neighborhood, a team,” said Betsy Sinclair, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. “Family, friends, and neighbors affect” choices involving “the candidate, issues to support, the political party to identify with, whether to donate to political candidates, and whether we turn out to cast a ballot.”

An Assistant Professor in political science at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are located in American politics and political methodology with an emphasis on individual political behavior. She focuses on the social foundations of participatory democracy -- the ways in which social networks influence voting, donating, choosing a candidate or identifying with a particular party. Her other interests are broadly defined as those involving voting and elections and range from evaluating the consequences of different voting technologies to developing techniques to draw additional causal inferences in randomized field experiments.