New Article on Social Context and Voting Behavior Out Now! July 9, 2015 5:07 pm Part of my ongoing work on religious cleavage voting (together with Kathrin Ackermann) has just been published in the Politische Vierteljahresschrift: The New Relevance of Social Context for Voting Behavior. Response to Franz Urban Pappi Abstract: We respond to the critique of our article (Ackermann and Traunmüller 2014) and argue that theories of the declining importance of social-structural characteristics for voting behavior are misguided. Instead we are interested in the more substantial question of how and under what conditions they become politically salient. This theoretical perspective opens up the view for regional and temporal variation in social influence processes that is at odds with traditional views of cleavage-voting. We support our argument by demonstrating that social contexts are more important for individual voting behavior today than decades ago. We conclude by discussing several implications for the study of social context effects on political behavior.