Who We Live With, What We Vote On: Household Composition and Issue-Based Mobilization

How does household composition shape which issues drive people to the polls? Although prior work shows that households influence whether people vote, we know far less about how they shape which issues become politically meaningful. We argue that households serve as a key site where issue relevance is formed: when an issue directly concerns the demographic groups present in the household, the household is more likely to mobilize. Conversely, sociodemographically diverse households show less selective participation across issues as internal diversity broadens political salience and mobilization across topics. We test these claims using administrative data and validated turnout from two Swiss cantons across multiple issue-specific ballots. While grounded in a context of direct democracy, our findings highlight the household as a key mechanism linking social structure to issue-based political mobilization, showing that political relevance is shaped not only individually but also from shared social environments.