The dual roots of opinion leadership

Political scientists often focus on the link between personal attributes and the flow of political information. In this article, I argue that opinion leadership may not be as singularly rooted in the presence of a certain predisposition or set of personal characteristics as suggested in previous political opinion leadership studies. I develop two sets of hypotheses: the first derived from the perspective that opinion leadership is a function of a recipe of attributes and the second derived from the perspective that opinion leadership is tied to the characteristics of the social milieu in which the citizen is embedded. I test these hypotheses empirically using a data set constructed from two surveys of individuals in the New York metropolitan area. The results suggest that while opinion leaders possess attributes that distinguish them from nonleaders, they appear to gain influence through their informational advantages relative to others in the same environment.