Diverging
Political Storms: Emergent Partisan Skepticism of Hurricane Risks
Elisa Long, Keith Chen & Ryne Rohla
University of California Working Paper, October 2019
Abstract:
The 2017 hurricane season devastated the U.S. gulf coast with two of the worst hurricanes in history: Harvey (107 deaths, $125B in damages) and Irma (134 deaths, $50B in damages). Despite extensive warnings, most affected residents did not evacuate their homes before the storms hit, complicating rescue and recovery efforts. Combining a large GPS dataset for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with U.S. Census demographic data and 2016 U.S. Presidential election precinct-level results, we empirically examine hurricane evacuation behavior. A difference-in-differences analysis demonstrates that Trump/Clinton vote share strongly predicts evacuation rates, but only after the emergence of conservative-media dismissals of hurricane warnings in September 2017, just before Irma made landfall in Florida. Following this viral “hurricane trutherism”, we estimate that Trump-voting Florida residents were 10-11% less likely to evacuate Irma than Clinton-voters (34% vs. 45%) after controlling for key demographic and geographic covariates, highlighting one consequence of political polarization. This effect size is similar in magnitude to that of an official hurricane watch. We confirm the causal impact of hurricane advisories using a spatial regression-discontinuity design that compares evacuation rates for residents living just on opposite sides of county boundaries who received differential alerts. A hurricane watch causally increases rapid evacuations (within 24 hours) by 6 percentage-points compared to no watch, and by 4 percentage-points compared to a tropical storm watch.
How Empathic Concern Fuels Political Polarization
Elizabeth Simas, Scott Clifford & Justin Kirkland
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the past two decades, there has been a marked increase in partisan social polarization, leaving scholars in search of solutions to partisan conflict. The psychology of intergroup relations identifies empathy as one of the key mechanisms that reduces intergroup conflict, and some have suggested that a lack of empathy has contributed to partisan polarization. Yet, empathy may not always live up to this promise. We argue that, in practice, the experience of empathy is biased toward one’s ingroup and can actually exacerbate political polarization. First, using a large, national sample, we demonstrate that higher levels of dispositional empathic concern are associated with higher levels of affective polarization. Second, using an experimental design, we show that individuals high in empathic concern show greater partisan bias in evaluating contentious political events. Taken together, our results suggest that, contrary to popular views, higher levels of dispositional empathy actually facilitate partisan polarization.
Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share
Daniel Effron & Medha Raj
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it “goes viral.” The results of four main experiments (two preregistered) and a pilot experiment (total N = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread — regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again — even when it was clearly labeled as false and participants disbelieved it, and even after we statistically accounted for judgments of how likeable and popular it was. In turn, perceiving the headline as less unethical predicted stronger inclinations to express approval of it online. People were also more likely to actually share repeated headlines than to share new headlines in an experimental setting. We speculate that repeating blatant misinformation may reduce the moral condemnation it receives by making it feel intuitively true, and we discuss other potential mechanisms that might explain this effect.
A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right
Patrick Forscher & Nour Kteily
Perspectives on Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The 2016 U.S. presidential election coincided with the rise of the “alternative right,” or alt-right. Alt-right associates have wielded considerable influence on the current administration and on social discourse, but the movement’s loose organizational structure has led to disparate portrayals of its members’ psychology and made it difficult to decipher its aims and reach. To systematically explore the alt-right’s psychology, we recruited two U.S. samples: An exploratory sample through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 827, alt-right n = 447) and a larger, nationally representative sample through the National Opinion Research Center’s Amerispeak panel (N = 1,283, alt-right n = 71–160, depending on the definition). We estimate that 6% of the U.S. population and 10% of Trump voters identify as alt-right. Alt-right adherents reported a psychological profile more reflective of the desire for group-based dominance than economic anxiety. Although both the alt-right and non-alt-right Trump voters differed substantially from non-alt-right, non-Trump voters, the alt-right and Trump voters were quite similar, differing mainly in the alt-right’s especially high enthusiasm for Trump, suspicion of mainstream media, trust in alternative media, and desire for collective action on behalf of Whites. We argue for renewed consideration of overt forms of bias in contemporary intergroup research.
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
Christopher Bail et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study — especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election — as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.
Do liberals and conservatives use different moral languages? Two replications and six extensions of Graham, Haidt, and Nosek’s (2009) moral text analysis
Jeremy Frimer
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do liberals and conservatives tend to use different moral languages? The Moral Foundations Hypothesis states that liberals rely more on foundations of care/harm and fairness/cheating whereas conservatives rely more on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation in their moral functioning. In support, Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009; Study 4) showed that sermons delivered by liberal and conservative pastors differed as predicted in their moral word usage, except for the loyalty foundation. I present two high-powered replication studies in religious contexts and six extension studies in politics, the media, and organizations to test ideological differences in moral language usage. On average, replication success rate was 30% and effect sizes were 38 times smaller than those in the original study. A meta-analysis (N=303,680) found that compared to liberals, conservatives used more authority r=.05, 95% confidence interval=[.02,.09] and purity words, r=.14 [.09,.19], fewer loyalty words, r=-.08 [-.10,-.05], and no more or less harm, r=.00 [-.02,.02], or fairness words, r=-.03 [-.06,.01].
Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide
Neil O’Brian
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.
Dixie’s Drivers: Core Values and the Southern Republican Realignment
Robert Lupton & Seth McKee
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholarly accounts attribute the American South’s historic partisan transformation that began in the 1960s to a combination of factors, such as changes in party positioning on civil rights, black re-enfranchisement, economic growth, urbanization, and generational change. However, no prior work emphasizes the connection between individuals’ fundamental beliefs and partisan change. Using pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 2016, we show that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism are more likely to influence southerners’ partisan affiliation relative to non-southerners. Southerners did not connect their core values to the same extent as other citizens in the early years of our analysis — owing to the vestiges of a one-party system operating in Dixie during that period. But over time, the strengthening of the relationship between core values and partisanship among southerners has been remarkable. Moreover, 1992-1996 panel data show that egalitarianism in particular influences southern partisanship (but not vice versa). Our results reveal that core values are integral to understanding the southern Republican realignment and contribute to southerners’ persistent political distinctiveness.
The Rise of Affective Polarization in the British Public: 1997-2018
Nahema Marchal & David Watson
University of Oxford Working Paper, October 2019
Abstract:
Partisan affective polarization is an increasingly salient feature of American political life. Yet, this phenomenon and its drivers have received comparatively little attention in the UK. This paper addresses this gap by systematically analyzing trends in partisan animosity among the British public between 1997 and 2018. Using data from the British Election Study (BES), we demonstrate that British partisans, especially older and strong identifiers, have become substantially more hostile towards opposite parties while favorizing their own over the past two decades. Against conventional wisdom which associates partisan animosity with divergences in policy attitudes, our data show that political identity — particularly the degree of one’s attachment to a political party — is a much stronger predictor of voters’ affective evaluations than holding extreme policy views or displaying consistent ideological and partisan loyalties.
“Macron demission!”: Loss of significance generates violent extremism for the Yellow Vests through feelings of anomia
Yara Mahfud & Jaïs Adam-Troian
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
After over 2 months of demonstration, 12 casualties, 3,142 people injured, and more than 5,000 people in custody, the question of why the Yellow Vest (YV) protests turned so violent remains. In line with a significance quest perspective on violent extremism (Kruglanski & Orehek, 2011), the present contribution assessed whether the motivation to restore a sense of control and purpose could explain why French citizens engage in violent YV extremism. We hypothesized that personal loss of significance should predict intentions to display YV violence through increased feelings of anomia. Cross-sectional (Study 1, N = 776, general population) and experimental (Study 2, N = 511, undergraduate students) mediation analyses corroborated this hypothesis, in addition to other known predictors of violent extremism. These results provide a first existential-motivational explanation of YV violence in France and highlight the key role of anomia as a predictor of violent extremism under loss of significance.
Reconsidering Tolerance: Insights From Political Theory and Three Experiments
Calvert Jones & Teresa Bejan
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Tolerance underlies many contemporary controversies, yet theorists and political scientists study it in strikingly different ways. This article bridges the gap by using recent developments in political theory to enrich empirical research and extend the study of tolerance to contexts beyond liberal democracies, such as authoritarian regimes. Our recommendations challenge dominant liberal-democratic frameworks by emphasizing variation across the (1) objects of tolerance; (2) possible responses to difference; and (3) sources of tolerance. We then illustrate the promise of our recommendations with three theoretically informed experiments inspired by historical debates about religious conversion. Our results suggest a marked ‘convert effect’ across not only contemporary religious but also secular political divides, with the same difference in terms of content viewed as less tolerable when resulting from conversion than when given or ascribed. The research demonstrates the benefits of greater dialogue across political theory and political science, while shedding light on a central question of tolerance today.
How Orwell’s 1984 has influenced Rev. Jim Jones to dominate and then destroy his followers: With extensions to current political leaders
Philip Zimbardo
Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article introduces some of the ways in which current political leaders use mind control techniques to manipulate their followers’ beliefs and actions. To more fully appreciate how they do so, we will rely on an in-depth analysis of how Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones did so earlier by putting into daily practice the strategies and tactics featured in Orwell’s novel 1984. Eight of Jones’s extractions from Orwell’s litany of state control tactics will be detailed, followed by revelations of how he put them into diabolical daily practice to totally dominate his thousand loyal followers — eventuating in their mass suicide/murder 40 years ago in Jonestown, Guyana.
A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics
Kevin Munger & Joseph Phillips
Pennsylvania State University Working Paper, October 2019
Abstract:
YouTube is the most used social network in the United States. However, for a combination of sociological and technical reasons, there exist little quantitative social science research on the political content on YouTube, in spite of widespread concern about the growth of extremist YouTube content. An emerging journalistic consensus theorizes the central role played by the video "recommendation engine," but we believe that this is premature. Instead, we propose the "Supply and Demand" framework for analyzing politics on YouTube. We discuss a number of novel technological affordances of YouTube as a platform and as a collection of videos, and how each might drive supply of or demand for extreme content. We then provide large-scale longitudinal descriptive information about the supply of and demand for alternative political content on YouTube. We demonstrate that viewership of far-right videos peaked in 2017.