Fighters
Donald Trump's Effect on Who is Considered "Conservative"
Karyn Amira
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conservative intellectuals have expressed concern that Donald Trump has tarnished the conservative brand with his authoritarian-populist rhetoric and style of governing. What exactly is Donald Trump's effect on this ideological label? In this paper I replicate work showing that members of Congress who have openly supported Trump are seen as more conservative than those who do not openly support him. I then test this relationship experimentally and explore whether a pro (or anti) Trump cue alone drives this perception or whether other perceived, unstated issue positions might influence this result. I find that supporting Trump moves candidates rightward compared to a control group, and this effect is about twice as large as the anti-Trump cue which moves candidates leftward. I also find that candidates who support Trump are more likely to be associated with additional issue-related content, which could affect ideological perception. Roadmaps for extensions are also discussed.
Unconditional Support for Trump's Resistance Prior to Election Day
Brendan Hartnett & Alexandra Haver
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using survey data collected less than two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, we investigated why likely Trump voters would support Trump resisting the election results if he lost. We first used an experiment with randomized hypothetical popular-vote margins to test whether support for resistance was contingent on the results of the election. We also directly asked respondents who stated that they would support resistance to explain their reasoning in an open-ended response. In doing so, we gained insight into one of the most turbulent elections in American history and examined how support for resistance existed before the election due to both misinformation about voter fraud and hyperpartisanship that made Trump voters view the electoral process itself as illegitimate.
Stop the Steal!: Allegations of Election Cheating and Support for Political Violence Among U.S. Conservatives
James Piazza
Penn State University Working Paper, August 2022
Abstract:
Are individuals more likely to endorse political violence when politicians accuse rivals of election improprieties? I theorize that the answer to this question is yes, but only for conservatives. Conservatives are primed to believe allegations of cheating by rival partisans, view election improprieties through the lens of racial and xenophobic resentments and are therefore triggered by allegations by elites of cheating by rivals to respond with fear, anger, resentment, and a willingness to abandon norms of nonviolent political behavior. Using an online survey experiment involving around 600 U.S. subjects I find that exposure to allegations that Democratic politicians promote fraud to rig elections raises support for political violence among conservative subjects. However, exposure to allegations that Republicans engage in voter suppression to steal elections has no significant effect on the endorsement of political violence among liberal subjects. Furthermore, mediation tests indicate that exposing conservatives to allegations of Democratic fraud reduces their trust of people of different races and religions which, in turn, increases their support for political violence.
Does Fake News Create Echo Chambers?
Jiding Zhang, Ken Moon & Senthil Veeraraghavan
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, June 2022
Abstract:
Platforms have come under criticism from regulatory agencies, policymakers, and media scholars for the unfettered spread of fake news online. A key concern is that, as fake news becomes prevalent, individuals may fall into online "echo chambers" that predominantly expose them only to fake news. Using a dataset reporting 30,995 individual households' online activity, we empirically examine the reach of false news content and whether echo chambers exist. We find that the population is widely exposed to online false news. However, echo chambers are minimal, and the most avid readers of false news content regularly expose themselves to mainstream news sources. Using a natural experiment occurring on a major social media platform, we find that being exposed to false news content causes households to increase their exposure to countervailing mainstream news (by 9.1% in the experiment). Hence, a naive intervention that reduces the supply of false news sources on a platform also reduces the overall consumption of news. Based on a structural model of household decisions whether to diversify their online news sources, we prescribe how platforms should moderate false news content. We find that platforms can further reduce the size of echo chambers (by 12-18%) by focusing their content moderation efforts on the households that are most susceptible to consuming predominantly false news, instead of the households most deeply exposed to false news.
Stasis and Sorting of Americans' Abortion Opinions: Political Polarization Added to Religious and Other Differences
Michael Hout, Stuart Perrett & Sarah Cowan
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, August 2022
Abstract:
Americans disagree on legal abortion now about as much as they did in the 1970s, but their attitudes now sort much more according to political identity. Differences of opinion by religion, gender, race, and work that were key to understanding abortion attitudes in the 1970s persisted through 2021. The General Social Survey shows that first conservatives increased their opposition to legal abortion rights; their mean score dropped 1.1 points (on a 6-point scale) from 3.8 to 2.7 from 1974 to 2004. As conservatives' opinions leveled off, liberals increased their support of abortion rights from 4.7 in 2004 to 5.3 or 5.4 in 2021 (because of Covid-19, survey mode changed, creating uncertainty about the sources of change). Women were significantly more divided by political ideology than men were throughout the time series, but gendered political differences did not displace or reduce religious, educational, racial, or work-life differences.
Reducing Explicit Blatant Dehumanization by Correcting Exaggerated Meta-Perceptions
Alexander Landry et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
If explicitly, blatantly dehumanizing a group of people - overtly characterizing them as less than human - facilitates harming them, then reversing this process is paramount. Addressing dehumanization among American political partisans appears especially crucial, given that it has been linked to their anti-democratic hostility. Perhaps because of its overt nature, partisans recognize - and greatly exaggerate - the extent to which out-partisans explicitly, blatantly dehumanize them. Past research has found that when people perceive they are dehumanized by an outgroup (i.e., meta-dehumanization), they respond with reciprocal dehumanization. Therefore, we reasoned that partisans' dehumanization could be reduced by correcting their exaggerated meta-dehumanization. Indeed, across three preregistered studies (N = 4,154), an intervention correcting American partisans' exaggerated meta-dehumanization reduced their own dehumanization of out-partisans. This decreased dehumanization persisted at a 1-week follow-up and predicted downstream reductions in partisans' anti-democratic hostility, suggesting that correcting exaggerated meta-dehumanization can durably mitigate the dark specter of dehumanization.
They Saw a Debate: Political Polarization Is Associated with Greater Multivariate Neural Synchrony When Viewing the Opposing Candidate Speak
Timothy Broom et al.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
With rampant polarization in current U.S. politics, it seems as though political partisans with opposing viewpoints are living in parallel realities. Indeed, prior research shows that people's impressions/attitudes toward political candidates are intertwined with their political affiliation. The current study investigated the relationship between political affiliation and intersubject neural synchrony of multivariate patterns of activity during naturalistic viewing of a presidential debate. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 20 individuals varying in political affiliation underwent functional neuroimaging while watching the first debate between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pairs of participants with more polarized political affiliations were higher in neural synchrony in a system of brain regions involved in self-referential processing when viewing the opposing candidate speak compared with that candidate's supporters regardless of which extreme of the political spectrum they occupied. Moreover, pairs of political partisans matching in the candidate they supported were higher in neural synchrony when watching the candidate they opposed compared with the one they both supported. These findings suggest that political groups' shared understanding may be driven more by perceptions of outgroups than of their own party/candidates.
A Longitudinal Test of the Conservative-Liberal Well-Being Gap
Salvador Vargas Salfate et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we test if conservatism predicts psychological well-being longitudinally. We based the study on previous findings showing that conservatives score higher on different measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and happiness. Most explanations in the literature have assumed that conservatism antecedes well-being without considering the alternative - that well-being may predict conservatism. In Study 1, using multilevel cross-lagged panel models with a two-wave longitudinal sample consisting of data from 19 countries (N = 8,740), we found that conservatism did not predict well-being over time. We found similar results in Study 2 (N = 2,554), using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models with a four-wave longitudinal sample from Chile. We discuss the main implications of these results for the literature examining the association between conservatism and well-being.
How Norms Shape the Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics
Eric Groenendyk, Erik Kimbrough & Mark Pickup
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals' own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms - what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what - from adherence to those norms. We find that a nontrivial portion of those reporting ideologically inconsistent preferences do so knowingly, suggesting their lack of ideological constraint can be attributed to pragmatism rather than innocence. Additionally, a question order experiment reveals that priming ideological norms before measuring policy preferences promotes ideological adherence, suggesting ideological constraint is at least partially attributable to norm-conformity pressure. Together, these findings raise the question whether ideology is actually desirable or if it instead allows elites to reverse the direction of accountability.
Do Political Beliefs Drive Environment Selection?
Lauren Ratliff Santoro
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars interested in understanding if and to what extent social environments influence individual political behavior are plagued by the reality that individuals construct their social environments. Though there is acknowledgement that this construction is determined by homophily - likes associating with likes - the extent to which political beliefs drive environment selection is yet untested. This paper seeks to understand the extent to which political beliefs inform individuals' decisions on which social environments to select into. To do so, I follow individuals as they select into social environments across their first year in a university setting - first contacting them before they are embedded in a new social environment, tracking their selections into friendships and groups, and observing how their attitudes change over a year and a half period. Results demonstrate that political beliefs can be significant predictors of selection into non-political social contexts, especially for those with the strongest beliefs about politics.
How Political Ideology Shapes Preferences for Observably Inferior Products
Monika Lisjak & Nailya Ordabayeva
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
While existing consumer research on political ideology often focuses on ideological differences in preferences for high-status, typically observably superior products, little is known about how political ideology may shape preferences for observably inferior products in non-status-signaling domains. Observably inferior products are product options which are dominated by alternatives along observable dimensions. We propose that in non-status-signaling domains conservatives are more interested in observably inferior products than liberals. This happens because conservatives (vs. liberals) have a stronger belief that things, including products, are in balance, whereby positives offset negatives. As a result, when presented with observably inferior products, conservatives (vs. liberals) are more likely to engage in compensatory reasoning and attribute positive qualities to these products, boosting their appeal. Activating belief in balance and preventing compensatory reasoning through cognitive load attenuate this effect. Salience of status-signaling motives serves as a boundary condition. Five studies and four follow-ups provide converging evidence using data collected in the lab and in the field, hypothetical and actual product choices, a variety of product categories and participant populations. These findings contribute to literatures on political ideology, compensatory inferences, and inferior products, and provide insights with respect to managing product manufacturing, inventory, and waste.
Wolf attacks predict far-right voting
Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg & Anselm Hager
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 26 July 2022
Abstract:
Does the return of large carnivores affect voting behavior? We study this question through the lens of wolf attacks on livestock. Sustained environmental conservation has allowed the wolf (Canis lupus) to make an impressive and unforeseen comeback across Central Europe in recent years. While lauded by conservationists, local residents often see the wolf as a threat to economic livelihoods, particularly those of farmers. As populists appear to exploit such sentiments, the wolf's reemergence is a plausible source for far-right voting behavior. To test this hypothesis, we collect fine-grained spatial data on wolf attacks and construct a municipality-level panel in Germany. Using difference-in-differences models, we find that wolf attacks are accompanied by a significant rise in far-right voting behavior, while the Green party, if anything, suffers electoral losses. We buttress this finding using local-level survey data, which confirms a link between wolf attacks and negative sentiment toward environmental protection. To explore potential mechanisms, we analyze Twitter posts, election manifestos, and Facebook ads to show that far-right politicians frame the wolf as a threat to economic livelihoods.