Minding Politics
Remembering and Voting: Theory and Evidence from Amnesic Patients
Jason Coronel et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most prominent claims to emerge from the field of public opinion is that citizens can vote for candidates whose issue positions best reflect their own beliefs even when they cannot remember previously learned stances associated with the candidates. The current experiment provides a unique and powerful examination of this claim by determining whether individuals with profound amnesia, whose severe memory impairments prevent them from remembering specific issue information associated with any particular candidate, can vote for candidates whose issue positions come closest to their own political views. We report here that amnesic patients, despite not being able to remember any issue information, consistently voted for candidates with favored political positions. Thus, sound voting decisions do not require recall or recognition of previously learned associations between candidates and their issue positions. This result supports a multiple memory systems model of political decision making.
----------------------
The Heritability of Duty and Voter Turnout
Peter John Loewen & Christopher Dawes
Political Psychology, June 2012, Pages 363-373
"The goal of this article is to examine whether one of the most central explanators of the decision to vote - a sense that voting is a duty - is itself heritable. To do so, we employ a twin study design with 561 twin pairs in the United States. We find significant heritable variation in the belief that voting is a duty. These results comport with recent research that other predictors of turnout we previously assumed to be exclusively the product of the environment are also heritable."
----------------------
Circumventing Resistance: Using Values to Indirectly Change Attitudes
Kevin Blankenship, Duane Wegener & Renee Murray
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most research on persuasion examines messages that directly address the attitude of interest. However, especially when message recipients are inclined to resist change, indirect methods might be more effective. Because values are rarely attacked and defended, value change could serve as a useful indirect route for attitude change. Attitudes toward affirmative action changed more when the value of equality was attacked (indirect change) than when affirmative action was directly attacked using the same message (Experiments 1-2). Changes in confidence in the value were responsible for the indirect change when the value was attacked (controlling for changes in favorability toward the value), whereas direct counterarguments to the message were responsible for the relative lack of change when the attitude was attacked directly (Experiment 2). Attacking the value of equality influenced attitudes toward policies related to the value but left policy attitudes unrelated to the value unchanged (Experiment 3). Finally, a manipulation of value confidence that left attitudes toward the value intact demonstrated similar confidence-based influences on policies related to the value of freedom (Experiment 4). Undermined value confidence also resulted in less confidence in the resulting policy attitudes controlling for the changes in the policy attitudes themselves (Experiments 3 and 4). Therefore, indirect change through value attacks presented a double threat - to both the policy attitudes and the confidence with which those policy attitudes were held (potentially leaving them open to additional influence).
----------------------
Judi Atkins & Alan Finlayson
Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article we demonstrate the application of rhetorical political analysis in the study of political communication and political ideas and ideologies. Taking the rhetorical use of anecdotes as a case study, we find that their use by mainstream party leaders in Britain has proliferated markedly since the mid-1990s. Drawing on examples from speeches by leaders of all three main parties, we show how these stories are employed as a form of argumentative proof that relies significantly on the elevation of ‘everyday' experience and knowledge above expert or technical knowledge. We argue that this reflects a more general ‘valorisation of lay knowledge' and, moreover, that it is indicative of a form of populist ideology.
----------------------
Thin-Slice Decisions Do Not Need Faces to be Predictive of Election Outcomes
Michael Spezio et al.
Political Psychology, June 2012, Pages 331-341
Abstract:
Rapid decisions about political candidates, made solely on the basis of candidate appearance, associate with real electoral outcomes. A prevailing interpretation is that these associations result from heuristic cognitive processing of cues from the face to yield a judgment about the candidate, processing that is shared by both voters and experimental participants. Here, we report findings suggesting that nonfacial aspects of a candidate's appearance are important cues for voter decision making. We asked participants to look at pairs of candidate images and decide (a) whom to vote for (SimVote), (b) who looks more physically threatening (Threat), and (c) who looks more competent to hold congressional office (Competence). When participants saw only the candidates' faces, there was no association between their decisions and electoral outcomes, except for Threat. Yet when participants saw the candidate images with the faces removed, there was a strong association between their decisions and voters' decisions, for all decision types. This suggests that the appearance-related heuristics that some voters use to guide their decisions may include mental schemas for processing appearance cues other than those associated with facial features. Such schema-based processing has implications for understanding the neurobiological system underlying thin-slice decisions from appearance alone.
----------------------
Andrea Louise Campbell
Annual Review of Political Science, 2012, Pages 333-351
Abstract:
This review examines policy feedback effects among the mass public, with a focus on social policies in the United States and Europe. It shows that existing policies feed back into the political system, shaping subsequent policy outcomes. Policies exert this effect by altering not only the capacities, interests, and beliefs of political elites and states but also those of the public. Public policies can shape political participation and attitudes. These effects can be positive or negative, enhancing or undercutting participation and conferring positive or negative messages about individuals' worth as citizens. These effects originate in elements of program design, such as the size, visibility, and traceability of benefits, the proximity of beneficiaries, and modes of program administration. Thus, public policy itself shapes the distance of citizens from government, with profound implications for democratic governance.
----------------------
Gregory Neddenriep & Anthony Nownes
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we test the effects of interest group endorsements on potential voters in the 2008 presidential election. Specifically, we use a posttest-only, multiple control group experiment (N=701) to examine how real-world endorsements affect citizens. We find that endorsements have profound effects on some voters. Specifically, we find that interest-group endorsements profoundly affect the candidate evaluations and stated voting preferences of potential voters who are what we call ‘poorly aligned' - that is, whose stand on the issue on which the endorsement is based (in this case, abortion) does not align ‘properly' with their party identification and ideology. Moreover, we find that the effects of endorsements are most profound among poorly aligned voters who are not well informed. In all, our results confirm that interest-group endorsements indeed act as cues for voters, even in high-information elections.
----------------------
Who Deserves Help? Evolutionary Psychology, Social Emotions, and Public Opinion about Welfare
Michael Bang Petersen et al.
Political Psychology, June 2012, Pages 395-418
Abstract:
Evidence suggests that our foraging ancestors engaged in the small-scale equivalent of social insurance as an essential tool of survival and evolved a sophisticated psychology of social exchange (involving the social emotions of compassion and anger) to regulate mutual assistance. Here, we hypothesize that political support for modern welfare policies are shaped by these evolved mental programs. In particular, the compassionate motivation to share with needy nonfamily could not have evolved without defenses against opportunists inclined to take without contributing. Cognitively, such parasitic strategies can be identified by the intentional avoidance of productive effort. When detected, this pattern should trigger anger and down-regulate support for assistance. We tested predictions derived from these hypotheses in four studies in two cultures, showing that subjects' perceptions of recipients' effort to find work drive welfare opinions; that such perceptions (and not related perceptions) regulate compassion and anger (and not related emotions); that the effects of perceptions of recipients' effort on opinions about welfare are mediated by anger and compassion, independently of political ideology; and that these emotions not only influence the content of welfare opinions but also how easily they are formed.
----------------------
Ideological Asymmetry in the Relationship Between Epistemic Motivation and Political Attitudes
Christopher Federico, Grace Deason & Emily Fisher
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the psychological bases of political attitudes tends to dwell on the attitudes of conservatives, rarely placing a conscious thematic emphasis on what motivates liberals to adopt the attitudes they do. This research begins to address this imbalance by examining whether the need for cognitive closure is equally associated with conservatism in policy attitudes among those who broadly identify with the liberal and conservative labels. Counterintuitively, we predict and find that the need for closure is most strongly associated with policy conservatism among those who symbolically identify as liberals or for whom liberal considerations are made salient. In turn, we also find that the need for closure is associated with reduced ideological consistency in issue attitudes among liberal identifiers but not conservative identifiers. Although supportive of our predictions, these results run counter to a simple "rigidity of the right" hypothesis, which would predict a positive link between need for closure and policy conservatism regardless of ideological self-description, and the "ideologue" hypothesis, which would predict a positive link between these variables among conservative identifiers and a negative one among liberal identifiers. We discuss the implications these findings for understanding the motivations underlying liberals' and conservatives' attitudes and suggest that future research attend to the important distinction between ideology in the sense of symbolic identification with conservatism versus liberalism and ideology in the sense of an average tilt to the right or left in one's policy attitudes.
----------------------
Are Confident Partisans Disloyal? The Role of Defensive Confidence in Party Defection
Julia Albarracín, Wei Wang & Dolores Albarracin
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, July 2012, Pages 1576-1598
Abstract:
People who feel comfortable defending their views-defensively confident-may also eventually change those views and corresponding behaviors. National Election Studies surveys showed that defensive confidence predicted defection in the 2006 U.S. House elections, above and beyond the impact of various demographic and political variables. Moreover, defensive confidence was also associated with political knowledge and attention to politics and government affairs, but not attention to the news. Finally, males, more educated citizens, ethnic minorities, and older respondents had higher reported defensive confidence than did females, less educated citizens, European Americans, and younger respondents. Defensive confidence may be a crucial factor for a deeper understanding of political behavior.
----------------------
Dimi Jottier, John Ashworth & Bruno Heyndels
Kyklos, August 2012, Pages 340-370
Abstract:
Models of political decision making often assume that politicians are fully informed on voters' preferences. Still, while they may be privileged witnesses of the democratic process, real-world politicians typically act upon imperfect information. Using a large scale survey among (498) Belgian local politicians we analyse whether and to what extent politicians are informed on public opinion. More precisely, we analyse their predictions of the electoral result of their own party in an upcoming election. The focus is on the impact of the electorate's complexity on this prediction accuracy. Complexity is defined in terms of the size and heterogeneity of the electorate. Complexity is found to affect both cognitive (prediction accuracy becomes smaller) and affective (predictions are biased through wishful thinking) processes underlying the politician's prediction. The empirical results show that smaller electorates have better informed politicians (with smaller prediction errors and less subject to wishful thinking), offering a case for decentralized government. Heterogeneity has a bearing on prediction accuracy and wishful thinking. Interestingly, the effects differ between politicians in power and those in opposition.
----------------------
Christopher Devine
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define liberalism and conservatism primarily in terms of social policies closely associated with religious values, each of which invert traditional ideological orientations toward the appropriate size and role of government. The causal mechanism shaping this relationship is authoritarianism, because, I argue, the religious social policy dimension most clearly evokes the deep-seated value conflicts associated with an authoritarian view of political conflict.
----------------------
Politics and the General Factor of Personality
Edward Bell et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, October 2012, Pages 546-551
Abstract:
A General Factor of Personality (GFP) was extracted in two studies in order to examine its relationship with political variables. Only one of nine phenotypic associations between the GFP and variables measuring left-right political orientations was significant, which suggests that people who score highly on the GFP are not typically "left" or "right" in political orientation. However, respondents scoring highly on the GFP were somewhat more likely to take an interest in politics and tended to have higher levels of education, financial satisfaction and income. A heritability analysis conducted to determine whether the GFP and political variables share a common genetic influence produced heritability estimates of .49 (.29 to .58) and .43 (.23 to .51) for the GFP, but the lack of significant phenotypic correlations between the GFP and measures of left-right differences precluded a search for a common genetic factor.
----------------------
Robert Klemmensen et al.
Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2012, Pages 409-427
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that variation in political attitudes and participation can be attributed to both genes and the environment. This finding raises the question of why genes matter to participation, and by which pathways. Two hypotheses suggest that feelings of civic duty and sense of political efficacy intermediate the relationship between genes and political participation and, thus, that these traits have a common heritable component. If so, how robust are the relationships across cultural contexts? Utilizing two new twin studies on political traits, one in Denmark and one in the United States, we show that the heritability of political participation and political efficacy is remarkably similar across cultures. Moreover, most of the covariation between efficacy and political participation is accounted for by a common underlying genetic component.
----------------------
Effects of Postdebate Coverage on Spontaneous Policy Reasoning
Raymond Pingree, Rosanne Scholl & Andrea Quenette
Journal of Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Candidate debates are unique in modern politics in their potential to draw widespread attention to policy reasoning, but game-framed postdebate coverage may interfere with this potentially deliberative moment. Two experiments tested effects of policy- versus game-framing of postdebate coverage on audience use of policy reasons, using a new dependent variable we develop and label spontaneous policy reasoning (SPR). In Study 1, a game-framed postdebate story decreased SPR relative to no postdebate story, while exposure to a policy-framed story increased SPR. Study 2 added manipulations of the timing and wording of the reason-giving prompt, replicating the framing effects in another context while validating SPR as a spontaneous tendency to give reasons distinct from existing measures of the ability to do so.
----------------------
Elizabeth Radziszewski
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines Polish support for the country's participation in the Iraq war in 2004. I argue that interpersonal discussions are a driving force behind emergent attitudes on foreign policy, such as support or opposition to war. I identify three mechanisms through which political discussions can influence individual's views on the war and develop hypotheses about the impact of kinship ties and frequency of discussions on strengthening the influence. I test my argument using the first large-N data on interpersonal discussions and foreign policy outside of the US context. Findings demonstrate that having a pro-war conversation partner greatly increases the probability that one will adopt similar views. They also show that when one's social environment is taken into account as the source of information about the policy, the impact of mass media diminishes.
----------------------
Choosing sides: The genetics of why we go with the loudest
Zoltán Fazekas & Levente Littvay
Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2012, Pages 389-408
Abstract:
Recent developments in spatial voting have moved beyond finding the most appropriate utility function and started to assess individual differences in decision strategy. The question is not if a proximity or directional worldview performs better in general, rather under what conditions do people pick one strategy over the other? We draw on psychological theories to develop a survey-based measure of individual decision strategy and take a behavior genetic route to explaining the individual differences. We argue that dispositional traits shape whether an individual develops a directional or proximity worldview of the political arena. Utilizing a classical twin design, we capitalize on the documented relationship between partisanship and a directionalist worldview. We find that, in the Minnesota Twin Political Survey, both the strength of party identification and directional voting are moderately (~20 percent) but significantly (p < 0.05) heritable with no socialized component contributing to the variance. The covariation between the two traits is predominantly driven by common underlying genetic effects (p < 0.01). Implications for the rational voter models are discussed in light of the findings.