How do individuals interpret interest group cues to make informed voting decisions that are aligned with their partisan identities and ideologies? In the 2020 election cycle, Californians voted on a b...

What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the p...

How do people respond to symbols related to nationalism, and does having political context matter? We argue that nationalist symbols influence perceptions when in a political context. Leveraging that ...

Trials are considered the most polarizing measure of transitional justice, as they have harsh consequences on the prosecuted and may criminalize a portion of the previous authoritarian elite that migh...

Politics increasingly shapes Americans’ social orientations, including their religious affiliations and levels of religiosity. Less is known about whether politics affects secularism—an affirmative em...

In a substantial literature on political trust in normal times, we know little about the impact on trust of crises or subsequent government efforts at correction. We investigate these impacts by analy...

Studies of minority voters have long considered the role of both ethnic identities and economic interests. However, research on Latino voters emphasizes ethnic identity and the related issue of immigr...

Is a lack of information about eligibility rules partly responsible for the particularly low youth voter turnout in U.S. elections? In a context where new voters usually have to register several weeks...

While ‘losers’ consent’ has long been recognized as crucial for democratic stability, recent concerns over elite manipulation of democratic processes highlight the need to shift focus to the responsib...

Can we use the way that people respond to information as evidence that partisan bias or directional motives influence political beliefs? It depends. Using one natural formalization of motivated reason...

Affective polarization is on the rise. Increasing polarization is often attributed to the nature of political discussion on social media platforms, but little is known about the affective consequences...

It has been well established that the effectiveness and quality of political representation is unequally distributed in Western democracies. Scholars have frequently warned about the rise of ‘diploma ...

Does an immigrant’s country of origin shape Americans’ immigration preferences? If so, are some attributes of origin countries likely to provoke particularly strong opposition over others? We answer t...

Immigration often causes backlash, to the benefit of anti-immigrant parties. Most studies that identify the effect of immigration on native attitudes and behaviors leverage variation in inflows of new...

Distrust is widely argued to stimulate support for political and institutional change. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars whether distrust pulls people towards rivaling decision-making mode...

Overcoming America’s deep partisan polarization poses a unique challenge: Americans must be able to sharply disagree on who should govern while agreeing on more fundamental democratic principles. We s...

Political (as opposed to professional) election oversight is one area in which the U.S. scores extremely low in measures of election integrity. Meanwhile, rancorous political battles to determine acceptable election procedures and judge when tactics cross the line have become common events. Our work contributes to recent scholarship investigating whether voters prioritize democratic principles or strategically favor electoral procedures that provide partisan advantage. In two survey experiments, we confirm that Americans’ attitudes about antidemocratic election tactics reveal more about which team they are cheering for than they do about whether the tactics are fraudulent. The tendency to engage in partisan motivated reasoning occurs among all partisans, but there are subtle differences as to when citizens will engage in it. Partisan motivated reasoning is more common when actions cause harm and by the partisans that are harmed. Finally, Independents are more impartial, but less likely to call out improper tactics in the aggregate because they often fail to condemn actions by either party.

Political (as opposed to professional) election oversight is one area in which the U.S. scores extremely low in measures of election integrity. Meanwhile, rancorous political battles to determine acceptable election procedures and judge when tactics cross the line have become common events. Our work contributes to recent scholarship investigating whether voters prioritize democratic principles or strategically favor electoral procedures that provide partisan advantage. In two survey experiments, we confirm that Americans’ attitudes about antidemocratic election tactics reveal more about which team they are cheering for than they do about whether the tactics are fraudulent. The tendency to engage in partisan motivated reasoning occurs among all partisans, but there are subtle differences as to when citizens will engage in it. Partisan motivated reasoning is more common when actions cause harm and by the partisans that are harmed. Finally, Independents are more impartial, but less likely to call out improper tactics in the aggregate because they often fail to condemn actions by either party.

There is a long history of political violence in the United States. Scholars have documented numerous dispositions that predict support for violence as a political tactic, finding that a general tendency toward aggression is consistently among the strongest predictors. Yet, we know much less about how political attitudes might activate aggressive personalities and direct them toward specific targets. In this paper, we examine how policy attitudes interact with dispositional aggression to motivate support for political violence. Across two studies, using novel measures and within-subjects designs, we show that intense policy opposition strongly predicts support for aggressive political tactics against politicians responsible for the legislation – primarily among those who are dispositionally prone to aggression. Surprisingly, the strength of partisan identity plays little role in explaining support for political aggression. Our findings suggest that policy attitudes are a crucial factor for understanding when aggressive individuals might turn to political violence.

Recently, parties that are run by and for ethnic minority citizens with a migration background have become more prominent. They can be considered a manifestation of ethnic political segregation. A key example of such a party is DENK in the Netherlands. So far, the explanatory literature has focused on how programmatic considerations drives voting for these parties. Other factors, such as the role of social networks in mobilization, have received limited testing and limited exploration in more detail. Furthermore, the literature on social networks is mainly based on majority populations. To inform our understanding of the role of social networks in voting (in general but also particularly among ethnic minority communities and for ethnic minority interest parties) this paper analyzes the voting behavior for DENK focusing on the role of personal, online and religious networks. The paper uses both qualitative interviews (with bicultural youth in the third largest city of the Netherlands in 2022) and quantitative surveys (the 2021 Dutch Ethnic Minority Electoral Study). Our analysis points to the importance of religious and personal networks for voting for DENK, whereas online networks appear to be less relevant.

Legacies of an authoritarian past have enduring effects on voters’ attitudes and behaviors. I argue that authoritarian nostalgia is an important source of group sentiment and voter behavior in post-authoritarian democracies. Voters with nostalgic sentiment construct strong group sentiment based on historical perception and express attachment towards authoritarian successors. I test this argument with a new measure of authoritarian nostalgia. With original data collected from South Korea and Taiwan, I provide evidence that nostalgic voters are likely to exhibit strong group sentiment observable through partisan attachment. Abstracting from the specific cases, I use a randomly assigned candidate comparison analysis to demonstrate that voters high in authoritarian nostalgia are more attracted to hypothetical candidates invoking nostalgia than those with high programmatic or ideological proximity. Overall, the results show how authoritarian nostalgia remains important as a source of group sentiment in maturing democracies.

Do people think that some policies should be handled by the states, rather than the national government? In an era characterized by stark party polarization there is reason to suspect that attitudes regarding federalism are shaped by partisan considerations. Specifically, reported support for devolution may be driven by exposure to elite partisan cues and partisan reasoning tied to which political party devolution would empower. Using data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, we find that partisans tend to differ—often substantially—in their support for state-level decision-making regarding concrete policy proposals. However, these differences are largely driven by those who are most likely to be exposed to elite cues. We also find that, among both Democrats and Republicans, support for policy devolution is contingent on which party controls the state legislature in an individual’s state. The findings suggest that partisanship plays a central role in shaping what the public says when asked about which level of government should determine whether to implement specific policy proposals.