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.

Most prior U.S. political discussion research has failed to pay close attention to the networks of political independents, and to the differences between true partisans, leaners, and true independents. This is in direct contrast to the (appropriately) growing research attention paid to the decades-long rise in the proportion of independents and the decline of true partisans. This study presents representative U.S. survey data that compares political discussion frequency, network size, and the partisan composition of the discussion networks of partisans, leaners, and independents. After applying controls for ideological strength and political interest, we find that the three groups do not differ in discussion frequency or network size. However, there are meaningful differences across the groups in three different network composition measures, including partisan bias. We interpret our findings in the context of both applied measurement considerations and normative democratic expectations of partisan diversity within discussion networks.

Political Behavior -

Can exposure to successful immigrants in the mass media affect perceptions of immigrants and alter attitudes toward immigration? To address this question, I study the case of Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sah...

In recent years, new data and methods have reinvigorated research on two central elements of elite political behavior: politicians’ congruence with and knowledge of citizens’ opinions. Here, we survey...

Following the “bellicist” school of state formation, the external threat of war is expected to spur polity formation by centralizing military capacity (Tilly, in Coercion, Capital, and European States...

Many previous studies have shown that public service motivation (PSM) is associated with public sector employment. However, with few exceptions, such studies have focused on unelected positions in pub...

Studies of voting behavior in some settings may be hampered by poor data availability or unsuitably large units of aggregation for reported turnout. We propose and demonstrate a practical big-data sol...

Do voters who dislike the other side prefer candidates who can win, even if they are less representative? Negative partisanship is an important feature of American politics, but few scholars have exam...

Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without a...

The association between higher education and political attitudes is well-recognized, and research suggests that socialization amongst peers is one of the most probable mechanisms explaining a possible...

Political Behavior -

Does the media enhance issue accountability? Many argue it does by covering where politicians stand on policy. However, evidence of this process is limited and fails to address two alternatives. First...

This study uses the case of ecological protests in the Russian Federation and the social network of 903 263 VKontakte users to investigate the unique characteristics of protesters’ social networks and...

Numerous countries around the globe have undertaken efforts aimed at enhancing political representation. One of these efforts has taken the institutional form of reserved seats or ethnic districts whe...

Several studies have demonstrated the importance of racial resentment and sexism in voting in the 2016 election. While this could be primarily a function of the particular electoral context, this stud...

Democratic stability hinges on voters’ commitment to democratic norms, yet there are many examples of voters’ willingness to tolerate politicians who violate such principles. This article examines whe...

In recent years, research on gun ownership has grown substantially but there has been less exploration of variation within gun owners. This study examines the differences in support for democracy betw...

Fact-checks have been shown to be effective in correcting specific false beliefs, but do they also cause people to update their broader views about the phenomenon in question? We consider this questio...

In states and localities with direct democracy, citizens can advance their policy interests without the aid of elected officials. Research documenting citizens’ lack of political knowledge raises ques...

Studies have shown that citizens from minoritized groups, including women and people of color, tend to feel better represented by politicians who share their identity, often translating into electoral...