Political Behavior最新文献

Emotional appeals are powerful motivators of political action. Yet the gender of a politician and the existing stereotypes held by audiences complicate the determination of which type of emotional appeal is best suited for different issue areas. In what ways do politicians' emotional appeals serve to mitigate or exacerbate the impact of gender stereotypes across different policy domains? This research examines when politicians pay penalties or gain rewards for their emotional expressions using a survey experiment on a diverse national sample. We find evidence that women politicians are on equal footing or stand to benefit when expressing masculine emotions while also having greater emotional freedom across policy domains. Men politicians, on the other hand, are significantly punished for not acting "manly" enough in masculine policy domains. Nonetheless, these patterns become complicated by both situational context and partisan expectations. The results provide promise for the future prospects of women politicians while pointing to the continued relevance of gendered stereotypes about emotionality in today's political world.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09727-5.

In this study, we investigate voters' unaided perceptions of whether politicians are lying. We conduct an experiment in which participants attempt to uncover politicians' dishonesty by watching videos of their speeches. We find that verbal cues (specifically, the amount of detail in the speech) and general demeanor cues explain the success (failure) of veracity judgments far better than paraverbal and nonverbal cues. We also find evidence of a truth bias-people are more likely to judge statements to be true than false-despite the political setting, where voters might have been more skeptical. However, gender plays a deterministic role for veracity judgments in political context; female politicians are more likely to be judged as honest.

A narrow information diet may be partly to blame for the growing political divides in the United States, suggesting exposure to dissimilar views as a remedy. These efforts, however, could be counterproductive, exacerbating attitude and affective polarization. Yet findings on whether such boomerang effect exists are mixed and the consequences of dissimilar exposure on other important outcomes remain unexplored. To contribute to this debate, we rely on a preregistered longitudinal experimental design combining participants' survey self-reports and their behavioral browsing data, in which one should observe boomerang effects. We incentivized liberals to read political articles on extreme conservative outlets (Breitbart, The American Spectator, and The Blaze) and conservatives to read extreme left-leaning sites (Mother Jones, Democracy Now, and The Nation). We maximize ecological validity by embedding the treatment in a larger project that tracks over time changes in online exposure and attitudes. We explored the effects on attitude and affective polarization, as well as on perceptions of the political system, support for democratic principles, and personal well-being. Overall we find little evidence of boomerang effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic is viewed by many as the biggest global crisis since WWII and had profound effects on the daily lives of people and decision-making worldwide. Using the pandemic as a system-wide agenda shock, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its causal effects on inequalities in political access, and social media prominence among business interests and NGOs. Our argument is twofold. First, the urgency and uncertainty of crises incentivized decision-makers to privilege providing access to business groups over securing inclusivity in the types of interests consulted. Second, NGOs compensated by increasing prominence in public communications. Our analysis of data from over 10,000 interest groups from over 100 countries registered in the European Union supports these hypotheses. Business interests successfully capitalized on the crisis in insider access, while NGOs increased prominence on social media. The results have wider implications for understanding how large-scale crises affect inequalities in representation.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09842-x.

What were the indicators of voter turnout and presidential vote choice among Asian Americans in 2020? We argue that 2020 was a unique year in which race was salient for Asian Americans due to the rise of anti-Asian attitudes attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and the opportunity to elect a vice presidential candidate of Asian descent. Because of this, racial considerations played a unique role that informed Asian American political participation and attitudes in this election. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we identify the individual-level factors associated with turnout and presidential vote choice among Asian Americans. We find that stronger perceptions of racial discrimination were related to a higher likelihood of turnout and voting in support of the Democratic Party, especially among Asian immigrants relative to the native-born. This study offers new insight for when we can expect racial considerations to inform the politics of Asian Americans, who are the fastest growing racial group in the United States and therefore an increasingly important bloc of the electorate.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09844-9.

How do media portrayals of potential policy beneficiaries' identities sway public support for these policies in a public health setting? Using a pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that the racial identity of substance users depicted in news media shapes public opinion on policies to address the opioid crisis. People display biases in favor of their own racial identity group that manifest in their support for both treatment-based policies and punitive policies. We show that these biases may be moderated by the type of initial drug used by a substance user and associated levels of perceived blame. Extending theories of group politics, we also assess favoritism based on gender and residential context identities, but find no such biases. These results highlight the continued centrality of race in the formation of policy preferences.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09845-8.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s11109-022-09826-x.].