J Robison
Biographic Data
| ID | 21977 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Robison |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Robison |
| SIGNATURE | ROBISON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7472-2247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 347 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1914 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
No Shelter in Unanimity
Supreme Court justices sometimes strategically use unanimity in an attempt to bolster the legitimacy of a court ruling and of the court itself. Do unanimous court rulings promote legitimacy? We pair evidence from three experiments based on real Supreme Court cases (including rulings on Donald Trump’s ballot eligibility) with observational analyses of the General Social Survey (1975–2024) to examine the influence of unanimity in more realistic env…
Is sortition the ideal? Examining public reactions to climate assemblies
Policy interventions to address global warming have been politically controversial despite the scientific consensus that action is needed. Many environmental groups have thus demanded the use of deliberative mini‐publics (DMPs) or “climate assemblies” to give citizens direct influence over policymaking. However, if these assemblies are to be effective at overcoming political gridlock, then their recommendations must affect policy. We investigate …
Do the origins of climate assemblies shape public reactions? Examining the impact of partisanship
Governments around the world are experimenting with deliberative mini‐publics as a means of integrating public input into policymaking processes, including as a method for directly creating policy. This raises the important question of when ordinary people will judge the outputs of mini‐publics to be legitimate and support their use. We investigate how public support for mini‐publics is shaped by: (1) whether the mini‐public is held in response t…
Explanation Giving Promotes Democratic Satisfaction Regardless of Respondent Partisanship
A central norm of democratic governance is that elected officials explain their behavior to constituents. Prior work shows that explanation giving can improve evaluations of the explainer and the decision they have reached. However, this work has not examined whether more frequent explanation giving is associated with higher levels of democratic satisfaction. We address this question using data from the European Social Survey and Varieties of Dem…
Elite party disunity negatively predicts mass partisan-ideological sorting
Political parties often feature salient internal conflicts between elite members over the party's positioning on political issues. We consider the relationship between elite partisan disunity and an important element of mass partisanship: partisan-ideological sorting. We argue that the likelihood of a partisan being sorted on a political issue will decrease as the extent of within-party elite disunity increases because this disunity will make it …
Is a Polarized Party System a Too Extreme Party System? Understanding Perceptions of Party Extremity in the United States
The Democratic and Republican parties have polarized since the 1960s. Does the American public believe that the parties have grown “too extreme?” I leverage data from 18 national surveys to explain perceptions of party extremity as well as text-analysis of open-ended survey responses from an additional national survey to examine what the public associates with the concept of extremity. Three key results emerged. First, a growing proportion of Ame…
Valuing Politics
Civic duty is a critical feature of explanations of political participation, but why do individuals differ in their propensity to adopt particular civic duty norms? We argue that norms are likely to be adopted when congruent with underlying values and support this contention using evidence from the European Social Survey. We show that individuals who prioritize self-transcendence values (which capture altruistic goals) place much greater emphasis…
Partisan Influence in Suspicious Times
Parties can significantly influence their supporters' policy views via endorsement cues, raising worries about manipulation of mass opinion. We bring attention to a novel constraint on party influence: information implying that the party adopted its position due to the lobbying efforts of interest groups and campaign donors. Party cue taking is significantly reduced across three survey experiment when this type of information is presented alongsi…
Can Elites Escape Blame by Explaining Themselves? Suspicion and the Limits of Elite Explanations
Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting inf…
What's the Value of Partisan Loyalty? Partisan Ambivalence, Motivated Reasoning, and Correct Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Partisans vary in the extent to which they rely on their partisan identities when voting. Are partisans who rely less on their partisan loyalties more likely to vote correctly than those who stick with their partisan intuitions? Research on motivated reasoning suggests so, but research focused on the heuristic value of partisanship implies otherwise. We examine this question using evidence from the ANES Time Series (1972–2004) and 2008 ANES Panel…
Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation
Most citizens agree that legislators should reflect their constituencies' stances. Yet constituents rarely speak in a single voice. Instead, constituents often vary not only in their policy preferences, but also in the degree to which a given policy impacts their lives. Politicians thus at times pursue targeted representation, offering increased input to especially affected groups. As efforts to address anti‐Black police misconduct make clear, su…
Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters
Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals wo…
Does Issue Importance Predict Learning About Candidates
A long-standing argument is that policy voting is more likely on issues the voter considers subjectively important. However, existing evidence is highly mixed. We leverage panel data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel to investigate the relationship between subjective issue importance and a key mechanism thought to link it and policy voting: candidate knowledge. Using both lagged dependent variable and fixed-effect models, we find little evidence that…
Like, Post, and Distrust? How Social Media Use Affects Trust in Government
There is much discussion about the potential negative effects of social media use on people’s political attitudes. But, does social media use shape trust in government? We use evidence from the 2012 and 2016 ANES as well as the 2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll to test competing expectations regarding this question: that social media polarizes versus de-polarizes trust judgments across partisan lines. Our analyses provide greater suppor…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
Does Social Disagreement Attenuate Partisan Motivated Reasoning? A Test Case Concerning Economic Evaluations
Research on partisan motivated reasoning shows that citizens perceive the world differently based upon their partisan allegiances. Here we marshal evidence from several national surveys to investigate whether partisan motivated reasoning is attenuated among partisans situated within disagreeable political discussion networks. While our analyses suggest that exposure to interpersonal disagreement is associated with weaker partisan identities, we f…
Studying Identities with Experiments
Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, m…
The Group Basis of Partisan Affective Polarization
What explains rising partisan animosity in the United States? We argue that mass partisans’ feelings toward the social group coalitions of the parties are an important cause of rising affective polarization. We first leverage evidence from the American National Election Study (ANES) Time Series to show that partisans’ feelings toward the social groups linked to their in-party (out-party) have grown more positive (negative) over time. We then turn…
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
An Audit of Political Behavior Research
What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a secon…
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
The Social Rewards of Engagement
Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest. A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures for political interest (self-reports and revealed pref…
The Role of Elite Accounts in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Repositioning
Do Disagreeable Political Discussion Networks Undermine Attitude Strength
How attitudes change and affect behavior depends, in large part, on their strength. Strong attitudes are more resistant to persuasion and are more likely to produce attitude‐consistent behavior. But what influences attitude strength? In this article, we explore a widely discussed, but rarely investigated, factor: an individual's political discussion network. What prior work exists offers a somewhat mixed picture, finding sometimes that disagreeab…
Elite Polarization and Public Opinion
Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage…
Studying Identities with Experiments
Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, m…
The Group Basis of Partisan Affective Polarization
What explains rising partisan animosity in the United States? We argue that mass partisans’ feelings toward the social group coalitions of the parties are an important cause of rising affective polarization. We first leverage evidence from the American National Election Study (ANES) Time Series to show that partisans’ feelings toward the social groups linked to their in-party (out-party) have grown more positive (negative) over time. We then turn…
Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters
Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals wo…
Elite Polarization and Public Opinion
Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage…
Like, Post, and Distrust? How Social Media Use Affects Trust in Government
There is much discussion about the potential negative effects of social media use on people’s political attitudes. But, does social media use shape trust in government? We use evidence from the 2012 and 2016 ANES as well as the 2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll to test competing expectations regarding this question: that social media polarizes versus de-polarizes trust judgments across partisan lines. Our analyses provide greater suppor…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
Can Elites Escape Blame by Explaining Themselves? Suspicion and the Limits of Elite Explanations
Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting inf…
The Role of Elite Accounts in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Repositioning
Who Knows? Question Format and Political Knowledge
Political knowledge is one of the most influential variables in political science. However, scholars still grapple with its theoretical meaning and how to measure it best. I address the deeply contested issue of whether knowledge should be measured with either an open-ended or closed-choice measure. Beyond exploring the effects of these contested approaches on estimates of overall levels of mass knowledge, I also study how they influence who is d…
The Social Rewards of Engagement
Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest. A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures for political interest (self-reports and revealed pref…
Women's Caregiving
This study draws on panel data from a random sample of 293 wives and mothers, interviewed in 1956 and 1986, to: (1) examine changes in women's caregiving experiences across four different birth cohorts, and (2) assess the likelihood of women becoming caregivers. Women born in the late 1920s and early 1930s reported more episodes of caring for members of an older generation, for disabled children, and for more than one person at a time than women …
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
Do Disagreeable Political Discussion Networks Undermine Attitude Strength
How attitudes change and affect behavior depends, in large part, on their strength. Strong attitudes are more resistant to persuasion and are more likely to produce attitude‐consistent behavior. But what influences attitude strength? In this article, we explore a widely discussed, but rarely investigated, factor: an individual's political discussion network. What prior work exists offers a somewhat mixed picture, finding sometimes that disagreeab…
Does Social Disagreement Attenuate Partisan Motivated Reasoning? A Test Case Concerning Economic Evaluations
Research on partisan motivated reasoning shows that citizens perceive the world differently based upon their partisan allegiances. Here we marshal evidence from several national surveys to investigate whether partisan motivated reasoning is attenuated among partisans situated within disagreeable political discussion networks. While our analyses suggest that exposure to interpersonal disagreement is associated with weaker partisan identities, we f…
An Audit of Political Behavior Research
What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a secon…
Measuring Drug and Alcohol Use Among College Student‐Athletes
Objective Few issues in athletics today receive more attention than drug and alcohol usage, especially when it comes to college athletics. We seek to address self‐report biases related to drug usage and heavy drinking. Methods We employ an experimental measurement technique. Results Our results suggest that a greater percentage of student‐athletes from a major conference knowingly engage in these two behaviors than self‐reports indicate. Specific…
Gaps in Political Interest
Political interest fundamentally influences political behavior, knowledge, and persuasion (Brady, Verba, & Schlozman, 1995; Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Luskin, 1990; Zukin, Andolina, Keeter, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006). Since the early 1960s, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has sought to measure respondents’ general interest in politics by asking them how often they follow public affairs. In this article, we uncover novel sour…
Partisan Influence in Suspicious Times
Parties can significantly influence their supporters' policy views via endorsement cues, raising worries about manipulation of mass opinion. We bring attention to a novel constraint on party influence: information implying that the party adopted its position due to the lobbying efforts of interest groups and campaign donors. Party cue taking is significantly reduced across three survey experiment when this type of information is presented alongsi…
Does Issue Importance Predict Learning About Candidates
A long-standing argument is that policy voting is more likely on issues the voter considers subjectively important. However, existing evidence is highly mixed. We leverage panel data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel to investigate the relationship between subjective issue importance and a key mechanism thought to link it and policy voting: candidate knowledge. Using both lagged dependent variable and fixed-effect models, we find little evidence that…
Explanation Giving Promotes Democratic Satisfaction Regardless of Respondent Partisanship
A central norm of democratic governance is that elected officials explain their behavior to constituents. Prior work shows that explanation giving can improve evaluations of the explainer and the decision they have reached. However, this work has not examined whether more frequent explanation giving is associated with higher levels of democratic satisfaction. We address this question using data from the European Social Survey and Varieties of Dem…
Is a Polarized Party System a Too Extreme Party System? Understanding Perceptions of Party Extremity in the United States
The Democratic and Republican parties have polarized since the 1960s. Does the American public believe that the parties have grown “too extreme?” I leverage data from 18 national surveys to explain perceptions of party extremity as well as text-analysis of open-ended survey responses from an additional national survey to examine what the public associates with the concept of extremity. Three key results emerged. First, a growing proportion of Ame…
Valuing Politics
Civic duty is a critical feature of explanations of political participation, but why do individuals differ in their propensity to adopt particular civic duty norms? We argue that norms are likely to be adopted when congruent with underlying values and support this contention using evidence from the European Social Survey. We show that individuals who prioritize self-transcendence values (which capture altruistic goals) place much greater emphasis…
Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation
Most citizens agree that legislators should reflect their constituencies' stances. Yet constituents rarely speak in a single voice. Instead, constituents often vary not only in their policy preferences, but also in the degree to which a given policy impacts their lives. Politicians thus at times pursue targeted representation, offering increased input to especially affected groups. As efforts to address anti‐Black police misconduct make clear, su…
Account of the Excavation of the Edwardian Castle at Castledykes, Kirkcudbright
The first documentary reference to the castle is in 1288 when John Comyn was its guardian. Excavation revealed the entire ground plan of what would have been an extremely large and formidable fortress. It was surrounded by a deep moat with deep ditches on three sides and was bounded by the sea on the fourth. The surviving castle dates mainly from 1588 and was probably rebuilt from the remains of the earlier castle. Small quantities of pottery dat…
Women's Work and Caregiving Roles
This study drew on a life course approach and a sample of 293 women from four birth cohorts in upstate New York to examine the relationship over time between women's paid work and their informal caregiving of aging or infirm relatives. We find that such caregiving is an increasingly likely role for women, both as they age and across birth cohorts. One in four (24%) women became caregivers at some time between ages 35-44, and over one in three (36…
Women's Caregiving
This study draws on panel data from a random sample of 293 wives and mothers, interviewed in 1956 and 1986, to: (1) examine changes in women's caregiving experiences across four different birth cohorts, and (2) assess the likelihood of women becoming caregivers. Women born in the late 1920s and early 1930s reported more episodes of caring for members of an older generation, for disabled children, and for more than one person at a time than women …
Who Knows? Question Format and Political Knowledge
Political knowledge is one of the most influential variables in political science. However, scholars still grapple with its theoretical meaning and how to measure it best. I address the deeply contested issue of whether knowledge should be measured with either an open-ended or closed-choice measure. Beyond exploring the effects of these contested approaches on estimates of overall levels of mass knowledge, I also study how they influence who is d…
Gaps in Political Interest
Political interest fundamentally influences political behavior, knowledge, and persuasion (Brady, Verba, & Schlozman, 1995; Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Luskin, 1990; Zukin, Andolina, Keeter, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006). Since the early 1960s, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has sought to measure respondents’ general interest in politics by asking them how often they follow public affairs. In this article, we uncover novel sour…
Measuring Drug and Alcohol Use Among College Student‐Athletes
Objective Few issues in athletics today receive more attention than drug and alcohol usage, especially when it comes to college athletics. We seek to address self‐report biases related to drug usage and heavy drinking. Methods We employ an experimental measurement technique. Results Our results suggest that a greater percentage of student‐athletes from a major conference knowingly engage in these two behaviors than self‐reports indicate. Specific…
Do Disagreeable Political Discussion Networks Undermine Attitude Strength
How attitudes change and affect behavior depends, in large part, on their strength. Strong attitudes are more resistant to persuasion and are more likely to produce attitude‐consistent behavior. But what influences attitude strength? In this article, we explore a widely discussed, but rarely investigated, factor: an individual's political discussion network. What prior work exists offers a somewhat mixed picture, finding sometimes that disagreeab…
Elite Polarization and Public Opinion
Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage…
The Social Rewards of Engagement
Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest. A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures for political interest (self-reports and revealed pref…
The Role of Elite Accounts in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Repositioning
The class pictures in citizens' minds
Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to…
An Audit of Political Behavior Research
What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a secon…
In the eye of the beholder
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define class…
Studying Identities with Experiments
Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, m…
The Group Basis of Partisan Affective Polarization
What explains rising partisan animosity in the United States? We argue that mass partisans’ feelings toward the social group coalitions of the parties are an important cause of rising affective polarization. We first leverage evidence from the American National Election Study (ANES) Time Series to show that partisans’ feelings toward the social groups linked to their in-party (out-party) have grown more positive (negative) over time. We then turn…
Does Issue Importance Predict Learning About Candidates
A long-standing argument is that policy voting is more likely on issues the voter considers subjectively important. However, existing evidence is highly mixed. We leverage panel data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel to investigate the relationship between subjective issue importance and a key mechanism thought to link it and policy voting: candidate knowledge. Using both lagged dependent variable and fixed-effect models, we find little evidence that…
Like, Post, and Distrust? How Social Media Use Affects Trust in Government
There is much discussion about the potential negative effects of social media use on people’s political attitudes. But, does social media use shape trust in government? We use evidence from the 2012 and 2016 ANES as well as the 2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll to test competing expectations regarding this question: that social media polarizes versus de-polarizes trust judgments across partisan lines. Our analyses provide greater suppor…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
Does Social Disagreement Attenuate Partisan Motivated Reasoning? A Test Case Concerning Economic Evaluations
Research on partisan motivated reasoning shows that citizens perceive the world differently based upon their partisan allegiances. Here we marshal evidence from several national surveys to investigate whether partisan motivated reasoning is attenuated among partisans situated within disagreeable political discussion networks. While our analyses suggest that exposure to interpersonal disagreement is associated with weaker partisan identities, we f…
What's the Value of Partisan Loyalty? Partisan Ambivalence, Motivated Reasoning, and Correct Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Partisans vary in the extent to which they rely on their partisan identities when voting. Are partisans who rely less on their partisan loyalties more likely to vote correctly than those who stick with their partisan intuitions? Research on motivated reasoning suggests so, but research focused on the heuristic value of partisanship implies otherwise. We examine this question using evidence from the ANES Time Series (1972–2004) and 2008 ANES Panel…
Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation
Most citizens agree that legislators should reflect their constituencies' stances. Yet constituents rarely speak in a single voice. Instead, constituents often vary not only in their policy preferences, but also in the degree to which a given policy impacts their lives. Politicians thus at times pursue targeted representation, offering increased input to especially affected groups. As efforts to address anti‐Black police misconduct make clear, su…
Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters
Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals wo…
Partisan Influence in Suspicious Times
Parties can significantly influence their supporters' policy views via endorsement cues, raising worries about manipulation of mass opinion. We bring attention to a novel constraint on party influence: information implying that the party adopted its position due to the lobbying efforts of interest groups and campaign donors. Party cue taking is significantly reduced across three survey experiment when this type of information is presented alongsi…
Can Elites Escape Blame by Explaining Themselves? Suspicion and the Limits of Elite Explanations
Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting inf…
Elite party disunity negatively predicts mass partisan-ideological sorting
Political parties often feature salient internal conflicts between elite members over the party's positioning on political issues. We consider the relationship between elite partisan disunity and an important element of mass partisanship: partisan-ideological sorting. We argue that the likelihood of a partisan being sorted on a political issue will decrease as the extent of within-party elite disunity increases because this disunity will make it …
Psychology (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (13 works)