Kyle L Saunders
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3487727 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kyle L Saunders |
| NOMBRES | Kyle L |
| APELLIDO | Saunders |
| FIRMA | SAUNDERS K L |
| AFILIACIONES | Colorado State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4023-8729 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1604 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Ideological asymmetries of trust in elections and non-voting political participation
We replicate and extend previous research that asks whether operational ideology moderates the relationship between trust in elections and non-voting political participation (NVP) in the United States. Using data from the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES, n = 4256), we find more evidence that operational liberals are positively associated with NVP regardless of trust, whereas distrusting operational conservatives, in particular, are as…
Mindset to gain? Framing effects, Need for Chaos, and the limits of ‘Burning It All Down’
Emerging scholarship suggests that willingness to engage in violent or risky behavior relates to Need for Chaos – a trait-state combination reflecting disaffection with society and politics, independent of political identity and beliefs. While previous research links Need for Chaos to a stronger gain-seeking mentality, it remains unclear whether those higher in Need for Chaos respond differently to gain and loss frames. We use a framing experimen…
Losers’ Conspiracy
Elections produce winners and losers. Winners reap the benefits; losers have to dust themselves off. How each side chooses to respond has important implications for democratic stability. Winners may attempt to develop post-election narratives in such a way as to claim a mandate and consolidate power. But losers are even more likely to be motivated to search for an explanation—a narrative that not only explains the loss in a self-esteem preserving…
The impact of voter confusion in ranked choice voting
Objectives Election observers have expressed concerns about voter “confusion” under ranked choice voting (RCV) since the 1890s. What is the meaning of “confusing,” and how does it affect behavior? We argue (with much of the literature) that ranking candidates for public office is a cognitively complex task because of a lack of information. Methods We explore some observable implications of this perspective using exit poll data from the first RCV …
Distrusting the Process
This article explores the relationships between electoral trust, operational ideology, and nonvoting political participation (NVP) during the 2020 US presidential election cycle. We hypothesize that: (1) more liberal operational ideology is associated with more NVP, (2) less electoral trust is associated with more NVP, and (3) operational ideology moderates the negative relationship between electoral trust and NVP. Using data from the 2020 Americ…
By any memes necessary
Although a growing body of scholarship examines who believes conspiracy theories (CTs) and why, less is known about why people share CTs. We test the impact of three independent motives on people’s willingness to share CTs on social media: bolstering their or their group’s beliefs (motivated sharing), generating collective action against their political outgroup because of losing (sounding the alarm), and mobilizing others against the political s…
Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories
Putting the Political in Political Interest
Given that political interest is one of the best predictors of political participation, it remains curious that the causes of interest are undertheorized and understudied. Notably absent from much of the research on political interest is an exploration of how variations in the nature of politics itself might have an impact on individual-level political interest. We develop a theory and a set of testable predictions about how partisanship interact…
Macrointerest
An interested and engaged electorate is widely believed to be an indicator of democratic health. As such, the aggregate level of political interest of an electorate – macrointerest – is an essential commodity in a democracy, and understanding the forces that change macrointerest is important for diagnosing the health of a democracy. Because being interested in politics requires time and effort, the article theorizes that the electorate's level of…
Self-Affirmation and Identity-Driven Political Behavior
Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, fa…
Justice Speaks, but Who's Listening
We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements incr…
The impact of elite frames and motivated reasoning on beliefs in a global warming conspiracy
Given the potential attitudinal and behavioral impact of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conspiracy beliefs, it is important to understand their causes and moderators. Here, two explanations for the variation in these beliefs are engaged: the first is the choice among elites to frame AGW using the phrase ‘global warming’ (GW) as opposed to ‘climate change’ (CC); the second is partisan motivated reasoning. A theory is then developed about the r…
Conspiracy Theories in the United States
In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide an important corrective to empirical work suggesting that conspiracy theories are the domain of paranoids. The authors provide convincing evidence that conspiracy endorsement is a motivated-reasoning process that connects conspiracy theories that buttress psychologically threatened identities to the ideological worldviews of those who feel anxious, alienated, or powe…
It’s Not All About Resources
The dominant political science explanations of the causes of individual-level political participation converge on three sets of antecedents—resources/skills, recruitment, and political engagement. However, the overwhelming majority of the empirical tests of these antecedents rely on cross-sectional data, obscuring the fact that micro-level participation in the United States is more accurately characterized by instability rather than by stability.…
Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning
Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual-level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual-level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from…
Pillar Talk
This article examines local sustainability initiatives in the United States through the lens of the “three pillars” of sustainability: economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. A comprehensive index is created using national-level survey data on local sustainability initiatives, then census and other data are used to examine local activities related to all three pillars of sustainability. Analysis of a series of correlati…
Considering Mixed Mode Surveys for Questions in Political Behavior
A new barrier to participation
Is Polarization a Myth
This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorina's assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence in…
The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence
The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Cal…
Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate
This article uses data from the 1952-2004 American National Election Studies and the 2004 U.S. National Exit Poll to compare the influence of ideology and membership in social groups on party identification. Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) that party loyalties are rooted in voters’ social identities, we find that party identification is much more strongly related to voters’ ideological preferences than to their soc…
Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Reality of a Polarized America
According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we …
A New Kind of Balancing Act
A New Kind of Balancing Act
Using data from the 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, this article analyzes the behavior of voters who split their tickets, voting for one party’s presidential candidate and the opposing party’s House candidate, in presidential election years. We test the hypotheses that balancing behavior is likely to occur only when the outcome of the presidential election is relatively certain, and that balancing is most likely to occur among r…
Effective Quotas, Relative Party Magnitude, and the Success of Female Candidates
The extraordinary success of gender quotas in the 1998 Peruvian municipal elections defies conventional wisdom in electoral studies. This article evaluates several institutional variables that are prominently featured in the literature and several others that were “discovered” in Peru, using pooled ordinary least squares regression models and original data sets. Two of the newly discovered variables—effective quotas and seats guaranteed by the ef…
Is Polarization a Myth
This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorina's assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence in…
Ideological Realignment in the U.S. Electorate
Using data from the 1976-1994 American National Election Studies and the 1992-94 ANES panel survey, this paper demonstrates that the outcomes of the 1994 and 1996 elections reflected a long-term shift in the bases of support and relative strength of the two major parties. This shift in the party loyalties of the electorate was based on the increased ideological polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties during the Reagan and post-Reaga…
Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning
Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual-level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual-level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from…
Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate
This article uses data from the 1952-2004 American National Election Studies and the 2004 U.S. National Exit Poll to compare the influence of ideology and membership in social groups on party identification. Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) that party loyalties are rooted in voters’ social identities, we find that party identification is much more strongly related to voters’ ideological preferences than to their soc…
Effective Quotas, Relative Party Magnitude, and the Success of Female Candidates
The extraordinary success of gender quotas in the 1998 Peruvian municipal elections defies conventional wisdom in electoral studies. This article evaluates several institutional variables that are prominently featured in the literature and several others that were “discovered” in Peru, using pooled ordinary least squares regression models and original data sets. Two of the newly discovered variables—effective quotas and seats guaranteed by the ef…
A new barrier to participation
Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Reality of a Polarized America
According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we …
Pillar Talk
This article examines local sustainability initiatives in the United States through the lens of the “three pillars” of sustainability: economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. A comprehensive index is created using national-level survey data on local sustainability initiatives, then census and other data are used to examine local activities related to all three pillars of sustainability. Analysis of a series of correlati…
The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence
The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Cal…
Ideological Realignment and Active Partisans in the American Electorate
This article investigates the consequences of ideological realignment for the motivations and policy preferences of active partisans—Democratic and Republican identifiers who engage in electoral activities that go beyond the act of voting. We hypothesize that, consistent with the logic of persuasion and selective recruitment/derecruitment, the influence of ideology as a motivation for campaign participation varies over time and between parties de…
Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories
Considering Mixed Mode Surveys for Questions in Political Behavior
The impact of elite frames and motivated reasoning on beliefs in a global warming conspiracy
Given the potential attitudinal and behavioral impact of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conspiracy beliefs, it is important to understand their causes and moderators. Here, two explanations for the variation in these beliefs are engaged: the first is the choice among elites to frame AGW using the phrase ‘global warming’ (GW) as opposed to ‘climate change’ (CC); the second is partisan motivated reasoning. A theory is then developed about the r…
A New Kind of Balancing Act
Using data from the 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, this article analyzes the behavior of voters who split their tickets, voting for one party’s presidential candidate and the opposing party’s House candidate, in presidential election years. We test the hypotheses that balancing behavior is likely to occur only when the outcome of the presidential election is relatively certain, and that balancing is most likely to occur among r…
Justice Speaks, but Who's Listening
We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements incr…
It’s Not All About Resources
The dominant political science explanations of the causes of individual-level political participation converge on three sets of antecedents—resources/skills, recruitment, and political engagement. However, the overwhelming majority of the empirical tests of these antecedents rely on cross-sectional data, obscuring the fact that micro-level participation in the United States is more accurately characterized by instability rather than by stability.…
Self-Affirmation and Identity-Driven Political Behavior
Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, fa…
Conspiracy Theories in the United States
In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide an important corrective to empirical work suggesting that conspiracy theories are the domain of paranoids. The authors provide convincing evidence that conspiracy endorsement is a motivated-reasoning process that connects conspiracy theories that buttress psychologically threatened identities to the ideological worldviews of those who feel anxious, alienated, or powe…
By any memes necessary
Although a growing body of scholarship examines who believes conspiracy theories (CTs) and why, less is known about why people share CTs. We test the impact of three independent motives on people’s willingness to share CTs on social media: bolstering their or their group’s beliefs (motivated sharing), generating collective action against their political outgroup because of losing (sounding the alarm), and mobilizing others against the political s…
Macrointerest
An interested and engaged electorate is widely believed to be an indicator of democratic health. As such, the aggregate level of political interest of an electorate – macrointerest – is an essential commodity in a democracy, and understanding the forces that change macrointerest is important for diagnosing the health of a democracy. Because being interested in politics requires time and effort, the article theorizes that the electorate's level of…
Distrusting the Process
This article explores the relationships between electoral trust, operational ideology, and nonvoting political participation (NVP) during the 2020 US presidential election cycle. We hypothesize that: (1) more liberal operational ideology is associated with more NVP, (2) less electoral trust is associated with more NVP, and (3) operational ideology moderates the negative relationship between electoral trust and NVP. Using data from the 2020 Americ…
The impact of voter confusion in ranked choice voting
Objectives Election observers have expressed concerns about voter “confusion” under ranked choice voting (RCV) since the 1890s. What is the meaning of “confusing,” and how does it affect behavior? We argue (with much of the literature) that ranking candidates for public office is a cognitively complex task because of a lack of information. Methods We explore some observable implications of this perspective using exit poll data from the first RCV …
Putting the Political in Political Interest
Given that political interest is one of the best predictors of political participation, it remains curious that the causes of interest are undertheorized and understudied. Notably absent from much of the research on political interest is an exploration of how variations in the nature of politics itself might have an impact on individual-level political interest. We develop a theory and a set of testable predictions about how partisanship interact…
A New Kind of Balancing Act
Ideological Realignment in the U.S. Electorate
Using data from the 1976-1994 American National Election Studies and the 1992-94 ANES panel survey, this paper demonstrates that the outcomes of the 1994 and 1996 elections reflected a long-term shift in the bases of support and relative strength of the two major parties. This shift in the party loyalties of the electorate was based on the increased ideological polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties during the Reagan and post-Reaga…
Effective Quotas, Relative Party Magnitude, and the Success of Female Candidates
The extraordinary success of gender quotas in the 1998 Peruvian municipal elections defies conventional wisdom in electoral studies. This article evaluates several institutional variables that are prominently featured in the literature and several others that were “discovered” in Peru, using pooled ordinary least squares regression models and original data sets. Two of the newly discovered variables—effective quotas and seats guaranteed by the ef…
Ideological Realignment and Active Partisans in the American Electorate
This article investigates the consequences of ideological realignment for the motivations and policy preferences of active partisans—Democratic and Republican identifiers who engage in electoral activities that go beyond the act of voting. We hypothesize that, consistent with the logic of persuasion and selective recruitment/derecruitment, the influence of ideology as a motivation for campaign participation varies over time and between parties de…
Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Reality of a Polarized America
According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we …
A New Kind of Balancing Act
A New Kind of Balancing Act
Using data from the 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, this article analyzes the behavior of voters who split their tickets, voting for one party’s presidential candidate and the opposing party’s House candidate, in presidential election years. We test the hypotheses that balancing behavior is likely to occur only when the outcome of the presidential election is relatively certain, and that balancing is most likely to occur among r…
Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate
This article uses data from the 1952-2004 American National Election Studies and the 2004 U.S. National Exit Poll to compare the influence of ideology and membership in social groups on party identification. Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) that party loyalties are rooted in voters’ social identities, we find that party identification is much more strongly related to voters’ ideological preferences than to their soc…
The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence
The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Cal…
Is Polarization a Myth
This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorina's assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence in…
A new barrier to participation
Considering Mixed Mode Surveys for Questions in Political Behavior
Pillar Talk
This article examines local sustainability initiatives in the United States through the lens of the “three pillars” of sustainability: economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. A comprehensive index is created using national-level survey data on local sustainability initiatives, then census and other data are used to examine local activities related to all three pillars of sustainability. Analysis of a series of correlati…
Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning
Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual-level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual-level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from…
Conspiracy Theories in the United States
In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide an important corrective to empirical work suggesting that conspiracy theories are the domain of paranoids. The authors provide convincing evidence that conspiracy endorsement is a motivated-reasoning process that connects conspiracy theories that buttress psychologically threatened identities to the ideological worldviews of those who feel anxious, alienated, or powe…
It’s Not All About Resources
The dominant political science explanations of the causes of individual-level political participation converge on three sets of antecedents—resources/skills, recruitment, and political engagement. However, the overwhelming majority of the empirical tests of these antecedents rely on cross-sectional data, obscuring the fact that micro-level participation in the United States is more accurately characterized by instability rather than by stability.…
The impact of elite frames and motivated reasoning on beliefs in a global warming conspiracy
Given the potential attitudinal and behavioral impact of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conspiracy beliefs, it is important to understand their causes and moderators. Here, two explanations for the variation in these beliefs are engaged: the first is the choice among elites to frame AGW using the phrase ‘global warming’ (GW) as opposed to ‘climate change’ (CC); the second is partisan motivated reasoning. A theory is then developed about the r…
Justice Speaks, but Who's Listening
We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements incr…
Self-Affirmation and Identity-Driven Political Behavior
Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, fa…
Macrointerest
An interested and engaged electorate is widely believed to be an indicator of democratic health. As such, the aggregate level of political interest of an electorate – macrointerest – is an essential commodity in a democracy, and understanding the forces that change macrointerest is important for diagnosing the health of a democracy. Because being interested in politics requires time and effort, the article theorizes that the electorate's level of…
By any memes necessary
Although a growing body of scholarship examines who believes conspiracy theories (CTs) and why, less is known about why people share CTs. We test the impact of three independent motives on people’s willingness to share CTs on social media: bolstering their or their group’s beliefs (motivated sharing), generating collective action against their political outgroup because of losing (sounding the alarm), and mobilizing others against the political s…
Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories
Putting the Political in Political Interest
Given that political interest is one of the best predictors of political participation, it remains curious that the causes of interest are undertheorized and understudied. Notably absent from much of the research on political interest is an exploration of how variations in the nature of politics itself might have an impact on individual-level political interest. We develop a theory and a set of testable predictions about how partisanship interact…
The impact of voter confusion in ranked choice voting
Objectives Election observers have expressed concerns about voter “confusion” under ranked choice voting (RCV) since the 1890s. What is the meaning of “confusing,” and how does it affect behavior? We argue (with much of the literature) that ranking candidates for public office is a cognitively complex task because of a lack of information. Methods We explore some observable implications of this perspective using exit poll data from the first RCV …
Distrusting the Process
This article explores the relationships between electoral trust, operational ideology, and nonvoting political participation (NVP) during the 2020 US presidential election cycle. We hypothesize that: (1) more liberal operational ideology is associated with more NVP, (2) less electoral trust is associated with more NVP, and (3) operational ideology moderates the negative relationship between electoral trust and NVP. Using data from the 2020 Americ…
Mindset to gain? Framing effects, Need for Chaos, and the limits of ‘Burning It All Down’
Emerging scholarship suggests that willingness to engage in violent or risky behavior relates to Need for Chaos – a trait-state combination reflecting disaffection with society and politics, independent of political identity and beliefs. While previous research links Need for Chaos to a stronger gain-seeking mentality, it remains unclear whether those higher in Need for Chaos respond differently to gain and loss frames. We use a framing experimen…
Political science (25 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Social Media and Politics (14 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Social Psychology (13 obras) · Political economy (12 obras)