Marc J Hetherington
Biographic Data
| ID | 1020141 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc J Hetherington |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc J |
| FAMILY NAME | Hetherington |
| SIGNATURE | HETHERINGTON M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4707-0132 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2491 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
More than a partisan pandemic: Worldview and Covid ‐19 response in the United States
As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolded, public responses increasingly divided along political lines: Democrats tended to support policies and behaviors recommended by public health experts and Republicans tended to oppose them. We argue that exclusively party‐based explanations for these patterns are incomplete. Instead, we call attention to people's philosophy about life—their “worldview”—as an important force behind their pandemic responses. We posi…
Hypercompetitiveness and Loser’s Consent
Electoral democracy rests on the conferral of Loser’s Consent. The Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021—and the widespread sympathy for it that endures among Republican citizens and elected officials—can be understood as an unprecedented denial of that Consent. We hypothesize that insurrectionist sympathies among 2020 election losers are structured in part by hypercompetitiveness—a psychological need to win at all costs. Using original survey …
Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the Covid‐19 Pandemic
Contemporary American politics has been largely characterized by hyperpartisanship and polarization, with partisan‐motivated reasoning a thematic concern. Theories of emotions in politics suggest that anxiety might interrupt partisan heuristics and encourage citizens to reason more evenhandedly—but in what domains and to what extent? We use original panel data to assess how anxiety about becoming seriously ill from COVID‐19 interacted with partis…
Advancing the Measurement of Authoritarianism
Masks and racial stereotypes in a pandemic: The case for surgical masks
To contain the spread of COVID-19, experts emphasize the importance of wearing masks. Unfortunately, this practice may put black people at elevated risk for being seen as potential threats by some Americans. In this study, we evaluate whether and how different types of masks affect perceptions of black and white male models. We find that non-black respondents perceive a black male model as more threatening and less trustworthy when he is wearing …
Affective Polarization in Political and Nonpolitical Settings
We seek to understand the extent to which affective polarization is driven by in-group love or out-group hate and whether it varies across context. The answer may, in turn, allow us to evaluate how well the fundamental premises of social identity theory mesh with different manifestations of affective polarization. Using an experiment to analyze partisans’ trust judgments, we find that the amount of affective polarization and the dominant mechanis…
Fractured America: How did we get here
An August 2020 CBS Poll asked Americans whether they considered the number of fatalities from Covid-19 – then around 170,000 in the United States – acceptable. The vast majority of Americans, including 90% of Democrats, said it was not. But among Republicans, fully 57% did deem it acceptable, though many also wondered whether the number of deaths was being exaggerated. Regardless, the reporting of that poll was accompanied by widespread shock tha…
Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism
Revisiting the Myth: New Evidence of a Polarized Electorate
This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party’s candidate, but not their own, a…
Back to the Future? What the Politics of the Late Nineteenth Century Can Tell Us about the 2016 Election
The politics and party system of the late Civil War era are strikingly similar to what we have in the present day. Elections were consistently close; race, culture, immigration, and populism were salient issues; and states almost always voted for the same party in election after election. The states that supported Democrats then, however, mostly support Republicans now, and vice versa. In 1896, though, a new party system began to emerge. In this …
Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis
Why Polarized Trust Matters”
The early 2000s has witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon in public opinion, polarized political trust. By polarized, I mean that those who identify with the party opposite the president express much less trust in government than those who identify with the president’s party. Indeed, outparty partisans express almost no political trust at all. This is important because it is this group of people who have traditionally been the bridge that allows…
Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale
Using a scale of child rearing preferences, scholars find that African Americans are far more authoritarian than Whites. We argue that this racial gap in authoritarianism is largely a measurement artifact. The child rearing scale now used to measure authoritarianism is cross-racially invalid because it draws heavily on a metaphor about hierarchy. Akin to someone who favors enforcing conformity in a child, the authoritarian is thought to be inclin…
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics
How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust
Americans most often think about government in terms of its ability to grapple with issues of redistribution and race. However, the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a massive increase in media attention to foreign affairs, which caused people to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. We demonstrate that such changes in issue salience alter the policy preferences that political trust shapes. Specifically, we show t…
Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror: Authoritarianism, Threat, and the War on Terror
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article published in American Journal of Political Science following peer review
Matthew Levendusky. The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans
The polarization of the American political system has received tremendous interest from political scientists and pundits alike, and for good reason. Many longtime political observers, some of whom thought stronger parties would improve American politics, now decry that the parties are out of control. A number of excellent books about polarization have already been published, yet Levendusky makes several distinct and substantively important contri…
Authoritarianism and polarization in American politics
Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that diff…
Priming, Performance, and the Dynamics of Political Trust
Political trust has never returned to Great Society-era levels. Conventional wisdom suggests that chronically poor performance explains why. Over the last 25 years, however, performance has often been at least very good. We show that one key to understanding the persistence of lower levels of political trust is that Americans have become more apt to use less favorable criteria when asked to evaluate government. When more people identify internati…
Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court
Journal Article Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court Get access Marc J. Hetherington, Marc J. Hetherington marc. j. hetherington is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Address correspondence to Marc J. Hetherington, e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joseph L. Smith Joseph L. Smith joseph l. smith is an Assist…
The Price of Leadership: Campaign Money and the Polarization of Congressional Parties
We argue that the leadership selection system, which now gives significant weight to fundraising, helps explain the continuing polarization of the congressional parties. Focusing first on elected party leadership posts, we demonstrate that members will select ideologically extreme leaders over "ideological middlemen" when extremists redistribute more money than their more centrist opponents. We then show that redistributing campaign money also he…
The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races
We examine the impact of the ten-year redistricting cycle on strategic candidate behavior. First, we provide evidence that strategic candidate behavior is a function of an election's temporal proximity to a redistricting year, finding that quality challengers are less likely to emerge as the redistricting cycle progresses. Next, we show that strategic candidates interpret national and local political conditions through the lens of time. Specifica…
Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism
The “rally-round-the-flag effect” sparked by the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and by President George W. Bush's prompt launching of the War on Terrorism cries out for the kind of timely analysis that political scientists sometimes can provide. A rally effect is the sudden and substantial increase in public approval of the president that occurs in response to certain kinds of dramatic international events involving the Un…
Political Trust and Racial Policy Preferences
perceived policy costs are high, trust affects white parents' support for education quotas but not white nonparents' support. The prolonged and dramatic drop in Americans' political trust over the past thirty-five years has prompted intense academic and jour? nalistic inquiry. While scholars have offered various explanations for the decline (e.g., Citrin 1974; Miller 1974), they have offered little em? pirical investigation into its consequences.…
Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization
For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced …
The Political Relevance of Political Trust
Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of s…
Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization
For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced …
Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism
Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror: Authoritarianism, Threat, and the War on Terror
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article published in American Journal of Political Science following peer review
The Media's Role in Forming Voters' National Economic Evaluations in 1992
Theory: In terms of economic voting, voters' perceptions of economic indicators can be more important than the statistics themselves. This distinction is particularly important in understanding George Bush's defeat in 1992. Hypothesis: Relentlessly negative reporting on economic performance during the election year negatively affected voters' perceptions of the economy. These altered perceptions influenced voting behavior. Methods: Ordinary least…
The Effect of Political Trust on the Presidential Vote, 1968-96
Scholars have consistently demonstrated that no link exists between declining political trust and declining turnout, but they have paid less attention to the effect of trust on vote choice. In an era characterized by declining trust, the incumbent party has lost, and third parties have strongly contested, four of the last eight presidential elections. Such outcomes are historically anomalous. This study demonstrates that declining political trust…
How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust
Americans most often think about government in terms of its ability to grapple with issues of redistribution and race. However, the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a massive increase in media attention to foreign affairs, which caused people to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. We demonstrate that such changes in issue salience alter the policy preferences that political trust shapes. Specifically, we show t…
Priming, Performance, and the Dynamics of Political Trust
Political trust has never returned to Great Society-era levels. Conventional wisdom suggests that chronically poor performance explains why. Over the last 25 years, however, performance has often been at least very good. We show that one key to understanding the persistence of lower levels of political trust is that Americans have become more apt to use less favorable criteria when asked to evaluate government. When more people identify internati…
Political Trust and Racial Policy Preferences
perceived policy costs are high, trust affects white parents' support for education quotas but not white nonparents' support. The prolonged and dramatic drop in Americans' political trust over the past thirty-five years has prompted intense academic and jour? nalistic inquiry. While scholars have offered various explanations for the decline (e.g., Citrin 1974; Miller 1974), they have offered little em? pirical investigation into its consequences.…
Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism
The “rally-round-the-flag effect” sparked by the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and by President George W. Bush's prompt launching of the War on Terrorism cries out for the kind of timely analysis that political scientists sometimes can provide. A rally effect is the sudden and substantial increase in public approval of the president that occurs in response to certain kinds of dramatic international events involving the Un…
Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale
Using a scale of child rearing preferences, scholars find that African Americans are far more authoritarian than Whites. We argue that this racial gap in authoritarianism is largely a measurement artifact. The child rearing scale now used to measure authoritarianism is cross-racially invalid because it draws heavily on a metaphor about hierarchy. Akin to someone who favors enforcing conformity in a child, the authoritarian is thought to be inclin…
The Price of Leadership: Campaign Money and the Polarization of Congressional Parties
We argue that the leadership selection system, which now gives significant weight to fundraising, helps explain the continuing polarization of the congressional parties. Focusing first on elected party leadership posts, we demonstrate that members will select ideologically extreme leaders over "ideological middlemen" when extremists redistribute more money than their more centrist opponents. We then show that redistributing campaign money also he…
Revisiting the Myth: New Evidence of a Polarized Electorate
This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party’s candidate, but not their own, a…
The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races
We examine the impact of the ten-year redistricting cycle on strategic candidate behavior. First, we provide evidence that strategic candidate behavior is a function of an election's temporal proximity to a redistricting year, finding that quality challengers are less likely to emerge as the redistricting cycle progresses. Next, we show that strategic candidates interpret national and local political conditions through the lens of time. Specifica…
Advancing the Measurement of Authoritarianism
Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court
Journal Article Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court Get access Marc J. Hetherington, Marc J. Hetherington marc. j. hetherington is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Address correspondence to Marc J. Hetherington, e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joseph L. Smith Joseph L. Smith joseph l. smith is an Assist…
Affective Polarization in Political and Nonpolitical Settings
We seek to understand the extent to which affective polarization is driven by in-group love or out-group hate and whether it varies across context. The answer may, in turn, allow us to evaluate how well the fundamental premises of social identity theory mesh with different manifestations of affective polarization. Using an experiment to analyze partisans’ trust judgments, we find that the amount of affective polarization and the dominant mechanis…
Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the Covid‐19 Pandemic
Contemporary American politics has been largely characterized by hyperpartisanship and polarization, with partisan‐motivated reasoning a thematic concern. Theories of emotions in politics suggest that anxiety might interrupt partisan heuristics and encourage citizens to reason more evenhandedly—but in what domains and to what extent? We use original panel data to assess how anxiety about becoming seriously ill from COVID‐19 interacted with partis…
Back to the Future? What the Politics of the Late Nineteenth Century Can Tell Us about the 2016 Election
The politics and party system of the late Civil War era are strikingly similar to what we have in the present day. Elections were consistently close; race, culture, immigration, and populism were salient issues; and states almost always voted for the same party in election after election. The states that supported Democrats then, however, mostly support Republicans now, and vice versa. In 1896, though, a new party system began to emerge. In this …
Why Polarized Trust Matters”
The early 2000s has witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon in public opinion, polarized political trust. By polarized, I mean that those who identify with the party opposite the president express much less trust in government than those who identify with the president’s party. Indeed, outparty partisans express almost no political trust at all. This is important because it is this group of people who have traditionally been the bridge that allows…
The Media's Role in Forming Voters' National Economic Evaluations in 1992
Theory: In terms of economic voting, voters' perceptions of economic indicators can be more important than the statistics themselves. This distinction is particularly important in understanding George Bush's defeat in 1992. Hypothesis: Relentlessly negative reporting on economic performance during the election year negatively affected voters' perceptions of the economy. These altered perceptions influenced voting behavior. Methods: Ordinary least…
The Political Relevance of Political Trust
Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of s…
The Effect of Political Trust on the Presidential Vote, 1968-96
Scholars have consistently demonstrated that no link exists between declining political trust and declining turnout, but they have paid less attention to the effect of trust on vote choice. In an era characterized by declining trust, the incumbent party has lost, and third parties have strongly contested, four of the last eight presidential elections. Such outcomes are historically anomalous. This study demonstrates that declining political trust…
Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization
For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced …
Political Trust and Racial Policy Preferences
perceived policy costs are high, trust affects white parents' support for education quotas but not white nonparents' support. The prolonged and dramatic drop in Americans' political trust over the past thirty-five years has prompted intense academic and jour? nalistic inquiry. While scholars have offered various explanations for the decline (e.g., Citrin 1974; Miller 1974), they have offered little em? pirical investigation into its consequences.…
The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races
We examine the impact of the ten-year redistricting cycle on strategic candidate behavior. First, we provide evidence that strategic candidate behavior is a function of an election's temporal proximity to a redistricting year, finding that quality challengers are less likely to emerge as the redistricting cycle progresses. Next, we show that strategic candidates interpret national and local political conditions through the lens of time. Specifica…
Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism
The “rally-round-the-flag effect” sparked by the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and by President George W. Bush's prompt launching of the War on Terrorism cries out for the kind of timely analysis that political scientists sometimes can provide. A rally effect is the sudden and substantial increase in public approval of the president that occurs in response to certain kinds of dramatic international events involving the Un…
The Price of Leadership: Campaign Money and the Polarization of Congressional Parties
We argue that the leadership selection system, which now gives significant weight to fundraising, helps explain the continuing polarization of the congressional parties. Focusing first on elected party leadership posts, we demonstrate that members will select ideologically extreme leaders over "ideological middlemen" when extremists redistribute more money than their more centrist opponents. We then show that redistributing campaign money also he…
Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court
Journal Article Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court Get access Marc J. Hetherington, Marc J. Hetherington marc. j. hetherington is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Address correspondence to Marc J. Hetherington, e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joseph L. Smith Joseph L. Smith joseph l. smith is an Assist…
Priming, Performance, and the Dynamics of Political Trust
Political trust has never returned to Great Society-era levels. Conventional wisdom suggests that chronically poor performance explains why. Over the last 25 years, however, performance has often been at least very good. We show that one key to understanding the persistence of lower levels of political trust is that Americans have become more apt to use less favorable criteria when asked to evaluate government. When more people identify internati…
Authoritarianism and polarization in American politics
Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that diff…
Matthew Levendusky. The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans
The polarization of the American political system has received tremendous interest from political scientists and pundits alike, and for good reason. Many longtime political observers, some of whom thought stronger parties would improve American politics, now decry that the parties are out of control. A number of excellent books about polarization have already been published, yet Levendusky makes several distinct and substantively important contri…
Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror: Authoritarianism, Threat, and the War on Terror
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article published in American Journal of Political Science following peer review
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics
How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust
Americans most often think about government in terms of its ability to grapple with issues of redistribution and race. However, the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a massive increase in media attention to foreign affairs, which caused people to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. We demonstrate that such changes in issue salience alter the policy preferences that political trust shapes. Specifically, we show t…
Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale
Using a scale of child rearing preferences, scholars find that African Americans are far more authoritarian than Whites. We argue that this racial gap in authoritarianism is largely a measurement artifact. The child rearing scale now used to measure authoritarianism is cross-racially invalid because it draws heavily on a metaphor about hierarchy. Akin to someone who favors enforcing conformity in a child, the authoritarian is thought to be inclin…
Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis
Why Polarized Trust Matters”
The early 2000s has witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon in public opinion, polarized political trust. By polarized, I mean that those who identify with the party opposite the president express much less trust in government than those who identify with the president’s party. Indeed, outparty partisans express almost no political trust at all. This is important because it is this group of people who have traditionally been the bridge that allows…
Revisiting the Myth: New Evidence of a Polarized Electorate
This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party’s candidate, but not their own, a…
Back to the Future? What the Politics of the Late Nineteenth Century Can Tell Us about the 2016 Election
The politics and party system of the late Civil War era are strikingly similar to what we have in the present day. Elections were consistently close; race, culture, immigration, and populism were salient issues; and states almost always voted for the same party in election after election. The states that supported Democrats then, however, mostly support Republicans now, and vice versa. In 1896, though, a new party system began to emerge. In this …
Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism
Affective Polarization in Political and Nonpolitical Settings
We seek to understand the extent to which affective polarization is driven by in-group love or out-group hate and whether it varies across context. The answer may, in turn, allow us to evaluate how well the fundamental premises of social identity theory mesh with different manifestations of affective polarization. Using an experiment to analyze partisans’ trust judgments, we find that the amount of affective polarization and the dominant mechanis…
Fractured America: How did we get here
An August 2020 CBS Poll asked Americans whether they considered the number of fatalities from Covid-19 – then around 170,000 in the United States – acceptable. The vast majority of Americans, including 90% of Democrats, said it was not. But among Republicans, fully 57% did deem it acceptable, though many also wondered whether the number of deaths was being exaggerated. Regardless, the reporting of that poll was accompanied by widespread shock tha…
Masks and racial stereotypes in a pandemic: The case for surgical masks
To contain the spread of COVID-19, experts emphasize the importance of wearing masks. Unfortunately, this practice may put black people at elevated risk for being seen as potential threats by some Americans. In this study, we evaluate whether and how different types of masks affect perceptions of black and white male models. We find that non-black respondents perceive a black male model as more threatening and less trustworthy when he is wearing …
Advancing the Measurement of Authoritarianism
Political science (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)