Thomas J Leeper
Biographic Data
| ID | 1069207 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas J Leeper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas J |
| FAMILY NAME | Leeper |
| SIGNATURE | LEEPER T J |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4097-6326 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1974 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Generalizing Survey Experiments Using Topic Sampling: An Application to Party Cues
What Influences Citizen Forecasts? The Effects of Information, Elite Cues, and Social Cues
Policy Preferences and Policy Legitimacy After Referendums: Evidence from the Brexit Negotiations
How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance a…
Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's …
Pricing Immigration
Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents …
Raising the Floor or Closing the Gap? How Media Choice and Media Content Impact Political Knowledge
Mass media are frequently cited as having the potential to inform the public, raising knowledge levels and reducing political knowledge gaps between citizens. But media are also seen as a force for segmentation, disengagement, and widening differences between citizens. If media have no effect on political knowledge, gaps between the engaged and disengaged persist regardless of who is exposed to news because no one learns. But gaps can also persis…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents’ favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents’ support for the overa…
Should We Worry About Sponsorship-Induced Bias in Online Political Science Surveys
Political scientists rely heavily on survey research to gain insights into public attitudes and behaviors. Over the past decade, survey data collection has moved away from personal face-to-face and telephone interviewing towards a model of computer-assisted self-interviewing. A hallmark of many online surveys is the prominent display of the survey’s sponsor, most often an academic institution, in the initial consent form and/or on the survey webs…
Studying Identities with Experiments: Weighing the Risk of Posttreatment Bias Against Priming Effects
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…
Where Have the Respondents Gone? Perhaps We Ate Them All
Rising rates of nonresponse are one of the most-debated issues in contemporary survey research. While early survey research regularly achieved response rates close to 100 percent, contemporary telephone interviewing methods in the United States regularly obtain response rates below 10 percent, due to a mix of noncontact and refusals. Existing research has examined a number of factors that explain variation in response rates, yet almost all such w…
Generalizability of heterogeneous treatment effect estimates across samples
Significance In experiments, the degree to which results generalize to other populations depends critically on the degree of treatment effect heterogeneity. We replicated 27 survey experiments (encompassing 101,745 individual survey responses) originally conducted on nationally representative samples using online convenience samples, finding very high correspondence despite obvious differences in sample composition. We contend this pattern is due…
Motivated Responses to Political Communications
Among numerous foundational contributions, Milton Lodge’s work is notable for its artful adaptation of theories of psychological processing to political contexts. Lodge recognized the uniqueness of politics as a context for information processing, exploring situations which are defined, in part, by (1) low information and thus situations where information acquisition occurs, (2) contested informational claims, and (3) over-time dynamics. This is …
Am I a Methodologist? (Asking for a Friend)
The early part of an academic career frequently entails processes of social identification: am I an Americanist, a comparativist, a theorist, or an international relations-ist (is that a word?); a positivist, a constructivist, or something else; a “quant” or a “qual”; a pluralist, a Perestroikan, an experimentalist; a teacher, researcher, pundit, “alt-ac”, data scientist, or what? Who am I and what am I an expert in? Outside pressures like job ap…
How Does Treatment Self-Selection Affect Inferences About Political Communication
Ecological validity is vital to experimental research because designs that are too artificial may not speak to any real-world political phenomenon. One such concern is treatment of self-selection: if individuals in the real-world self-select treatments, such as political communications, how well does the sample average treatment effect estimate the effects of message exposure for those individuals who would—if given the choice—opt-in to and out o…
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…
The Generalizability of Survey Experiments
Survey experiments have become a central methodology across the social sciences. Researchers can combine experiments’ causal power with the generalizability of population-based samples. Yet, due to the expense of population-based samples, much research relies on convenience samples (e.g. students, online opt-in samples). The emergence of affordable, but non-representative online samples has reinvigorated debates about the external validity of exp…
Cognitive Style and the Survey Response
According to democratic theory, citizens should have a set of well-defined, valenced opinions. Yet evidence suggests that individuals vary in chronic evaluative tendencies, with some processing information in an online fashion, spontaneously becoming opinionated about whatever they encounter and recalling summary evaluations easily. Individuals lower in evaluative tendencies do not form attitudes in this fashion and instead must construct and rep…
The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization
Journal Article The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization Get access Thomas J. Leeper Thomas J. Leeper * Thomas J. Leeper is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. The author thanks Jamie Druckman, Solomon Messing, Joanne Miller, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Disserta…
Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Public Opinion Formation
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approa…
Doing What Others Do: Norms, Science, and Collective Action on Global Warming
Does rhetoric highlighting social norms or mentioning science in a communication affect individuals’ beliefs about global warming and/or willingness to take action? We draw from framing theory and collective-interest models of action to motivate hypotheses that are tested in two large web-based survey-experiments using convenience samples. Our results show that attitudes about global warming, support for policies that would reduce carbon emission…
Self-Interest and Attention to News Among Issue Publics
To what extent are groups selectively exposed to news that affects their self-interest? We theorize that having an interest at stake in an issue increases the importance of related information, promoting selective exposure to politics. The framework we develop generates hypotheses we test with data from 29 U.S. public opinion surveys conducted between 1997 and 2007 with a combined sample size of over 40,000 respondents. We find that though the pr…
Is Public Opinion Stable? Resolving the Micro/Macro Disconnect in Studies of Public Opinion
Public opinion matters, both as a central element of democratic theory and as a substantive foundation for political representation. The origins and nature of public opinion have long attracted the attention of social scientists. Yet a number of questions remain; among the more perplexing is whether–and under what conditions–public opinion is stable. The answer depends in large part on whether one looks at aggregations of individual opinions (mac…
Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects
Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment aff…
A Source of Bias in Public Opinion Stability
A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant under…
Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents’ favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents’ support for the overa…
The Generalizability of Survey Experiments
Survey experiments have become a central methodology across the social sciences. Researchers can combine experiments’ causal power with the generalizability of population-based samples. Yet, due to the expense of population-based samples, much research relies on convenience samples (e.g. students, online opt-in samples). The emergence of affordable, but non-representative online samples has reinvigorated debates about the external validity of exp…
Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Public Opinion Formation
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approa…
Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's …
Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects
Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment aff…
A Source of Bias in Public Opinion Stability
A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant under…
Studying Identities with Experiments: Weighing the Risk of Posttreatment Bias Against Priming Effects
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 Informational Basis for Mass Polarization
Journal Article The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization Get access Thomas J. Leeper Thomas J. Leeper * Thomas J. Leeper is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. The author thanks Jamie Druckman, Solomon Messing, Joanne Miller, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Disserta…
Self-Interest and Attention to News Among Issue Publics
To what extent are groups selectively exposed to news that affects their self-interest? We theorize that having an interest at stake in an issue increases the importance of related information, promoting selective exposure to politics. The framework we develop generates hypotheses we test with data from 29 U.S. public opinion surveys conducted between 1997 and 2007 with a combined sample size of over 40,000 respondents. We find that though the pr…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
Is Public Opinion Stable? Resolving the Micro/Macro Disconnect in Studies of Public Opinion
Public opinion matters, both as a central element of democratic theory and as a substantive foundation for political representation. The origins and nature of public opinion have long attracted the attention of social scientists. Yet a number of questions remain; among the more perplexing is whether–and under what conditions–public opinion is stable. The answer depends in large part on whether one looks at aggregations of individual opinions (mac…
Policy Preferences and Policy Legitimacy After Referendums: Evidence from the Brexit Negotiations
How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance a…
Where Have the Respondents Gone? Perhaps We Ate Them All
Rising rates of nonresponse are one of the most-debated issues in contemporary survey research. While early survey research regularly achieved response rates close to 100 percent, contemporary telephone interviewing methods in the United States regularly obtain response rates below 10 percent, due to a mix of noncontact and refusals. Existing research has examined a number of factors that explain variation in response rates, yet almost all such w…
Generalizing Survey Experiments Using Topic Sampling: An Application to Party Cues
How Does Treatment Self-Selection Affect Inferences About Political Communication
Ecological validity is vital to experimental research because designs that are too artificial may not speak to any real-world political phenomenon. One such concern is treatment of self-selection: if individuals in the real-world self-select treatments, such as political communications, how well does the sample average treatment effect estimate the effects of message exposure for those individuals who would—if given the choice—opt-in to and out o…
Raising the Floor or Closing the Gap? How Media Choice and Media Content Impact Political Knowledge
Mass media are frequently cited as having the potential to inform the public, raising knowledge levels and reducing political knowledge gaps between citizens. But media are also seen as a force for segmentation, disengagement, and widening differences between citizens. If media have no effect on political knowledge, gaps between the engaged and disengaged persist regardless of who is exposed to news because no one learns. But gaps can also persis…
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…
Doing What Others Do: Norms, Science, and Collective Action on Global Warming
Does rhetoric highlighting social norms or mentioning science in a communication affect individuals’ beliefs about global warming and/or willingness to take action? We draw from framing theory and collective-interest models of action to motivate hypotheses that are tested in two large web-based survey-experiments using convenience samples. Our results show that attitudes about global warming, support for policies that would reduce carbon emission…
What Influences Citizen Forecasts? The Effects of Information, Elite Cues, and Social Cues
Pricing Immigration
Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents …
Am I a Methodologist? (Asking for a Friend)
The early part of an academic career frequently entails processes of social identification: am I an Americanist, a comparativist, a theorist, or an international relations-ist (is that a word?); a positivist, a constructivist, or something else; a “quant” or a “qual”; a pluralist, a Perestroikan, an experimentalist; a teacher, researcher, pundit, “alt-ac”, data scientist, or what? Who am I and what am I an expert in? Outside pressures like job ap…
Cognitive Style and the Survey Response
According to democratic theory, citizens should have a set of well-defined, valenced opinions. Yet evidence suggests that individuals vary in chronic evaluative tendencies, with some processing information in an online fashion, spontaneously becoming opinionated about whatever they encounter and recalling summary evaluations easily. Individuals lower in evaluative tendencies do not form attitudes in this fashion and instead must construct and rep…
Is Public Opinion Stable? Resolving the Micro/Macro Disconnect in Studies of Public Opinion
Public opinion matters, both as a central element of democratic theory and as a substantive foundation for political representation. The origins and nature of public opinion have long attracted the attention of social scientists. Yet a number of questions remain; among the more perplexing is whether–and under what conditions–public opinion is stable. The answer depends in large part on whether one looks at aggregations of individual opinions (mac…
Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects
Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment aff…
A Source of Bias in Public Opinion Stability
A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant under…
Self-Interest and Attention to News Among Issue Publics
To what extent are groups selectively exposed to news that affects their self-interest? We theorize that having an interest at stake in an issue increases the importance of related information, promoting selective exposure to politics. The framework we develop generates hypotheses we test with data from 29 U.S. public opinion surveys conducted between 1997 and 2007 with a combined sample size of over 40,000 respondents. We find that though the pr…
Cognitive Style and the Survey Response
According to democratic theory, citizens should have a set of well-defined, valenced opinions. Yet evidence suggests that individuals vary in chronic evaluative tendencies, with some processing information in an online fashion, spontaneously becoming opinionated about whatever they encounter and recalling summary evaluations easily. Individuals lower in evaluative tendencies do not form attitudes in this fashion and instead must construct and rep…
The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization
Journal Article The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization Get access Thomas J. Leeper Thomas J. Leeper * Thomas J. Leeper is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. The author thanks Jamie Druckman, Solomon Messing, Joanne Miller, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Disserta…
Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Public Opinion Formation
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approa…
Doing What Others Do: Norms, Science, and Collective Action on Global Warming
Does rhetoric highlighting social norms or mentioning science in a communication affect individuals’ beliefs about global warming and/or willingness to take action? We draw from framing theory and collective-interest models of action to motivate hypotheses that are tested in two large web-based survey-experiments using convenience samples. Our results show that attitudes about global warming, support for policies that would reduce carbon emission…
The Generalizability of Survey Experiments
Survey experiments have become a central methodology across the social sciences. Researchers can combine experiments’ causal power with the generalizability of population-based samples. Yet, due to the expense of population-based samples, much research relies on convenience samples (e.g. students, online opt-in samples). The emergence of affordable, but non-representative online samples has reinvigorated debates about the external validity of exp…
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…
How Does Treatment Self-Selection Affect Inferences About Political Communication
Ecological validity is vital to experimental research because designs that are too artificial may not speak to any real-world political phenomenon. One such concern is treatment of self-selection: if individuals in the real-world self-select treatments, such as political communications, how well does the sample average treatment effect estimate the effects of message exposure for those individuals who would—if given the choice—opt-in to and out o…
Generalizability of heterogeneous treatment effect estimates across samples
Significance In experiments, the degree to which results generalize to other populations depends critically on the degree of treatment effect heterogeneity. We replicated 27 survey experiments (encompassing 101,745 individual survey responses) originally conducted on nationally representative samples using online convenience samples, finding very high correspondence despite obvious differences in sample composition. We contend this pattern is due…
Motivated Responses to Political Communications
Among numerous foundational contributions, Milton Lodge’s work is notable for its artful adaptation of theories of psychological processing to political contexts. Lodge recognized the uniqueness of politics as a context for information processing, exploring situations which are defined, in part, by (1) low information and thus situations where information acquisition occurs, (2) contested informational claims, and (3) over-time dynamics. This is …
Am I a Methodologist? (Asking for a Friend)
The early part of an academic career frequently entails processes of social identification: am I an Americanist, a comparativist, a theorist, or an international relations-ist (is that a word?); a positivist, a constructivist, or something else; a “quant” or a “qual”; a pluralist, a Perestroikan, an experimentalist; a teacher, researcher, pundit, “alt-ac”, data scientist, or what? Who am I and what am I an expert in? Outside pressures like job ap…
Should We Worry About Sponsorship-Induced Bias in Online Political Science Surveys
Political scientists rely heavily on survey research to gain insights into public attitudes and behaviors. Over the past decade, survey data collection has moved away from personal face-to-face and telephone interviewing towards a model of computer-assisted self-interviewing. A hallmark of many online surveys is the prominent display of the survey’s sponsor, most often an academic institution, in the initial consent form and/or on the survey webs…
Studying Identities with Experiments: Weighing the Risk of Posttreatment Bias Against Priming Effects
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…
Where Have the Respondents Gone? Perhaps We Ate Them All
Rising rates of nonresponse are one of the most-debated issues in contemporary survey research. While early survey research regularly achieved response rates close to 100 percent, contemporary telephone interviewing methods in the United States regularly obtain response rates below 10 percent, due to a mix of noncontact and refusals. Existing research has examined a number of factors that explain variation in response rates, yet almost all such w…
Pricing Immigration
Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents …
Raising the Floor or Closing the Gap? How Media Choice and Media Content Impact Political Knowledge
Mass media are frequently cited as having the potential to inform the public, raising knowledge levels and reducing political knowledge gaps between citizens. But media are also seen as a force for segmentation, disengagement, and widening differences between citizens. If media have no effect on political knowledge, gaps between the engaged and disengaged persist regardless of who is exposed to news because no one learns. But gaps can also persis…
More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions
Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents’ favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents’ support for the overa…
Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's …
Policy Preferences and Policy Legitimacy After Referendums: Evidence from the Brexit Negotiations
How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance a…
Generalizing Survey Experiments Using Topic Sampling: An Application to Party Cues
What Influences Citizen Forecasts? The Effects of Information, Elite Cues, and Social Cues
Psychology (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works)