Stephen P Nicholson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1149481 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen P Nicholson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen P |
| FAMILY NAME | Nicholson |
| SIGNATURE | NICHOLSON S P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Merced |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5998-3190 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1070 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
I’m Doing This for My Daughter: An Examination of the Daughter Effect in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections
International audience
Political trust and public support for propaganda in China
Authoritarian governments heavily rely on propaganda as a means of maintaining rule. Although scholars have examined the effects of propaganda exposure, much less is known about attitudes toward propaganda messages. In this study, we explore the foundations underlying propaganda support in China by examining the role of political trust, a primary ingredient for explaining public support for government actions and compliance. Using a survey with a…
Anchoring Political Preferences: The Psychological Foundations of Status Quo Bias and the Boundaries of Elite Manipulation
Public policy is often about numbers that affect people’s lives in fundamental ways. Given the central importance of numbers, we examine anchoring, a heuristic in which people are influenced by an initial number in expressing a preference. Across a series of experiments and three unique surveys, we find evidence of anchoring effects, but not uniformly so. In contrast to experiments in psychology and behavioral economics, we find no evidence that …
Inverting the Lens: White Privilege Denial in Evaluations of Politicians and Policy
Public understandings of race in the United States have evolved, at least among some, to acknowledge that whiteness confers privilege. In contrast to the negative racial stereotypes that animate racial resentment, white privilege inverts the lens by focusing on whites and the notion that whiteness confers unearned advantages. Given the centrality of race in American politics, we investigate white privilege denial and whether it matters politicall…
In Government We Trust: Implicit Political Trust and Regime Support in China
High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socia…
Making the List: Reevaluating Political Trust and Social Desirability in China
We examined sensitive questions on political trust and regime support in China using indirect methods. We replicated previous list experiment results confirming that a majority trusts the central government despite overreports. We also conducted novel list experiments on trust in local government and support for removal of the presidential term limit and found evidence of overreporting for both. The point estimate for local government also sugges…
My Trust in Government Is Implicit: Automatic Trust in Government and System Support
How distrustful are people of government? Although large majorities of Americans express distrust in government, we propose that most of these same individuals also possess an implicit, gut-level trust in government. Using a common method to measure attitudes that people are either unwilling or unable to self-report, we found that most respondents implicitly trust government and that implicit trust is largely unrelated to explicit trust (as self-…
The Nature of Party Categories in Two‐Party and Multiparty Systems
Categories are one of the primary ways by which people make sense of complex environments. For political environments, parties are especially useful categories. By simplifying political life, party categories enable people to make sense of politics. A fundamental characteristic of party categories is that they minimize perceived differences of members within a party (e.g., two Democrats) and maximize perceived differences between members of diffe…
Snap Judgment: Implicit Perceptions of a (Political) Court
The Paradoxical Effect of Speech-Suppressing Appeals to the First Amendment
While the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government from imposing adverse consequences for speech it dislikes, in popular discourse this part of the Constitution is often referenced in an attempt to suppress nongovernmental criticism of controversial statements. To assess whether inappropriate, speech-suppressing appeals to the First Amendment cause intolerance of criticism or, unintentionally, promote tolerance of adverse re…
The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans
The Physiology of Framing Effects: Threat Sensitivity and the Persuasiveness of Political Arguments
Framing effects are among the most commonly studied type of political information that shapes public opinion. We advance research on differences in susceptibility to framing effects by exploring whether, and how, physiological traits condition responses to messages in the political environment. In particular, we propose that the effectiveness of a frame depends on how well that frame's argument matches the physiological predisposition or "outlook…
The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness
Death and Turnout: The Human Costs of War and Voter Participation in Democracies
War heightens public interest in politics, especially when human lives are lost. We examine whether, and how, combat casualties affect the decision to vote in established democracies. Drawing from social psychology research on mortality salience, we expect increasing casualties to increase the salience of death, information that moves people to defend their worldview, especially nationalistic and ideological values. By heightening the importance …
Mobilizing Interests: Group Participation and Competition in Direct Democracy Elections
Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions
The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy‐conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings sha…
Extreme Voices
Studies of issue publics suggest that widespread political ignorance does not matter because those affected by specific issues are involved and well informed, and can meaningfully shape policy in their policy area. However, research on civic participation raises important questions about whether the opinions of the active are representative of the less active. To examine whether meaningful differences in policy attitudes exist between the politic…
Agenda Setting by Direct Democracy: Comparing the Initiative and the Referendum
Using research on the initiative as a point of comparison, we consider how frequently and for what ends state legislators use the referendum. Akin to initiative use, we find that legislators are constrained by procedural hurdles in their ability to place referendums on the ballot. However, in contrast to research on the initiative, which emphasizes the role of interest groups as the drivers of initiatives, our analysis suggests that referendum us…
Polarizing Cues
People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in‐ and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co‐partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out‐party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using s…
Who Wants to Have a Tea Party? The Who, What, and Why of the Tea Party Movement
In the wake of the 2008 election, disgruntled conservatives organized opposition to President Obama's policies under a new movement dubbed the Tea Party. As an emerging force in American politics, we seek to understand who supports the Tea Party and the political attitudes these individuals hold. Using a nationally representative survey of respondents during the 2010 midterm elections, we examine whether the emerging narrative surrounding the Tea…
Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties
Dominating Cues and the Limits of Elite Influence
Scholars have found source cues—the political actors behind a policy issue—to be a potent cause of opinion change. The implication is an easily persuaded public. I advance the argument that the public is not so easily persuaded. A policy featuring group beneficiaries provides a highly informative cue, one that is likely to dominate source cues. This insight is based on research demonstrating that people ignore source cues if they engage the subje…
When t = 1 and N = 2: Creating a Political Science Program at a New Research University
If you could start a political science program from scratch, how would you do it? Given no institutional history, how would you design graduate and undergraduate programs? How would you grow your faculty? How would you attempt to build a reputation in the absence of a reputation at time t -1? In an interdisciplinary environment, with which disciplines would you work most closely? For most political science professors, these might be interesting h…
Political Knowledge and Issue Voting Among the Latino Electorate
How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters …
Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change
Although dramatic partisan change among the electorate is infrequent, the issue agendas of parties may produce large shifts. A major cause of such change is the politics of race. In a political environment charged with racially oriented issues, racial groups often align themselves with different parties (as witnessed most recently in the American South). Yet, if racial appeals violate norms of equality, these appeals may rebound on the party usin…
Polarizing Cues
People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in‐ and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co‐partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out‐party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using s…
Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change
Although dramatic partisan change among the electorate is infrequent, the issue agendas of parties may produce large shifts. A major cause of such change is the politics of race. In a political environment charged with racially oriented issues, racial groups often align themselves with different parties (as witnessed most recently in the American South). Yet, if racial appeals violate norms of equality, these appeals may rebound on the party usin…
Dominating Cues and the Limits of Elite Influence
Scholars have found source cues—the political actors behind a policy issue—to be a potent cause of opinion change. The implication is an easily persuaded public. I advance the argument that the public is not so easily persuaded. A policy featuring group beneficiaries provides a highly informative cue, one that is likely to dominate source cues. This insight is based on research demonstrating that people ignore source cues if they engage the subje…
Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions
The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy‐conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings sha…
The Political Environment and Ballot Proposition Awareness
Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors, the political environment plays a vital role. This …
The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness
Presidential Approval and the Mixed Blessing of Divided Government
Divided government provides ambiguous and conflicting information about which branch of government to hold accountable for government performance. The implication for presidents, who are easy targets of blame, is that they are less likely to be held accountable for government's failures during periods of divided government because the public has a plausible alternative for affixing responsibility: the U.S. Congress. Because presidents are punishe…
Framing Support for the Supreme Court in the Aftermath of Bush v. Gore
Public support for political actors and institutions depends on the frames emphasized in elite debate, especially following a political controversy. In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court made itself the object of political controversy because it effectively ended the 2000 presidential election. Opponents of the decision framed the Supreme Court ruling as partisan and "stealing the election," while supporters framed it as a principle…
My Trust in Government Is Implicit: Automatic Trust in Government and System Support
How distrustful are people of government? Although large majorities of Americans express distrust in government, we propose that most of these same individuals also possess an implicit, gut-level trust in government. Using a common method to measure attitudes that people are either unwilling or unable to self-report, we found that most respondents implicitly trust government and that implicit trust is largely unrelated to explicit trust (as self-…
Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties
Political Knowledge and Issue Voting Among the Latino Electorate
How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters …
Midterm Elections and Divided Government: An Information-Driven Theory of Electoral Volatility
Divided government affects individual choices over how to vote in midterm elections because it increases uncertainty in the minds of voters. Particularly, divided control of government makes blame attribution more difficult by obscuring causal connections and reducing the overall amount of usable information. As a result, we argue that under divided government, voters are less likely to vote for the House candidate not of the President's party. U…
In Government We Trust: Implicit Political Trust and Regime Support in China
High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socia…
Death and Turnout: The Human Costs of War and Voter Participation in Democracies
War heightens public interest in politics, especially when human lives are lost. We examine whether, and how, combat casualties affect the decision to vote in established democracies. Drawing from social psychology research on mortality salience, we expect increasing casualties to increase the salience of death, information that moves people to defend their worldview, especially nationalistic and ideological values. By heightening the importance …
Sequential Choices and Partisan Transitions in U.S. Senate Delegations: 1972-1988
A recent increase in the number of states sending mixed delegations to the U.S. Senate, i.e., having one senator of each political party, has led scholars to ask why essentially stable electorates produce different partisan outcomes. We contend that the existing arguments do not, and cannot, adequately explain this phenomenon. The failure of these earlier attempts is the direct result of a misinterpretation of the choices faced by voters in seque…
Making the List: Reevaluating Political Trust and Social Desirability in China
We examined sensitive questions on political trust and regime support in China using indirect methods. We replicated previous list experiment results confirming that a majority trusts the central government despite overreports. We also conducted novel list experiments on trust in local government and support for removal of the presidential term limit and found evidence of overreporting for both. The point estimate for local government also sugges…
Who Wants to Have a Tea Party? The Who, What, and Why of the Tea Party Movement
In the wake of the 2008 election, disgruntled conservatives organized opposition to President Obama's policies under a new movement dubbed the Tea Party. As an emerging force in American politics, we seek to understand who supports the Tea Party and the political attitudes these individuals hold. Using a nationally representative survey of respondents during the 2010 midterm elections, we examine whether the emerging narrative surrounding the Tea…
The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans
Snap Judgment: Implicit Perceptions of a (Political) Court
Agenda Setting by Direct Democracy: Comparing the Initiative and the Referendum
Using research on the initiative as a point of comparison, we consider how frequently and for what ends state legislators use the referendum. Akin to initiative use, we find that legislators are constrained by procedural hurdles in their ability to place referendums on the ballot. However, in contrast to research on the initiative, which emphasizes the role of interest groups as the drivers of initiatives, our analysis suggests that referendum us…
The Jeffords Switch and Public Support for Divided Government
On 24 May 2001, US Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont formally announced that he intended to leave the Republican party to become an Independent. Although congressional party switches in the United States are noteworthy because of their infrequency, the Jeffords switch was especially significant because he would caucus with the Democratic party, handing the Democratic party control of the Senate by a one-vote margin. When Jeffords formally left…
Extreme Voices
Studies of issue publics suggest that widespread political ignorance does not matter because those affected by specific issues are involved and well informed, and can meaningfully shape policy in their policy area. However, research on civic participation raises important questions about whether the opinions of the active are representative of the less active. To examine whether meaningful differences in policy attitudes exist between the politic…
Prior Beliefs and Voter Turnout in the 1986 and 1988 Congressional Elections
The costs of political information differ between and among elections. In those elections where information costs are high, voters should rely on information from previous elections. Although research on voter choice has long recognized that voters use past information in their assessments of candidates, studies of voter turnout are solely concerned with informa tion available in the current election. Specifically, the closeness of elections is a…
The Physiology of Framing Effects: Threat Sensitivity and the Persuasiveness of Political Arguments
Framing effects are among the most commonly studied type of political information that shapes public opinion. We advance research on differences in susceptibility to framing effects by exploring whether, and how, physiological traits condition responses to messages in the political environment. In particular, we propose that the effectiveness of a frame depends on how well that frame's argument matches the physiological predisposition or "outlook…
Anchoring Political Preferences: The Psychological Foundations of Status Quo Bias and the Boundaries of Elite Manipulation
Public policy is often about numbers that affect people’s lives in fundamental ways. Given the central importance of numbers, we examine anchoring, a heuristic in which people are influenced by an initial number in expressing a preference. Across a series of experiments and three unique surveys, we find evidence of anchoring effects, but not uniformly so. In contrast to experiments in psychology and behavioral economics, we find no evidence that …
Sequential Choices and Partisan Transitions in U.S. Senate Delegations: 1972-1988
A recent increase in the number of states sending mixed delegations to the U.S. Senate, i.e., having one senator of each political party, has led scholars to ask why essentially stable electorates produce different partisan outcomes. We contend that the existing arguments do not, and cannot, adequately explain this phenomenon. The failure of these earlier attempts is the direct result of a misinterpretation of the choices faced by voters in seque…
Prior Beliefs and Voter Turnout in the 1986 and 1988 Congressional Elections
The costs of political information differ between and among elections.In those elections where information costs are high, voters should rely on information from previous elections.Although research on voter choice has long recognized that voters use past information in their assessments of candidates, studies of voter turnout are solely concerned with information available in the current election.Specifically, the closeness of elections is a cen…
Prior Beliefs and Voter Turnout in the 1986 and 1988 Congressional Elections
The costs of political information differ between and among elections. In those elections where information costs are high, voters should rely on information from previous elections. Although research on voter choice has long recognized that voters use past information in their assessments of candidates, studies of voter turnout are solely concerned with informa tion available in the current election. Specifically, the closeness of elections is a…
Midterm Elections and Divided Government: An Information-Driven Theory of Electoral Volatility
Divided government affects individual choices over how to vote in midterm elections because it increases uncertainty in the minds of voters. Particularly, divided control of government makes blame attribution more difficult by obscuring causal connections and reducing the overall amount of usable information. As a result, we argue that under divided government, voters are less likely to vote for the House candidate not of the President's party. U…
Presidential Approval and the Mixed Blessing of Divided Government
Divided government provides ambiguous and conflicting information about which branch of government to hold accountable for government performance. The implication for presidents, who are easy targets of blame, is that they are less likely to be held accountable for government's failures during periods of divided government because the public has a plausible alternative for affixing responsibility: the U.S. Congress. Because presidents are punishe…
The Political Environment and Ballot Proposition Awareness
Framing Support for the Supreme Court in the Aftermath of Bush v. Gore
Public support for political actors and institutions depends on the frames emphasized in elite debate, especially following a political controversy. In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court made itself the object of political controversy because it effectively ended the 2000 presidential election. Opponents of the decision framed the Supreme Court ruling as partisan and "stealing the election," while supporters framed it as a principle…
The Political Environment and Ballot Proposition Awareness
Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors, the political environment plays a vital role. This …
Voting the Agenda: Candidates, Elections, and Ballot Propositions
The Jeffords Switch and Public Support for Divided Government
On 24 May 2001, US Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont formally announced that he intended to leave the Republican party to become an Independent. Although congressional party switches in the United States are noteworthy because of their infrequency, the Jeffords switch was especially significant because he would caucus with the Democratic party, handing the Democratic party control of the Senate by a one-vote margin. When Jeffords formally left…
Political Knowledge and Issue Voting Among the Latino Electorate
How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters …
Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change
Although dramatic partisan change among the electorate is infrequent, the issue agendas of parties may produce large shifts. A major cause of such change is the politics of race. In a political environment charged with racially oriented issues, racial groups often align themselves with different parties (as witnessed most recently in the American South). Yet, if racial appeals violate norms of equality, these appeals may rebound on the party usin…
When t = 1 and N = 2: Creating a Political Science Program at a New Research University
If you could start a political science program from scratch, how would you do it? Given no institutional history, how would you design graduate and undergraduate programs? How would you grow your faculty? How would you attempt to build a reputation in the absence of a reputation at time t -1? In an interdisciplinary environment, with which disciplines would you work most closely? For most political science professors, these might be interesting h…
Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties
Dominating Cues and the Limits of Elite Influence
Scholars have found source cues—the political actors behind a policy issue—to be a potent cause of opinion change. The implication is an easily persuaded public. I advance the argument that the public is not so easily persuaded. A policy featuring group beneficiaries provides a highly informative cue, one that is likely to dominate source cues. This insight is based on research demonstrating that people ignore source cues if they engage the subje…
Agenda Setting by Direct Democracy: Comparing the Initiative and the Referendum
Using research on the initiative as a point of comparison, we consider how frequently and for what ends state legislators use the referendum. Akin to initiative use, we find that legislators are constrained by procedural hurdles in their ability to place referendums on the ballot. However, in contrast to research on the initiative, which emphasizes the role of interest groups as the drivers of initiatives, our analysis suggests that referendum us…
Polarizing Cues
People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in‐ and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co‐partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out‐party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using s…
Who Wants to Have a Tea Party? The Who, What, and Why of the Tea Party Movement
In the wake of the 2008 election, disgruntled conservatives organized opposition to President Obama's policies under a new movement dubbed the Tea Party. As an emerging force in American politics, we seek to understand who supports the Tea Party and the political attitudes these individuals hold. Using a nationally representative survey of respondents during the 2010 midterm elections, we examine whether the emerging narrative surrounding the Tea…
Extreme Voices
Studies of issue publics suggest that widespread political ignorance does not matter because those affected by specific issues are involved and well informed, and can meaningfully shape policy in their policy area. However, research on civic participation raises important questions about whether the opinions of the active are representative of the less active. To examine whether meaningful differences in policy attitudes exist between the politic…
Mobilizing Interests: Group Participation and Competition in Direct Democracy Elections
Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions
The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy‐conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings sha…
The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness
Death and Turnout: The Human Costs of War and Voter Participation in Democracies
War heightens public interest in politics, especially when human lives are lost. We examine whether, and how, combat casualties affect the decision to vote in established democracies. Drawing from social psychology research on mortality salience, we expect increasing casualties to increase the salience of death, information that moves people to defend their worldview, especially nationalistic and ideological values. By heightening the importance …
The Paradoxical Effect of Speech-Suppressing Appeals to the First Amendment
While the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government from imposing adverse consequences for speech it dislikes, in popular discourse this part of the Constitution is often referenced in an attempt to suppress nongovernmental criticism of controversial statements. To assess whether inappropriate, speech-suppressing appeals to the First Amendment cause intolerance of criticism or, unintentionally, promote tolerance of adverse re…
The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans
Political science (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (32 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (28 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Voting (13 works) · Political economy (12 works)