Kevin K Banda
Biographic Data
| ID | 1534467 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin K Banda |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin K |
| FAMILY NAME | Banda |
| SIGNATURE | BANDA K K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas Tech University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4504-9302 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 269 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
How National Cues Polarize Perceptions of Political Figures
A growing body of research documents the increased importance of national issues and politics for vote choice and election outcomes in subnational elections. The extant literature identifies two dimensions – informational and behavioral – along which politics can be more or less nationalized. This study advances our understanding of the nationalized political environment by directly examining the relationship between these two dimensions. We use …
Partisans' evaluations of unconstitutional legislative activity
In this research note, we examine whether public evaluations of a policy depend on the constitutionality of the process by which that policy was passed. We observe whether people's views depend on accusations that a policy was passed in violation of a state constitution's single subject rule, and whether the effect of that accusation depends on the party making the accusation. Results from two survey experiments—one using a low salience issue and…
All politics are national
Objective While they were once viewed as largely local or candidate‐centered contests, recent American elections have come to be dominated by national forces such as presidential politics and partisanship. Prior research on voter behavior in this new era of nationalized politics, however, has largely focused on more high‐profile contests and has not examined voter decision making across multiple levels of government. Methods Our study uses cross‐…
Timing and responsiveness in American political advertising campaigns
Objective Though candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle? Methods I test how general election television advertising responsiveness varies over the course of the campaign cy…
How Filibuster Rhetoric Informs Perceptions of Politicians
How does rhetoric about the filibuster inform people's views of political figures? We argue that support or opposition to eliminating the filibuster conveys information to citizens that they can use to assess a politician's ideological position. This information can also be used when citizens form affective evaluations of politicians, but its effects depend on people's partisan identities. We use a preregistered survey experiment—along with a sec…
White Americans’ Evaluations of the Alt-Right
Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal …
Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization
Reexamining the Effects of Electoral Competition on Negative Advertising
Prior research suggests that campaigns become more negative when the election environment becomes more competitive. Much of this research suffers from data and design limitations. I replicate and extend prior analyses using a much larger number of cases. Using advertising data drawn from 374 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns contested from 2000 through 2018, I find evidence that electoral competition encourages candidates to engage in more …
Issue ownership cues and candidate support
Issue ownership theory suggests that candidates should focus on the issues that are owned by—or associated with—their parties and mostly avoid issues that are owned by the opposing party. Doing so allows them to focus on their own party’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses. Despite this expectation, contemporary research finds that candidates discuss both their own party’s issues and trespass by talking about issues owned by the opposing p…
Candidate appearance in campaign advertisements
How the Alt‐Right Label Informs Political Assessments
Objective To determine how the alt‐right label informs how voters assess individuals and political candidates. Methods We use a survey experiment with a hypothetical candidate. Along with a control, we vary the ideological label the hypothetical candidate uses, including conservative and alt‐right. Results The alt‐right label leads people to view candidates as holding more right‐leaning ideological and issue positions relative to no label and oft…
Evidence of Conflict Extension in Partisans’ Evaluations of People and Inanimate Objects
Prior research shows that partisan bias affects evaluations of people in nonpolitical settings, but it is unclear to what extent this bias informs evaluations of objects other than people in similar contexts. This is an important limitation given the frequency with which brands, locations, and products are associated with parties and political figures. We examine whether partisan bias influences evaluations of inanimate objects in the same way th…
Perceived Ideological Distance and Trust in Congress
Objectives We evaluate whether citizens’ trust in Congress is influenced by perceptions of ideological distance between themselves and their representatives. We argue that citizens view members as the “face” of Congress, and thus trust the institution more when the face of that institution is more ideologically proximal to themselves. Methods We test our hypotheses using responses to survey questions regarding both trust in Congress and perceptio…
How Trust Attitudes Promote Grassroots Lobbying in the American States
Objectives Despite declining trust in government institutions, political scientists have observed increasing political participation across activities, including grassroots lobbying. We argue that higher levels of trust in the state political system as a whole—diffuse political trust—and in state legislatures—specific political trust—should increase the likelihood that citizens contact their state legislators about policy matters because higher l…
Issue Scales, Information Cues, and the Proximity and Directional Models of Voter Choice
One of the most important questions in the study of democratic politics centers on how citizens consider issues and candidate positions when choosing whom to support in an election. The proximity and directional theories make fundamentally different predictions about voter behavior and imply different optimal strategies for candidates, but a longstanding literature to empirically adjudicate between the theories has yielded mixed results. We use a…
Legislative Party Polarization and Trust in State Legislatures
We argue that citizens’ trust attitudes are inversely related to party polarization because polarization tends to encourage political conflict, which most people dislike. We further posit that partisans trust attitudes are driven by the ideological extremity of the opposing and their own parties for similar reasons. Using roll-call-based estimates of state legislative party polarization and public opinion data collected in 2008, we show strong ev…
Elite polarization, party extremity, and affective polarization
Issue Ownership, Issue Positions, and Candidate Assessment
I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candid…
Negative Advertising and the Dynamics of Candidate Support
Competition and the Dynamics of Issue Convergence
Issue convergence theory suggests that candidates should respond to their opponents by discussing the same issues whereas issue divergence theory posits that candidates should instead ignore each other and discuss different issues. Recent studies tend to find evidence in favor of issue convergence, but these results may be inaccurate because the analyses that generated them tested dynamic campaign behavior using cross-sectional methods. Using a d…
Two-stage elections, strategic candidates, and campaign agendas
Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment
Journal Article Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment Get access Kevin K. Banda Kevin K. Banda * Kevin K. Banda is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada–Reno, Reno, NV, USA. The author thanks Tom Carsey, Pam Conover, Virginia Gray, Mike MacKuen, Jim Stimson, Chris Clark, Jeff Harden, Justin Kirkland, Jason Windett, the editors of Public Opinion Quarterly, and three anonymous reviewers …
Racial stereotypes, racial context, and the 2008 presidential election
As the first African-American nominee for president of a major political party, Barack Obama's campaign and ultimate victory reminded voters, scholars, pundits, and the press of the centrality of race in American political life. Speculation by observers of all types centered around the potential impact of race as an individual psychological prejudice and/or as a geographic/contextual factor. These two themes parallel different leading scholarly t…
The Dynamics of Campaign Issue Agendas
I argue that candidates shape their issue agendas—the sets of related issues on which they focus—in part in response to the issue agendas of their opponents and that competitive campaigns stimulate candidates to respond to one another at higher rates. I test my theory of candidate interaction using weekly advertising data at the media market level from 146 statewide elections—54 gubernatorial and 92 U.S. Senate contests—from six election years an…
Elite polarization, party extremity, and affective polarization
Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization
The Dynamics of Campaign Issue Agendas
I argue that candidates shape their issue agendas—the sets of related issues on which they focus—in part in response to the issue agendas of their opponents and that competitive campaigns stimulate candidates to respond to one another at higher rates. I test my theory of candidate interaction using weekly advertising data at the media market level from 146 statewide elections—54 gubernatorial and 92 U.S. Senate contests—from six election years an…
Negative Advertising and the Dynamics of Candidate Support
Competition and the Dynamics of Issue Convergence
Issue convergence theory suggests that candidates should respond to their opponents by discussing the same issues whereas issue divergence theory posits that candidates should instead ignore each other and discuss different issues. Recent studies tend to find evidence in favor of issue convergence, but these results may be inaccurate because the analyses that generated them tested dynamic campaign behavior using cross-sectional methods. Using a d…
Issue Ownership, Issue Positions, and Candidate Assessment
I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candid…
Legislative Party Polarization and Trust in State Legislatures
We argue that citizens’ trust attitudes are inversely related to party polarization because polarization tends to encourage political conflict, which most people dislike. We further posit that partisans trust attitudes are driven by the ideological extremity of the opposing and their own parties for similar reasons. Using roll-call-based estimates of state legislative party polarization and public opinion data collected in 2008, we show strong ev…
Two-stage elections, strategic candidates, and campaign agendas
Issue Scales, Information Cues, and the Proximity and Directional Models of Voter Choice
One of the most important questions in the study of democratic politics centers on how citizens consider issues and candidate positions when choosing whom to support in an election. The proximity and directional theories make fundamentally different predictions about voter behavior and imply different optimal strategies for candidates, but a longstanding literature to empirically adjudicate between the theories has yielded mixed results. We use a…
Issue ownership cues and candidate support
Issue ownership theory suggests that candidates should focus on the issues that are owned by—or associated with—their parties and mostly avoid issues that are owned by the opposing party. Doing so allows them to focus on their own party’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses. Despite this expectation, contemporary research finds that candidates discuss both their own party’s issues and trespass by talking about issues owned by the opposing p…
Evidence of Conflict Extension in Partisans’ Evaluations of People and Inanimate Objects
Prior research shows that partisan bias affects evaluations of people in nonpolitical settings, but it is unclear to what extent this bias informs evaluations of objects other than people in similar contexts. This is an important limitation given the frequency with which brands, locations, and products are associated with parties and political figures. We examine whether partisan bias influences evaluations of inanimate objects in the same way th…
Candidate appearance in campaign advertisements
How the Alt‐Right Label Informs Political Assessments
Objective To determine how the alt‐right label informs how voters assess individuals and political candidates. Methods We use a survey experiment with a hypothetical candidate. Along with a control, we vary the ideological label the hypothetical candidate uses, including conservative and alt‐right. Results The alt‐right label leads people to view candidates as holding more right‐leaning ideological and issue positions relative to no label and oft…
Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment
Journal Article Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment Get access Kevin K. Banda Kevin K. Banda * Kevin K. Banda is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada–Reno, Reno, NV, USA. The author thanks Tom Carsey, Pam Conover, Virginia Gray, Mike MacKuen, Jim Stimson, Chris Clark, Jeff Harden, Justin Kirkland, Jason Windett, the editors of Public Opinion Quarterly, and three anonymous reviewers …
Racial stereotypes, racial context, and the 2008 presidential election
As the first African-American nominee for president of a major political party, Barack Obama's campaign and ultimate victory reminded voters, scholars, pundits, and the press of the centrality of race in American political life. Speculation by observers of all types centered around the potential impact of race as an individual psychological prejudice and/or as a geographic/contextual factor. These two themes parallel different leading scholarly t…
Perceived Ideological Distance and Trust in Congress
Objectives We evaluate whether citizens’ trust in Congress is influenced by perceptions of ideological distance between themselves and their representatives. We argue that citizens view members as the “face” of Congress, and thus trust the institution more when the face of that institution is more ideologically proximal to themselves. Methods We test our hypotheses using responses to survey questions regarding both trust in Congress and perceptio…
All politics are national
Objective While they were once viewed as largely local or candidate‐centered contests, recent American elections have come to be dominated by national forces such as presidential politics and partisanship. Prior research on voter behavior in this new era of nationalized politics, however, has largely focused on more high‐profile contests and has not examined voter decision making across multiple levels of government. Methods Our study uses cross‐…
White Americans’ Evaluations of the Alt-Right
Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal …
Timing and responsiveness in American political advertising campaigns
Objective Though candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle? Methods I test how general election television advertising responsiveness varies over the course of the campaign cy…
How Filibuster Rhetoric Informs Perceptions of Politicians
How does rhetoric about the filibuster inform people's views of political figures? We argue that support or opposition to eliminating the filibuster conveys information to citizens that they can use to assess a politician's ideological position. This information can also be used when citizens form affective evaluations of politicians, but its effects depend on people's partisan identities. We use a preregistered survey experiment—along with a sec…
Reexamining the Effects of Electoral Competition on Negative Advertising
Prior research suggests that campaigns become more negative when the election environment becomes more competitive. Much of this research suffers from data and design limitations. I replicate and extend prior analyses using a much larger number of cases. Using advertising data drawn from 374 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns contested from 2000 through 2018, I find evidence that electoral competition encourages candidates to engage in more …
How Trust Attitudes Promote Grassroots Lobbying in the American States
Objectives Despite declining trust in government institutions, political scientists have observed increasing political participation across activities, including grassroots lobbying. We argue that higher levels of trust in the state political system as a whole—diffuse political trust—and in state legislatures—specific political trust—should increase the likelihood that citizens contact their state legislators about policy matters because higher l…
Racial stereotypes, racial context, and the 2008 presidential election
As the first African-American nominee for president of a major political party, Barack Obama's campaign and ultimate victory reminded voters, scholars, pundits, and the press of the centrality of race in American political life. Speculation by observers of all types centered around the potential impact of race as an individual psychological prejudice and/or as a geographic/contextual factor. These two themes parallel different leading scholarly t…
The Dynamics of Campaign Issue Agendas
I argue that candidates shape their issue agendas—the sets of related issues on which they focus—in part in response to the issue agendas of their opponents and that competitive campaigns stimulate candidates to respond to one another at higher rates. I test my theory of candidate interaction using weekly advertising data at the media market level from 146 statewide elections—54 gubernatorial and 92 U.S. Senate contests—from six election years an…
Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment
Journal Article Issue-Based Negativity and Candidate Assessment Get access Kevin K. Banda Kevin K. Banda * Kevin K. Banda is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada–Reno, Reno, NV, USA. The author thanks Tom Carsey, Pam Conover, Virginia Gray, Mike MacKuen, Jim Stimson, Chris Clark, Jeff Harden, Justin Kirkland, Jason Windett, the editors of Public Opinion Quarterly, and three anonymous reviewers …
Competition and the Dynamics of Issue Convergence
Issue convergence theory suggests that candidates should respond to their opponents by discussing the same issues whereas issue divergence theory posits that candidates should instead ignore each other and discuss different issues. Recent studies tend to find evidence in favor of issue convergence, but these results may be inaccurate because the analyses that generated them tested dynamic campaign behavior using cross-sectional methods. Using a d…
Two-stage elections, strategic candidates, and campaign agendas
Issue Ownership, Issue Positions, and Candidate Assessment
I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candid…
Negative Advertising and the Dynamics of Candidate Support
How Trust Attitudes Promote Grassroots Lobbying in the American States
Objectives Despite declining trust in government institutions, political scientists have observed increasing political participation across activities, including grassroots lobbying. We argue that higher levels of trust in the state political system as a whole—diffuse political trust—and in state legislatures—specific political trust—should increase the likelihood that citizens contact their state legislators about policy matters because higher l…
Issue Scales, Information Cues, and the Proximity and Directional Models of Voter Choice
One of the most important questions in the study of democratic politics centers on how citizens consider issues and candidate positions when choosing whom to support in an election. The proximity and directional theories make fundamentally different predictions about voter behavior and imply different optimal strategies for candidates, but a longstanding literature to empirically adjudicate between the theories has yielded mixed results. We use a…
Legislative Party Polarization and Trust in State Legislatures
We argue that citizens’ trust attitudes are inversely related to party polarization because polarization tends to encourage political conflict, which most people dislike. We further posit that partisans trust attitudes are driven by the ideological extremity of the opposing and their own parties for similar reasons. Using roll-call-based estimates of state legislative party polarization and public opinion data collected in 2008, we show strong ev…
Elite polarization, party extremity, and affective polarization
Perceived Ideological Distance and Trust in Congress
Objectives We evaluate whether citizens’ trust in Congress is influenced by perceptions of ideological distance between themselves and their representatives. We argue that citizens view members as the “face” of Congress, and thus trust the institution more when the face of that institution is more ideologically proximal to themselves. Methods We test our hypotheses using responses to survey questions regarding both trust in Congress and perceptio…
How the Alt‐Right Label Informs Political Assessments
Objective To determine how the alt‐right label informs how voters assess individuals and political candidates. Methods We use a survey experiment with a hypothetical candidate. Along with a control, we vary the ideological label the hypothetical candidate uses, including conservative and alt‐right. Results The alt‐right label leads people to view candidates as holding more right‐leaning ideological and issue positions relative to no label and oft…
Evidence of Conflict Extension in Partisans’ Evaluations of People and Inanimate Objects
Prior research shows that partisan bias affects evaluations of people in nonpolitical settings, but it is unclear to what extent this bias informs evaluations of objects other than people in similar contexts. This is an important limitation given the frequency with which brands, locations, and products are associated with parties and political figures. We examine whether partisan bias influences evaluations of inanimate objects in the same way th…
Issue ownership cues and candidate support
Issue ownership theory suggests that candidates should focus on the issues that are owned by—or associated with—their parties and mostly avoid issues that are owned by the opposing party. Doing so allows them to focus on their own party’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses. Despite this expectation, contemporary research finds that candidates discuss both their own party’s issues and trespass by talking about issues owned by the opposing p…
Candidate appearance in campaign advertisements
Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization
Reexamining the Effects of Electoral Competition on Negative Advertising
Prior research suggests that campaigns become more negative when the election environment becomes more competitive. Much of this research suffers from data and design limitations. I replicate and extend prior analyses using a much larger number of cases. Using advertising data drawn from 374 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns contested from 2000 through 2018, I find evidence that electoral competition encourages candidates to engage in more …
White Americans’ Evaluations of the Alt-Right
Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal …
All politics are national
Objective While they were once viewed as largely local or candidate‐centered contests, recent American elections have come to be dominated by national forces such as presidential politics and partisanship. Prior research on voter behavior in this new era of nationalized politics, however, has largely focused on more high‐profile contests and has not examined voter decision making across multiple levels of government. Methods Our study uses cross‐…
Timing and responsiveness in American political advertising campaigns
Objective Though candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle? Methods I test how general election television advertising responsiveness varies over the course of the campaign cy…
How Filibuster Rhetoric Informs Perceptions of Politicians
How does rhetoric about the filibuster inform people's views of political figures? We argue that support or opposition to eliminating the filibuster conveys information to citizens that they can use to assess a politician's ideological position. This information can also be used when citizens form affective evaluations of politicians, but its effects depend on people's partisan identities. We use a preregistered survey experiment—along with a sec…
Partisans' evaluations of unconstitutional legislative activity
In this research note, we examine whether public evaluations of a policy depend on the constitutionality of the process by which that policy was passed. We observe whether people's views depend on accusations that a policy was passed in violation of a state constitution's single subject rule, and whether the effect of that accusation depends on the party making the accusation. Results from two survey experiments—one using a low salience issue and…
How National Cues Polarize Perceptions of Political Figures
A growing body of research documents the increased importance of national issues and politics for vote choice and election outcomes in subnational elections. The extant literature identifies two dimensions – informational and behavioral – along which politics can be more or less nationalized. This study advances our understanding of the nationalized political environment by directly examining the relationship between these two dimensions. We use …
Electoral Systems and Political Participation (24 works) · Political science (23 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)