Nicholas T Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 272745 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas T Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas T |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS N T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alabama |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0039-0817 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 207 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Future of the US Supreme Court
Despite nearly two centuries of actively stylizing itself as above the partisan fray of banal politics, the US Supreme Court faces increasing scrutiny over its ideological nature, ethical lapses, and perceived disconnection from democratic accountability. This article explores potential reforms including ethics guidelines, public affairs offices, and term limits to enhance the Court’s legitimacy. It also examines trends in judicial decision makin…
Partisan sorting, fatalism, and Supreme Court legitimacy
This paper studies the contours of Supreme Court legitimacy. First, we construct a data set of surveys from 2012 to 2024 to show that diffuse support now diverges among partisans; we then analyze an original, six‐wave panel survey that reveals the stability of this partisan sorting. Second, we unpack the direct and indirect effects of partisanship on legitimacy: Democrats are more cynical about the Court, disapprove of its outputs, and view obedi…
Diffuse Support, Partisanship, and the Electoral Relevance of the Supreme Court
Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting l…
Civility norm violations and political accountability
Introduction This short article investigates how violations of civility norms by politicians affect attitudes about the importance of norms and demand for political accountability after wrongdoing. Results Our main findings are twofold: (1) support for norms and (2) demand for punishing norm‐breaking increases when parties hold political officials accountable for their actions—especially in the case of in‐group norm‐breaking. Conclusions These fi…
The (racial) implications of “special favors”
In this short manuscript, I explore the predictive validity of a common component of racial resentment—(dis)agreement with the idea that minority racial groups need special favors to get ahead. Specifically, this analysis takes advantage of different “special favors” questions included in the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2012-2014 Panel Study to assess whether affirmative action preferences are uniquely racialized. I find tha…
Response to Seth J. Hill’s Review of Democracy’s Meaning
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The Psychometric Properties of the Christian Nationalism Scale
A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that s…
Vicarious Justifications for Prejudice in the Application of Democratic Values
Democratic values are widely endorsed principles including commitments to protect individual freedoms. Paradoxically, the widespread normativity of these ideas can be used to justify prejudice. With two nationally representative U.S. samples, we find that prejudiced respondents defend another’s prejudiced speech, using democratic values as justification. This vicarious defense occurs primarily among those who share the prejudice and only when the…
Democracy's Meanings
Change We Can Believe In
Scholars have used network analysis to explore the structural properties of mass ideology. This article incorporates two important, though ignored features in past research by investigating howtimeshapes the properties of belief networksfor different populations of people—those who exhibit high and low levels of political knowledge. We find that (1) belief network density increases asymmetrically among people with high relative to low knowledge; …
Elite rhetoric can undermine democratic norms
Significance Democracies depend on candidates and parties affirming the legitimacy of election results even when they lose. These statements help maintain confidence that elections are free and fair and thereby facilitate the peaceful transfer of power. However, this norm has recently been challenged in the United States, where former president Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the integrity of the 2020 US election. We evaluate the effect of t…
The Effect of White Social Prejudice on Support for American Democracy
Social prejudice constitutes an unwillingness to associate with individuals whose cultural or racial background differs from one's own group. Such prejudice is a particularly thorny problem in the context of democracy, which requires citizens to minimally respect such differences. In this paper, we assess the relationships between these attitudes and support for democratic institutions. Using World Values Survey data from 1995 to 2011, we find th…
Changes in perceptions of media bias
In this paper, we utilize a module from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to explore how individual perceptions of media bias changed over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. While previous literature has documented the role of partisan affiliation in perceptions of bias, we know considerably less about how these perceptions change during a presidential election. Consistent with existing theories of attitude change, perceptio…
The Meanings of Democracy among Mass Publics
The Political Consequences of Nativism
Objective Scholars have noted the increase in nativist sentiment in political debates in both the United States and across Europe. However, how these changes have affected voting behavior and political party support is less clear. In this article, we ask how relevant nativist attitudes are when making voting decisions across party systems in the United States and Europe. Are these sentiments pushing out other drivers of vote choice, and if so, wh…
Affective Consistency and Sorting
Objective Sorting is often portrayed as a mechanistic response to elite polarization: individuals recognize salient differences between the parties and match their preferences accordingly. Much less is known, however, about the psychological and motivational processes that contribute to it. In particular, how might affective reactions to elites shape convergence among political preferences? Method To explore the relationship between the consisten…
Economic Vulnerability, Cultural Decline, and Nativism
Objective Nativism, or anti‐immigrant preferences, is increasingly evident within democratic mass publics. In this article, we explore whether economic concerns, perceptions of social decline, or some combination of the two shape these attitudes. Method Our data are comprised of more than 8,000 survey respondents from nine Western, industrial democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Stat…
Identity Sorting and Political Compromise
In this article, I explore the relationship between sorting and the value that individuals assign to compromise. Analyzing four separate, nationally-representative surveys from 2007 to 2016, I show that a reliable asymmetry among partisans exists regarding their preference for political leaders who compromise. Among persons with right-leaning identities, high levels of overlap between partisanship and ideology undercut the professed desirability …
Constructing Images of the Divine
How do individuals psychologically organize their images of the divine? Most work on this topic is factor-analytic in nature, finding that God images vary with respect to love, judgment, and engagement. However, few studies look at how individuals spontaneously combine these divine dimensions into composite images of God. To fill this gap, we subject data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey to latent class analysis and find evidence for five dep…
Perceptions of elites and (asymmetric) sorting
Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity correspon…
Religion and Partisan‐Ideological Sorting, 1984–2016
Objective This article explores how religion affects the extent to which individuals connect their ideological to partisan identities—a process termed partisan‐ideological sorting. Method To explore this relationship, I analyze data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) Time‐Series surveys and the Youth‐Parent Socialization (YPS) panel study. Results I find that a matrix of belief, belonging, and behavior constrains the convergence b…
Winning, Losing, and the Dynamics of External Political Efficacy
Party Polarization, Media Choice, and Mass Partisan-Ideological Sorting
What is the relationship between party polarization, media fragmentation, and partisan-ideological sorting? The growth and availability of partisan media—afforded through the expansion of cable, satellite, and Internet penetration—is often linked to the consistency and extremity of individuals’ political attitudes and partisan identities. At the same time, the literature on mass audiences and media choice suggests that the effects of choice and p…
Religion and Attitudes toward Redistributive Policies among Americans
Scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding how individuals’ political and economic attitudes shape their views toward government policies designed to alleviate growing income inequality in the United States. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how religion shapes Americans’ attitudes toward income inequality and redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by…
Sorting and the Split-Ticket
Party Polarization, Media Choice, and Mass Partisan-Ideological Sorting
What is the relationship between party polarization, media fragmentation, and partisan-ideological sorting? The growth and availability of partisan media—afforded through the expansion of cable, satellite, and Internet penetration—is often linked to the consistency and extremity of individuals’ political attitudes and partisan identities. At the same time, the literature on mass audiences and media choice suggests that the effects of choice and p…
The Psychometric Properties of the Christian Nationalism Scale
A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that s…
Sorting and the Split-Ticket
Religion and Attitudes toward Redistributive Policies among Americans
Scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding how individuals’ political and economic attitudes shape their views toward government policies designed to alleviate growing income inequality in the United States. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how religion shapes Americans’ attitudes toward income inequality and redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by…
Change We Can Believe In
Scholars have used network analysis to explore the structural properties of mass ideology. This article incorporates two important, though ignored features in past research by investigating howtimeshapes the properties of belief networksfor different populations of people—those who exhibit high and low levels of political knowledge. We find that (1) belief network density increases asymmetrically among people with high relative to low knowledge; …
The Meanings of Democracy among Mass Publics
The Role of Indifference in Split-Ticket Voting
Religion and Partisan‐Ideological Sorting, 1984–2016
Objective This article explores how religion affects the extent to which individuals connect their ideological to partisan identities—a process termed partisan‐ideological sorting. Method To explore this relationship, I analyze data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) Time‐Series surveys and the Youth‐Parent Socialization (YPS) panel study. Results I find that a matrix of belief, belonging, and behavior constrains the convergence b…
Identity Sorting and Political Compromise
In this article, I explore the relationship between sorting and the value that individuals assign to compromise. Analyzing four separate, nationally-representative surveys from 2007 to 2016, I show that a reliable asymmetry among partisans exists regarding their preference for political leaders who compromise. Among persons with right-leaning identities, high levels of overlap between partisanship and ideology undercut the professed desirability …
Responsiveness and the rules of the game
Winning, Losing, and the Dynamics of External Political Efficacy
Affective Consistency and Sorting
Objective Sorting is often portrayed as a mechanistic response to elite polarization: individuals recognize salient differences between the parties and match their preferences accordingly. Much less is known, however, about the psychological and motivational processes that contribute to it. In particular, how might affective reactions to elites shape convergence among political preferences? Method To explore the relationship between the consisten…
Constructing Images of the Divine
How do individuals psychologically organize their images of the divine? Most work on this topic is factor-analytic in nature, finding that God images vary with respect to love, judgment, and engagement. However, few studies look at how individuals spontaneously combine these divine dimensions into composite images of God. To fill this gap, we subject data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey to latent class analysis and find evidence for five dep…
Partisan sorting, fatalism, and Supreme Court legitimacy
This paper studies the contours of Supreme Court legitimacy. First, we construct a data set of surveys from 2012 to 2024 to show that diffuse support now diverges among partisans; we then analyze an original, six‐wave panel survey that reveals the stability of this partisan sorting. Second, we unpack the direct and indirect effects of partisanship on legitimacy: Democrats are more cynical about the Court, disapprove of its outputs, and view obedi…
Diffuse Support, Partisanship, and the Electoral Relevance of the Supreme Court
Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting l…
Changes in perceptions of media bias
In this paper, we utilize a module from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to explore how individual perceptions of media bias changed over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. While previous literature has documented the role of partisan affiliation in perceptions of bias, we know considerably less about how these perceptions change during a presidential election. Consistent with existing theories of attitude change, perceptio…
Economic Vulnerability, Cultural Decline, and Nativism
Objective Nativism, or anti‐immigrant preferences, is increasingly evident within democratic mass publics. In this article, we explore whether economic concerns, perceptions of social decline, or some combination of the two shape these attitudes. Method Our data are comprised of more than 8,000 survey respondents from nine Western, industrial democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Stat…
Perceptions of elites and (asymmetric) sorting
Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity correspon…
The Political Consequences of Nativism
Objective Scholars have noted the increase in nativist sentiment in political debates in both the United States and across Europe. However, how these changes have affected voting behavior and political party support is less clear. In this article, we ask how relevant nativist attitudes are when making voting decisions across party systems in the United States and Europe. Are these sentiments pushing out other drivers of vote choice, and if so, wh…
Responsiveness and the rules of the game
Objectivity and Information Bias in Campaign News
This article examines whether objective campaign news stories—defined here as those with equitable tone toward 2 competing candidates—are less informative than slanted stories favoring one candidate over the other. Using a large news content dataset composed of campaign news stories from statewide elections in 2004, 2006, and 2008, we measure news story quality 6 different ways. It is modeled as a function of differences in story tone toward oppo…
The Role of Indifference in Split-Ticket Voting
Winning, Losing, and the Dynamics of External Political Efficacy
Party Polarization, Media Choice, and Mass Partisan-Ideological Sorting
What is the relationship between party polarization, media fragmentation, and partisan-ideological sorting? The growth and availability of partisan media—afforded through the expansion of cable, satellite, and Internet penetration—is often linked to the consistency and extremity of individuals’ political attitudes and partisan identities. At the same time, the literature on mass audiences and media choice suggests that the effects of choice and p…
Religion and Attitudes toward Redistributive Policies among Americans
Scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding how individuals’ political and economic attitudes shape their views toward government policies designed to alleviate growing income inequality in the United States. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how religion shapes Americans’ attitudes toward income inequality and redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by…
Sorting and the Split-Ticket
Perceptions of elites and (asymmetric) sorting
Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity correspon…
Religion and Partisan‐Ideological Sorting, 1984–2016
Objective This article explores how religion affects the extent to which individuals connect their ideological to partisan identities—a process termed partisan‐ideological sorting. Method To explore this relationship, I analyze data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) Time‐Series surveys and the Youth‐Parent Socialization (YPS) panel study. Results I find that a matrix of belief, belonging, and behavior constrains the convergence b…
The Political Consequences of Nativism
Objective Scholars have noted the increase in nativist sentiment in political debates in both the United States and across Europe. However, how these changes have affected voting behavior and political party support is less clear. In this article, we ask how relevant nativist attitudes are when making voting decisions across party systems in the United States and Europe. Are these sentiments pushing out other drivers of vote choice, and if so, wh…
Affective Consistency and Sorting
Objective Sorting is often portrayed as a mechanistic response to elite polarization: individuals recognize salient differences between the parties and match their preferences accordingly. Much less is known, however, about the psychological and motivational processes that contribute to it. In particular, how might affective reactions to elites shape convergence among political preferences? Method To explore the relationship between the consisten…
Economic Vulnerability, Cultural Decline, and Nativism
Objective Nativism, or anti‐immigrant preferences, is increasingly evident within democratic mass publics. In this article, we explore whether economic concerns, perceptions of social decline, or some combination of the two shape these attitudes. Method Our data are comprised of more than 8,000 survey respondents from nine Western, industrial democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Stat…
Identity Sorting and Political Compromise
In this article, I explore the relationship between sorting and the value that individuals assign to compromise. Analyzing four separate, nationally-representative surveys from 2007 to 2016, I show that a reliable asymmetry among partisans exists regarding their preference for political leaders who compromise. Among persons with right-leaning identities, high levels of overlap between partisanship and ideology undercut the professed desirability …
Constructing Images of the Divine
How do individuals psychologically organize their images of the divine? Most work on this topic is factor-analytic in nature, finding that God images vary with respect to love, judgment, and engagement. However, few studies look at how individuals spontaneously combine these divine dimensions into composite images of God. To fill this gap, we subject data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey to latent class analysis and find evidence for five dep…
Elite rhetoric can undermine democratic norms
Significance Democracies depend on candidates and parties affirming the legitimacy of election results even when they lose. These statements help maintain confidence that elections are free and fair and thereby facilitate the peaceful transfer of power. However, this norm has recently been challenged in the United States, where former president Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the integrity of the 2020 US election. We evaluate the effect of t…
The Effect of White Social Prejudice on Support for American Democracy
Social prejudice constitutes an unwillingness to associate with individuals whose cultural or racial background differs from one's own group. Such prejudice is a particularly thorny problem in the context of democracy, which requires citizens to minimally respect such differences. In this paper, we assess the relationships between these attitudes and support for democratic institutions. Using World Values Survey data from 1995 to 2011, we find th…
Changes in perceptions of media bias
In this paper, we utilize a module from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to explore how individual perceptions of media bias changed over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. While previous literature has documented the role of partisan affiliation in perceptions of bias, we know considerably less about how these perceptions change during a presidential election. Consistent with existing theories of attitude change, perceptio…
The Meanings of Democracy among Mass Publics
Vicarious Justifications for Prejudice in the Application of Democratic Values
Democratic values are widely endorsed principles including commitments to protect individual freedoms. Paradoxically, the widespread normativity of these ideas can be used to justify prejudice. With two nationally representative U.S. samples, we find that prejudiced respondents defend another’s prejudiced speech, using democratic values as justification. This vicarious defense occurs primarily among those who share the prejudice and only when the…
Democracy's Meanings
Change We Can Believe In
Scholars have used network analysis to explore the structural properties of mass ideology. This article incorporates two important, though ignored features in past research by investigating howtimeshapes the properties of belief networksfor different populations of people—those who exhibit high and low levels of political knowledge. We find that (1) belief network density increases asymmetrically among people with high relative to low knowledge; …
The (racial) implications of “special favors”
In this short manuscript, I explore the predictive validity of a common component of racial resentment—(dis)agreement with the idea that minority racial groups need special favors to get ahead. Specifically, this analysis takes advantage of different “special favors” questions included in the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2012-2014 Panel Study to assess whether affirmative action preferences are uniquely racialized. I find tha…
Response to Seth J. Hill’s Review of Democracy’s Meaning
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The Psychometric Properties of the Christian Nationalism Scale
A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that s…
Diffuse Support, Partisanship, and the Electoral Relevance of the Supreme Court
Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting l…
Political science (26 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)