Christian D Johnston
Biographic Data
| ID | 798249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian D Johnston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian D |
| FAMILY NAME | Johnston |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNSTON C D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6704-7629 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 832 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting
The ability of voters to predict the future policy-related behavior of candidates is essential to a well-functioning representative democracy. But existing studies have difficulty distinguishing between detailed knowledge of individual candidates and the use of coarse partisan cues when making prospective judgments. This article uses incentivized forecasting of candidates’ future interest group ratings, which allows for finer distinctions than ye…
Competing moral minds? Estimating moral disagreement in American politics
What drives ideological and partisan divisions in contemporary American politics? An influential line of research suggests they are rooted in disagreement about the nature of morality. While the left uses principles of care and fairness in moral judgment, the right considers loyalty, authority, and sanctity to be additional morally relevant values. This creates a “moral empathy gap” that makes it difficult for people to understand the perspective…
Linking personality and policy: The moderating roles of cues and frames
The mechanisms by which personality shapes political attitudes are underexplored. We examine the interplay among dispositional openness, political engagement, and elite discourse in the context of two key processes that shape public opinion generally: elite cue‐taking and policy framing. In Study 1, we examine the extent to which the presence or absence of partisan cues moderates the relationship between openness and policy preferences. In Study …
An Ideology by Any Other Name
Mixed evidence for a relationship of cognitive fatigue to political engagement
The Conditional Relationship of Psychological Needs to Ideology
We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associ…
Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated Reasoning
A large literature demonstrates that conservatives have greater needs for certainty than liberals. This suggests an asymmetry hypothesis: Conservatives are less open to new information that conflicts with their political identity and, in turn, political accountability will be lower on the right than the left. However, recent work suggests that liberals and conservatives are equally prone to politically motivated reasoning (PMR). The present artic…
Negativity bias, personality and political ideology
The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters
Curbing the Court: Why the Public Constrains Judicial Independence
What motivates political actors with diverging interests to respect the Supreme Court's authority? A popular answer is that the public serves as the guardian of judicial independence by punishing elected officials who undermine the justices. Curbing the Court challenges this claim, presenting a new theory of how we perceive the Supreme Court. Bartels and Johnston argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, citizens are not principled defenders o…
The Covid-19 Pandemic and its Impact on the Southern United States
The Southern United States, the fastest growing region in the nation, is comprised of the largest number of states and home to the largest population of residents compared to the other three U.S. regions. Americans in the South have been more likely to experience poor health outcomes, to be living in poverty, and to be uninsured than those in other regions. In addition, Southerners' tradition of hospitality, the high value placed on church attend…
Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology
I consider two theories of affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the United States: (1) ideological divergence on size‐of‐government issues (Webster & Abramowitz, ) and (2) authoritarianism‐based partisan sorting (Hetherington & Weiler, ). I argue that these alternatives cannot be easily disentangled, because politically engaged citizens seek out and assimilate information about economic policy from elites who are perceived …
Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution
Debates over redistribution, social insurance, and market regulation are central to American politics. Why do some citizens prefer a large role for government in the economic life of the nation while others wish to limit its reach? In Open versus Closed, the authors argue that these preferences are not always what they seem. They show how deep-seated personality traits underpinning the culture wars over race, immigration, law and order, sexuality…
Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time
While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both low and high income citizens. We reconsider this conclusion. First, we examine the methods of this research, and find that the claims made are not robust to important corrections in model speci…
Economists and Public Opinion: Expert Consensus and Economic Policy Judgments
How do citizens view economists, and how do they respond to consensus in the profession? We examine the responsiveness of the American public to information regarding the distribution of opinion among economists on five economic policy issues. We also examine the extent and role of citizens' trust in economists. We find that trust is tepid and find correspondingly small-to-moderate changes in public opinion when citizens are given information abo…
Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution
Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near-universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data sh…
Ethnic Change, Personality, and Polarization Over Immigration in the American Public
This article explores the interplay between ethnic change and individual psychology in shaping mass opinion on immigration. Recent research suggests that personality traits related to uncertainty aversion structure left-right orientation in American politics, and we argue that this personality cleavage should shape citizens' reactions to ethnic change. Using national survey data and a survey experiment, our analysis reveals that ethnic change pol…
Emotion and Political Judgment: Expectancy Violation and Affective Intelligence
What factors prompt citizens to switch from a partisan judgment strategy, one in which they reflexively side with the in-group in policy and electoral contests, to a more thoughtful one, in which they pause to consider additional information? Previous work suggests that variation in political reasoning is triggered by the experience of anxiety. In this research, we examine a broader consideration: whether the overall pattern of experienced emotio…
Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues
A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism, and (2) political sophisticati…
False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy: False Consciousness or Class Awareness
Existing research analyzes the effects of cross-national and temporal variation in income inequality on public opinion; however, research has failed to explore the impact of variation in inequality across citizens? local residential context. This article analyzes the impact of local inequality on citizens? belief in a core facet of the American ethos?meritocracy. We advance conditional effects hypotheses that collectively argue that the effect of…
Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy
Journal Article Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy Get access Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy by Eric W. Groenendyk. New York, Oxford University Press, 2013. 224 pp. $69.95. Christopher D. Johnston Christopher D. Johnston Duke University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academ…
Ideology, the Affordable Care Act Ruling, and Supreme Court Legitimacy
The received wisdom in the scholarly literature on the US Supreme Court is that the perceived legitimacy of the institution is largely independent of the Court’s policy output. Legitimacy is thought to be rooted in more stable factors, such as support for democratic values, and thus to be immune from ideological discontent with any particular decision. While recent research has demonstrated a general association between political predispositions …
Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity
There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic in…
Dispositional Sources of Economic Protectionism
Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by rece…
On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public
Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policy…
Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity
There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic in…
On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public
Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policy…
False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy: False Consciousness or Class Awareness
Existing research analyzes the effects of cross-national and temporal variation in income inequality on public opinion; however, research has failed to explore the impact of variation in inequality across citizens? local residential context. This article analyzes the impact of local inequality on citizens? belief in a core facet of the American ethos?meritocracy. We advance conditional effects hypotheses that collectively argue that the effect of…
Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues
A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism, and (2) political sophisticati…
Immigration Crackdown in the American Workplace: Explaining Variation in E-Verify Policy Adoption Across the U.S. States
Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analy…
Ethnic Change, Personality, and Polarization Over Immigration in the American Public
This article explores the interplay between ethnic change and individual psychology in shaping mass opinion on immigration. Recent research suggests that personality traits related to uncertainty aversion structure left-right orientation in American politics, and we argue that this personality cleavage should shape citizens' reactions to ethnic change. Using national survey data and a survey experiment, our analysis reveals that ethnic change pol…
Emotion and Political Judgment: Expectancy Violation and Affective Intelligence
What factors prompt citizens to switch from a partisan judgment strategy, one in which they reflexively side with the in-group in policy and electoral contests, to a more thoughtful one, in which they pause to consider additional information? Previous work suggests that variation in political reasoning is triggered by the experience of anxiety. In this research, we examine a broader consideration: whether the overall pattern of experienced emotio…
Dispositional Sources of Economic Protectionism
Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by rece…
Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated Reasoning
A large literature demonstrates that conservatives have greater needs for certainty than liberals. This suggests an asymmetry hypothesis: Conservatives are less open to new information that conflicts with their political identity and, in turn, political accountability will be lower on the right than the left. However, recent work suggests that liberals and conservatives are equally prone to politically motivated reasoning (PMR). The present artic…
Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time
While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both low and high income citizens. We reconsider this conclusion. First, we examine the methods of this research, and find that the claims made are not robust to important corrections in model speci…
Ideology, the Affordable Care Act Ruling, and Supreme Court Legitimacy
The received wisdom in the scholarly literature on the US Supreme Court is that the perceived legitimacy of the institution is largely independent of the Court’s policy output. Legitimacy is thought to be rooted in more stable factors, such as support for democratic values, and thus to be immune from ideological discontent with any particular decision. While recent research has demonstrated a general association between political predispositions …
Economists and Public Opinion: Expert Consensus and Economic Policy Judgments
How do citizens view economists, and how do they respond to consensus in the profession? We examine the responsiveness of the American public to information regarding the distribution of opinion among economists on five economic policy issues. We also examine the extent and role of citizens' trust in economists. We find that trust is tepid and find correspondingly small-to-moderate changes in public opinion when citizens are given information abo…
The Conditional Relationship of Psychological Needs to Ideology
We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associ…
Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology
I consider two theories of affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the United States: (1) ideological divergence on size‐of‐government issues (Webster & Abramowitz, ) and (2) authoritarianism‐based partisan sorting (Hetherington & Weiler, ). I argue that these alternatives cannot be easily disentangled, because politically engaged citizens seek out and assimilate information about economic policy from elites who are perceived …
Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution
Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near-universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data sh…
Negativity bias, personality and political ideology
The Covid-19 Pandemic and its Impact on the Southern United States
The Southern United States, the fastest growing region in the nation, is comprised of the largest number of states and home to the largest population of residents compared to the other three U.S. regions. Americans in the South have been more likely to experience poor health outcomes, to be living in poverty, and to be uninsured than those in other regions. In addition, Southerners' tradition of hospitality, the high value placed on church attend…
Mixed evidence for a relationship of cognitive fatigue to political engagement
The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters
The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy
Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based approach to these questions, one that compels a wholesale rethinking of the roots of responsible democratic citizenship. The central claim of the book is that partisan identity comes in qualitativel…
Immigration Crackdown in the American Workplace: Explaining Variation in E-Verify Policy Adoption Across the U.S. States
Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analy…
Dispositional Sources of Economic Protectionism
Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by rece…
On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public
Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policy…
Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy
Journal Article Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy Get access Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind: How Loyalty and Responsiveness Shape Party Identification and Democracy by Eric W. Groenendyk. New York, Oxford University Press, 2013. 224 pp. $69.95. Christopher D. Johnston Christopher D. Johnston Duke University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academ…
Ideology, the Affordable Care Act Ruling, and Supreme Court Legitimacy
The received wisdom in the scholarly literature on the US Supreme Court is that the perceived legitimacy of the institution is largely independent of the Court’s policy output. Legitimacy is thought to be rooted in more stable factors, such as support for democratic values, and thus to be immune from ideological discontent with any particular decision. While recent research has demonstrated a general association between political predispositions …
Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity
There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic in…
Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution
Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near-universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data sh…
Ethnic Change, Personality, and Polarization Over Immigration in the American Public
This article explores the interplay between ethnic change and individual psychology in shaping mass opinion on immigration. Recent research suggests that personality traits related to uncertainty aversion structure left-right orientation in American politics, and we argue that this personality cleavage should shape citizens' reactions to ethnic change. Using national survey data and a survey experiment, our analysis reveals that ethnic change pol…
Emotion and Political Judgment: Expectancy Violation and Affective Intelligence
What factors prompt citizens to switch from a partisan judgment strategy, one in which they reflexively side with the in-group in policy and electoral contests, to a more thoughtful one, in which they pause to consider additional information? Previous work suggests that variation in political reasoning is triggered by the experience of anxiety. In this research, we examine a broader consideration: whether the overall pattern of experienced emotio…
Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues
A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism, and (2) political sophisticati…
False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy: False Consciousness or Class Awareness
Existing research analyzes the effects of cross-national and temporal variation in income inequality on public opinion; however, research has failed to explore the impact of variation in inequality across citizens? local residential context. This article analyzes the impact of local inequality on citizens? belief in a core facet of the American ethos?meritocracy. We advance conditional effects hypotheses that collectively argue that the effect of…
Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time
While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both low and high income citizens. We reconsider this conclusion. First, we examine the methods of this research, and find that the claims made are not robust to important corrections in model speci…
Economists and Public Opinion: Expert Consensus and Economic Policy Judgments
How do citizens view economists, and how do they respond to consensus in the profession? We examine the responsiveness of the American public to information regarding the distribution of opinion among economists on five economic policy issues. We also examine the extent and role of citizens' trust in economists. We find that trust is tepid and find correspondingly small-to-moderate changes in public opinion when citizens are given information abo…
Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution
Debates over redistribution, social insurance, and market regulation are central to American politics. Why do some citizens prefer a large role for government in the economic life of the nation while others wish to limit its reach? In Open versus Closed, the authors argue that these preferences are not always what they seem. They show how deep-seated personality traits underpinning the culture wars over race, immigration, law and order, sexuality…
Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology
I consider two theories of affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the United States: (1) ideological divergence on size‐of‐government issues (Webster & Abramowitz, ) and (2) authoritarianism‐based partisan sorting (Hetherington & Weiler, ). I argue that these alternatives cannot be easily disentangled, because politically engaged citizens seek out and assimilate information about economic policy from elites who are perceived …
Curbing the Court: Why the Public Constrains Judicial Independence
What motivates political actors with diverging interests to respect the Supreme Court's authority? A popular answer is that the public serves as the guardian of judicial independence by punishing elected officials who undermine the justices. Curbing the Court challenges this claim, presenting a new theory of how we perceive the Supreme Court. Bartels and Johnston argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, citizens are not principled defenders o…
The Covid-19 Pandemic and its Impact on the Southern United States
The Southern United States, the fastest growing region in the nation, is comprised of the largest number of states and home to the largest population of residents compared to the other three U.S. regions. Americans in the South have been more likely to experience poor health outcomes, to be living in poverty, and to be uninsured than those in other regions. In addition, Southerners' tradition of hospitality, the high value placed on church attend…
The Conditional Relationship of Psychological Needs to Ideology
We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associ…
Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated Reasoning
A large literature demonstrates that conservatives have greater needs for certainty than liberals. This suggests an asymmetry hypothesis: Conservatives are less open to new information that conflicts with their political identity and, in turn, political accountability will be lower on the right than the left. However, recent work suggests that liberals and conservatives are equally prone to politically motivated reasoning (PMR). The present artic…
Negativity bias, personality and political ideology
The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters
Mixed evidence for a relationship of cognitive fatigue to political engagement
An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting
The ability of voters to predict the future policy-related behavior of candidates is essential to a well-functioning representative democracy. But existing studies have difficulty distinguishing between detailed knowledge of individual candidates and the use of coarse partisan cues when making prospective judgments. This article uses incentivized forecasting of candidates’ future interest group ratings, which allows for finer distinctions than ye…
Competing moral minds? Estimating moral disagreement in American politics
What drives ideological and partisan divisions in contemporary American politics? An influential line of research suggests they are rooted in disagreement about the nature of morality. While the left uses principles of care and fairness in moral judgment, the right considers loyalty, authority, and sanctity to be additional morally relevant values. This creates a “moral empathy gap” that makes it difficult for people to understand the perspective…
Political science (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Ideology (11 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (11 works)