What types of motives trigger politically motivated reasoning? In two large-scale experiments (total N = 5,403) involving four contentious political issues, we investigated two psychological mechanisms that could trigger biased reasoning and attitude polarization: (1) epistemic motives to reduce uncertainty, manipulated by raising uncertainty about politically relevant evidence; and (2) relational motives to establish within-group homogeneity, manipulated through social cueing. We also investigated ideological symmetries and asymmetries in these processes. In the presence of uncertainty cues, results revealed that liberals moderated their attitudes, whereas conservatives maintained pre-existing opinions. Social cues, on the other hand, increased attitude polarization in liberals and conservatives alike. These findings highlight psychological similarities and dissimilarities between liberals and conservatives and show that multiple motives, when temporarily activated, are capable of contributing to biased reasoning.
Election administration is under intense scrutiny, including scrutiny of the design of electoral systems. But why do voters prefer some voting rules over others? We introduce a new construct we refer to as the Access-Integrity Continuum. At its core, the Access-Integrity Continuum represents a voter’s weighting of the relative importance of ease of voter access in an election versus the integrity of an election. Utilizing data from a unique dataset of over 5,000 respondents from the 2022 election season, we measure the effects of the Access-Integrity Continuum versus partisanship on respondent preferences for different voting rules. We show that the Access-Integrity Continuum explains considerable variance in those preferences beyond partisanship.
Voting is repetitive and persistent, but these ideas have received scarce attention when it comes to other political behaviors. Do repetition and persistence characterize political acts beyond voting? Drawing together existing theories of participation with the idea of habit, we present an integrated model of repeated behavior. We then analyze the characteristics of 17 different political acts using two methodological approaches including a “conditions on observables” approach using the 2010-2014 Cooperative Election Study Panel and a “direct measurement” approach using a new survey instrument called the Self-Report Habit Index on two Qualtrics surveys and the 2020 Cooperative Election Study Panel. From these results, we identify political acts along a spectrum of habit, discuss the implications, and provide suggestions for future work on political habits.
Congress has a long history of deference to the Executive with regard to foreign policy and the intelligence community. During the Cold War in particular, Congress often wished to be kept at arm's reach from covert operations conducted by Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. Yet in the 1980s, Members of Congress began to assert themselves over the Reagan administration's covert operation to provide aid and weapons to the contras in Nicaragua. We articulate a theory showing how backbenchers moved intelligence committee members away from deference and into a more polarized, adversarial posture. We then investigate the mechanisms of this theory with a novel dataset of speeches of Members of Congress, 1981-1983, on the topic of Nicaragua. We find that intelligence committee members' rhetoric began to shift towards the rhetoric of backbenchers as more revelations about the covert operation are made public. These findings suggest that the modern confrontational attitude of Congress toward the intelligence agencies has its roots in the 1980s, rather than the 1990s, and demonstrate a new mechanism by which Congress oversees the executive.
Political polarization and division between the two major U.S. political parties has sparked a growing interest in independent voters - individuals who prefer not to align with the two major political parties. Independents make up the largest proportion of the U.S. electorate. Despite the growth of independent identifiers, scholars continue to debate whether independents are truly distinct or merely weak partisans, and there has been little prior research on the characteristics of independents and how the public perceives them. This study assesses how independents differ demographically, ideologically, and perceptually from partisans. Evidence from voter file data suggests independents are younger, less educated, and more likely to be moderates. Analysis of a unique 2022 national survey finds independents want a political system that is more inclusive, offers better representation, and allows for increased political flexibility (with less categorization). The results suggest independents seek a greater sense of participation in the political process.
Field offices for Members of Congress allow staff to engage in casework and solve local problems. Office locations are forms of representation and a strategic political choice to harness voters. Utilizing archived websites to track the physical location of Members of the U.S. House's district offices from 2012-2020, we explore whether redistricting and representative identity lead to changes in the location of district offices for newly elected House Members. Using geolocation at the zip code level, the results show that newly elected members were likely to move their district offices following redistricting, confirming alterations in geographic boundaries. Additionally, we uncover evidence that incoming women House Members strategically relocate their office locations to areas where they can support local constituents' needs. The result for partisan identity is less straightforward as both parties strive to locate their offices in politically beneficial areas that are more racially diverse due to the changing demographic composition of the U.S. The results suggest that members shift district offices to accommodate new constituencies and strategically position their physical office locations.
The practice of racially gerrymandering political districts entails segregating one racial group from others into and out of individual districts. This study measures the racial segregation of black people in U.S. Congressional Districts using the Areal Unit Segregation Measure (abbreviated S+/-), a statistic introduced to the literature recently. S+/- measures how much a district packs or cracks some racial group by determining whether a district contains an unusually greater (or unusually lesser) share of black people than the share of black people among a district's residents' nearest N neighbors (where values of N equal the number of people in a state's Congressional Districts). Since S+/- is a new measure, the main goal of this paper is to interpret values of S+/-. To do this, S+/- values are generated for all U.S. Congressional Districts drawn after each census from 1990 to 2020 and for high-profile court cases in which judges overturned Congressional Districts that unduly segregated black voters into and out of districts. S+/- values of actual districts are also compared with samples of computer-generated maps to determine when a 2022 district's S+/- is statistically unusual. Collectively, these results clearly indicate that when a district's S+/- value is about 18 or more points from zero a district is unduly packed or cracked.
Changing technology now allows for increased citizen participation in the redistricting process. Bodies responsible for redistricting, including legislatures, commissions, and courts, will need new analytical methods to evaluate large numbers of maps. We propose the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a decision-support tool that will help evaluators identify high quality maps proposed by citizens and citizen groups. DEA does not rely upon an a priori ranking of redistricting criteria, but scores maps based on the values that emerge from the pool of submitted maps. We apply DEA to 403 maps submitted to Draw the Lines (DTL) , a series of redistricting contests held in Pennsylvania prior to the 2021 redistricting round. We compare DEA scores with contest outcomes, in particular comparing high scoring maps and semifinalists chosen by DTL judges. We explore the incomplete overlap between the maps that performed well in the contest and those that scored highly on DEA. We argue that DEA can aid in reducing the number of maps to be considered by human judges, for any process in which a large number of maps, whether created by humans or computers, must be evaluated for the selection of a final redistricting plan. These include public contests, public comment to legislatures and redistricting commissions, and, increasingly, cases in which the courts have had to select redistricting plans after the failure of the political process.
Tax proceeds provide the funding base for the welfare state. However, little is known about how taxes affect public support for welfare programs. We contend that the design features of the tax sources of welfare programs can affect Americans' welfare preferences. Moreover, these effects may vary depending on citizens' ideological beliefs and income levels. Through conducting a conjoint experiment, we explore how people of different political ideologies and income levels respond to welfare programs' tax sources. Our analysis suggests that tax salience considerably affects welfare attitudes. We also find that information about progressive taxes funding welfare programs has a more pronounced negative impact on welfare support among high-income citizens, while details about regressive tax sources have a more substantial dampening impact on low-income individuals. However, political ideology does not significantly shape citizens' welfare preferences when they receive information about federal or state taxes that fund welfare programs.
Members of Congress rely on social media to cultivate political narratives, with anger and an indignant message becoming increasingly central to their self-presentation. Given its heightened capacity for virality and mobilization, angry rhetoric serves as a powerful tool in political communication. This short article examines the role of partisan dynamics in fueling the escalation of angry rhetoric in representatives' reputation-building online, finding persisting trends that predate President Donald Trump's notable use of Twitter for agenda-setting. Leveraging computational textual analysis of over 2.2 million official congressional tweets, we demonstrate asymmetric partisan patterns in representatives' use of angry rhetoric, finding that Democrats are disproportionately driving this trend. These findings further our understanding of lawmakers' digital reputation-building, contributing to broader discussions about the interplay between partisan politics and the communication strategies lawmakers employ while in office.
Journalists in the US regularly are thought to publish climate change news that uses less negative language than the terrorism reporting they provide. Using data from eight major newspapers, we show this supposition is true. However, we also show that terrorism news' more negative tone is an epiphenomenon of the events journalists cover. When presented with identical climate change and terrorism stories, journalists report on these threats using roughly the same language. This result, based on data from five experiments, calls the idea that journalism's principles and practices are the source of the differential coverage people receive into question. Instead, the result is consistent with the idea that journalisms institutions homogenize the news.
Empirical research on voter fraud finds that it is rare and does not appear to influence the outcomes of elections. However, voter fraud may still have deleterious effects even if it does not affect who wins the election. I offer two survey experiments to assess how fraud affects the legitimacy of the winner. I find that fraud undermines legitimacy, even when it occurs on such a small scale that it could not plausibly have changed the outcome of the election. I also find some evidence that voter ID laws significantly increase the winner's legitimacy and that the effect is larger than the effect of a post-election audit.
Political communications research has found that elites enjoy wide latitude to shape mass opinion but also identified important constraints on opinion leadership in competitive democracies. To win over the public, political leaders must generally mobilize party loyalties, secure interest group endorsements, and make persuasive arguments to support their views. Influential research (Broockman & Butler, 2017) calls these constraints into question by raising the possibility that elected officials can sway their constituents' opinions about policy merely by declaring their own stances, without providing substantive justifications or group cues. Such "position adoption," in which ordinary citizens simply defer to politicians' authority, would mean that the public is more pliant than previous research suggests. To examine this possibility, we report on four experimental studies that assess the effect of unelaborated "position-taking cues" from elected representatives on their constituents' policy opinions. We find no evidence that the bare articulation of a representative's position changes constituents' opinions, whereas many of the group cues and substantive arguments included in these experiments have sizable influences on opinions measured in our studies. These results cast doubt on the most pessimistic interpretation of elite opinion leadership.
U.S. presidential campaigns generate an extraordinary volume of political news intended to inform and mobilize the electorate. Yet long-standing concerns about citizens' limited capacity to process political information raise the possibility that this abundance may instead produce disengagement as a coping mechanism for election stress. This study examines whether perceptions of election news overload during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign are linked to intentional avoidance of election-related news. Drawing on an original six-item measure of perceived election news overload, the analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in how citizens experienced the campaign news environment, with a majority reporting at least some degree of overload. Importantly, higher levels of perceived election news overload are associated with a greater likelihood of intentionally avoiding election coverage. This relationship persists after accounting for well-established predictors of political information engagement, including political interest, efficacy, knowledge, partisan strength, and demographics. Moving beyond reliance on self-reports alone, the study combines survey measures with a news story selection task to capture both behavioral and stated avoidance. The findings suggest that information abundance during campaigns may undermine citizen competence by encouraging strategic disengagement from election news.
Recent surveys suggest that Americans' trust in institutions has decreased, including trust in science and government. Such trends could have significant effects on the health of democracy, scientific advancement, information consumption, and more. However, trust can stem from different considerations. In some cases, a lack of trust arises from ill will or suspicion over integrity, that is, concerns about immorality or wrong doing. It can also arise from pessimism about competence. These different causes elicit distinct reactions, which could motivate varied reactions toward groups that are not trusted. Using multiple original surveys of US adults (total N = 3,894), including an original experiment, we find that seeing scientists and politicians as morally bad - but not as incompetent - leads to lower trust in these individuals. This suggests that perceptions of moral wrongdoing are stronger drivers of lower political and scientific trust in recent years, compared to perceived incompetence. These results hold in correlational analysis, although the effects vary somewhat by partisanship. Together, these results have important implications for understanding the driver of major ills that threaten the functioning of society and government.
Can mass protests for racial justice influence police patrol tactics? Which racial and spatial mechanisms underlie these changes? Previous literature suggests that high-profile events can lead individual agents to alter their enforcement activities by 'de-policing.' However, literature is scarce (and conflicting) about the relationship of de-policing with crime, and effects across racial groups are underexplored. In this article, I argue that this apparent de-policing is, in reality, a positive reform of police patrol tactics induced by public pressure, which forced law enforcement to reconsider its approach to police-civilian interactions and focus on adopting a conservative stopping strategy, more targeted against higher-risk individuals, and more sensitive regarding the unequal treatment of minorities. To do so, I analyze this issue combining pedestrian stops and crime data from Chicago, asking whether the 2020 BLM protests led the Chicago Police Department to change its patrol strategy. When protests erupted, crime and policing got progressively decoupled: when criminality rose, stops did not. While overall crime simply returned to its pre-BLM (and pre-COVID-19) trends and levels, policing changed radically: stops, searches and arrests dropped and became stationary, while hit rates rose sharply. Stops also decreased differently across racial groups: almost exclusively for Black civilians, and mostly in minority districts. This decline in minority policing is evident across all officer groups, further indicating that the change reflects a broad shift in policing tactics rather than individual-level shirking.
The American electorate is divided along educational lines. The 2024 presidential election was marked by the largest-ever educational divide in vote choice. Typically, we frame this divide as a split between people with college degrees and those without. In this paper, I argue that there is significant polarization along the entire educational attainment spectrum. I show that the divide between BA and graduate degree holders is just as pronounced on many dimensions as the divide between BA holders and high school graduates. This point is especially critical because graduate degree holders are the fastest-growing educational category, moving from 9% of the population in 2000 to 14.5% today. I use ANES and US Census data to show that educational polarization encompasses political attitudes, engagement, and vote choice. As people become more educated, they become more liberal on social, cultural, and economic issues, become more likely to participate in politics, and support the Democrats. I also show that educational polarization combined with demographic changes has dramatically reshaped the party coalitions, with the Democratic Party's base becoming more educated while the Republican coalition is little changed. I also show that the proportion of the population with a graduate degree was one of the strongest demographic predictors of county-level vote share in the 2024 election. All told, the American electorate is polarized along the entire educational attainment spectrum.
Do voters have an intrinsic preference for democracy? Assessing attitudes toward trustee or delegate models of representation risks conflating intrinsic and instrumental orientations toward democracy. To clarify the gap between intrinsic and instrumental support for political representation, we use a survey experiment to investigate whether US voters want representatives to enact the individual voter's own preferences, regardless of countervailing attitudes held by the representative themselves or by their constituents. We find considerable support for this third, personal model of representation. We argue that this poses two important questions for democratic theorists. First, how do citizens' observed preferences for dictating outcomes challenge normative democratic principles of representation? Furthermore, if we rethink how citizens engage in democratic processes, how does it change our understanding of democracy's intrinsic worth in the public?
The US Congress is the world's most studied legislature, but data on its many facets often remains isolated. This note introduces an updated version of CongressData, a database of over 1300 member-year and district-year level variables between 1789 and 2024 that compiles district demographics and economic variables, legislator characteristics, lawmaking behavior, and committee membership. We also introduce an R package that makes it easy to subset and cite data and an associated web app. We first draw attention to the metadata in CongressData. Then, leveraging CongressData, we highlight analyses that cut across these types of data. Our illustration uses dimensional analysis on the the determinants of bill introduction by Members of Congress. In doing so, we assess several prominent explanations for bill in-troduction. Exploring the factors that govern this focus, we find that committee membership is more associated than party, ideology, member characteristics, or district demographics. The dataset will aid scholars of Congress and American institutions, enabling them to adjudicate between different factors to explain the phenomena of interest to them.
How do information environments shape political preferences among rural Americans? This study examines how variation in local television news exposure shapes rural Americans' political preferences about government spending on law enforcement. These governmental spending preferences are often shaped by skepticism grounded in rural place-based identity. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, I argue that exposure to different media markets-particularly those from more populous urban areas where coverage of crime and law enforcement is more prevalent-creates distinct informational contexts that influence political preferences. Using survey data from rural respondents in the 2016, 2020, and 2022 Cooperative Election Studies and a matching design, the analysis finds that rural Americans exposed to local television news from urban media markets express greater support for increasing law enforcement spending, even at the expense of other public services. These findings challenge the idea that rural Americans hold rigid, identity-based political preferences rooted in place. Instead, this study demonstrates that rural political preferences are malleable and shaped by information environments.
