Tag: Politics

Political ideology, emotion response, and confirmation bias

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Author: Dickinson, David L. Description: Motivated reasoning can serve to help resolve emotional discomfort, which suggests emotion as a likely moderator of such reasoning. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by examining emotion and confirmation bias in the political domain. Results from two preregistered studies, which involved over 900 unique participants, document a confirmation bias across distinct dimensions of belief and preference formation. Also, ideologically dissonant information significantly worsens self-reported emotion. With some exceptions, the evidence generally supports the hypothesis that negative emotion moderates the strength of the…

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The political is personal: The costs of daily politics

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Author: Ford, Brett Q.; Feinberg, Matthew; Lassetter, Bethany; Thai, Sabrina; Gatchpazian, Arasteh Description: Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across 2 weeks (Study 1: N = 198, observations = 2,167) and 3 weeks (Study 2: N…

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Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration

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Author: Smith, Kevin B. Description: Objectives: To quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration. Methods: A previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines. Results: Large numbers…

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Explaining Support for Political Violence: Grievance and Perceived Opportunity

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Author: Dyrstad, Karin; Hillesund, Solveig Description: What explains support for violence against the state? The surge in survey-based studies in (former) conflict areas has improved our understanding of the determinants of armed conflict. Yet, the potential interaction between grievances and political opportunity structure has received little attention in microlevel studies. Integrating common arguments from the civil war literature with the political behavior tradition, this article argues that perceived political efficacy, a central component of the political opportunity structure, moderates the association between individual and group grievance and people’s support for…

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Bringing the Legislature Back In: Examining the Structural Effects of National Legislatures on Effective Democratic Governance

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Author: Tusalem, Rollin F. Description: Extant research in comparative politics has examined the role of institutional frameworks such as constitutional design, the nature of the electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism on the quality of governance. Understanding variations on effective democratic governance has assumed a state-centric approach that has largely neglected how strong legislatures can drastically affect political outcomes. This study finds empirical evidence that the strength of national legislatures (in terms of its influence over the executive, institutional autonomy, its specified powers and institutional capacity) is correlated to effective democratic…

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The Autocrat’s Corruption Dilemma

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Author: Carothers, Christopher Description: A large body of scholarship shows that autocrats can use corruption strategically to strengthen their political hold, such as by distributing rents to their supporters. However, this scholarship often overlooks how corruption may also politically damage autocrats. I argue that corruption often brings substantial political costs alongside its advantages, resulting in a “corruption dilemma” for autocrats. I show that in recent years, public anger over corruption has led to numerous anti-government protests and has been a major cause of autocrats being ousted from power. How politically…

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Liberalism and Conservatism, for a Change! Rethinking the Association Between Political Orientation and Relation to Societal Change

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Author: Proch, Jutta; Elad-Strenger, Julia; Kessler, Thomas Description: According to common wisdom, which is supported by extant psychological theorizing, a core feature of political conservatism (vs. liberalism) is the resistance to (vs. acceptance of) societal change. We propose that an empirical examination of the actual difference in political liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward change across different sociopolitical issues may call into question this assumed association between political orientation and relation to change. We examined this proposition in four studies conducted in Germany. In Study 1, we assessed lay people’s intuitions…

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Direct and indirect influences of political regimes on corruption

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Author: Goel, R.; Nelson, M. A. Description: Objective: This paper studies the direct and indirect impacts of political regimes on corruption. Whereas the interplay of government is fundamental to corrupt acts, the present research sheds new light by showing the direct and indirect influences of dimensions of government structure on corruption. Methods: We employ two different estimation techniques. First, we use OLS regressions, with year and regional dummies. Second, we employ mediation analysis to account for the intermediate role of government size in the relation between government structure and corruption…

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Sources of Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes

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Author: Chang, Eric C. C.; Golden, Miriam A. Description: We study the determinants of corruption in a sample of 40-odd authoritarian polities at the turn of the 21st century. Recent studies have proposed several parallel mechanisms potentially relevant for variations in the extent of corruption in authoritarian regimes. We put these various theories into a unified empirical model in order to investigate the wide range of corruption observed in non-democratic political systems. We investigate the importance to variations in corruption in authoritarian countries of the type of group in power,…

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