Intersubjective cultural representations predicting behaviour: The case of political culture and voting

Research has shown that cultural identification is influenced by the congruence between people's personal values and intersubjectively represented cultural values. The current research extended this finding to voter choice and behaviour. We hypothesized that people whose values and attitudes are similar to the collective representations of the political party that an election candidate belongs to would be more likely to vote for that candidate. Also, this relationship would be mediated by party identification. We found support for our hypotheses in two studies, one on the Legislative Council election in Hong Kong and the other on the 2004 US presidential election.     

From marginal to mainstream: The role of perceived social norms in the rise of a far‐right movement

The present research intends to shed light on the processes enabling political minorities to transition into normatively acceptable groups, by investigating how a previously marginalised far‐right movement (the French National Front) is progressively becoming mainstream. Drawing on the social representations approach, we argue that perceived social norms play a pivotal role in this process. Using a longitudinal and experimental design, the study (N = 233) was implemented in the ecological context of the 2012 French presidential election at a Parisian university campus, a traditional anti‐far‐right bastion. We tested whether the electoral campaign altered the perceptions of social norms, whether the perceived social norms were easily malleable in this specific context and, most important, whether they influenced people's willingness to speak out in public against the far‐right movement. The findings support affirmative answers to all three questions. We conclude that, in periods of collective uncertainty, changing perceptions of social norms might play an important role in the weakening of public opposition to far‐right movements. This, in turn, helps to explain the recent transition to mainstream recognition of a number of previously marginalised political movements in Europe and around the globe.     

Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces: New Evidence From Exit Polls

Research shows people share common political facial stereotypes: They associate faces with political ideologies. Moreover, given that many voters rely on party affiliation, political ideology, and appearances to select political candidates, we might expect that political facial stereotypes would sway voting preferences and, by extension, the share of votes going to each candidate in an election. And yet few studies have examined whether having a stereotypically conservative‐looking (or liberal‐looking) face predicts a candidate's vote shares. Using data from U.S. election exit polls, we show that the Republican voters within each state are more likely to vote for a candidate (even a Democrat) the more that person has a stereotypically Republican‐looking face. By contrast, the voting choices of the Democratic voters within each state are unrelated to political facial stereotypes. Moreover, we show that the relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting does not depend on state‐level ideology: Republican voters in both right‐leaning (“red”) and left‐leaning (“blue”) states are more likely to vote for candidates with conservative‐looking faces. These results have several important practical and theoretical implications concerning the nature and impact of political facial stereotypes, which we discuss.     

The Wished‐For Always Wins Until the Winner Was Inevitable All Along: Motivated Reasoning and Belief Bias Regulate Emotion During Elections

How do biases affect political information processing? A variant of the Wason selection task, which tests for confirmation bias, was used to characterize how the dynamics of the recent U.S. presidential election affected how people reasoned about political information. Participants were asked to evaluate pundit‐style conditional claims like “The incumbent always wins in a year when unemployment drops” either immediately before or immediately after the 2012 presidential election. A three‐way interaction between ideology, predicted winner (whether the proposition predicted that Obama or Romney would win), and the time of test indicated complex effects of bias on reasoning. Before the election, there was partial evidence of motivated reasoning—liberals performed especially well at looking for falsifying information when the pundit's claim predicted Romney would win. After the election, once the outcome was known, there was evidence of a belief bias—people sought to falsify claims that were inconsistent with the real‐world outcome rather than their ideology. These results suggest that people seek to implicitly regulate emotion when reasoning about political predictions. Before elections, people like to think their preferred candidate will win. After elections, people like to think the winner was inevitable all along.     

The Differential Effects of Stress on Voter Turnout

While everyone deals with stressful situations on a daily basis, individuals have different behavioral reactions to that stress. We argue that life stress also affects individuals’ political behavior, but this effect is contingent on their past political involvement. While individuals familiar with and engaged in the political process are unaffected when confronted with stress in life, individuals who are not routinely involved in the electoral process are more likely to disengage from politics. To test the differential effects of stress on the likelihood of political involvement, we fielded two experiments, one preceding the U.S. presidential election of 2012 and the second preceding the 2013 municipal election in a small Midwestern American town. We find that when triggered to consider life stressors unrelated to politics, individuals without a history of past participation in politics are less likely to vote while individuals who are habitual voters are unaffected.     

Beyond ‘Liberals’ and ‘Conservatives’: Complexity in Ideology,Moral Intuitions,and Worldview Among Swedish Voters

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the left–right division. With respect to social ideology, resistance to change and binding moral intuitions predicted stronger preference for a social democratic (vs. progressive) party on the left and weaker preference for a social liberal (vs. social conservative or liberal-conservative) party on the right. With respect to political values and broader worldviews, normativism and low acceptance of immigrants predicted the strongest preference for a nationalist party, while environmentalism predicted the strongest preference for a green party. The effects were generally strong and robust when we controlled for left–right self-placements, economic ideology, and demographic characteristics. These results show that personality variation in the ideological domain is not reducible to the simplistic contrast between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, which ignores differences between progressive and non-progressive leftists, economic and green progressives, social liberal and conservative rightists, and nationalist and non-nationalist conservatives.     

Voting and Values: Reciprocal Effects over Time

Two studies investigated reciprocal effects of values and voting. Study 1 measured adults' basic values and core political values both before (n = 1379) and following (n = 1030) the 2006 Italian national election. Both types of values predicted voting. Voting choice influenced subsequent core political values but not basic values. The political values of free enterprise, civil liberties, equality, law and order, military intervention, and accepting immigrants changed to become more compatible with the ideology of the chosen coalition. Study 2 measured core political values before (n = 697) and following (n = 506) the 2008 Italian national election. It largely replicated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values of Study 1. In addition, it demonstrated that left‐right ideology mediated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values. Moreover, voter certainty moderated these effects. Political values predicted vote choice more weakly among undecided than decided voters, but voting choice led to more value change among undecided voters.     

Using Attitude Strength to Predict Registration and Voting Behavior in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections

This study examined attitude strength in the context of the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Surveys of 299 undergraduates assessed attitudes and attitude strength constructs toward Bush/Kerry. The results suggest that (a) attitude strength constructs, especially importance and value-relevance, predict political behavior, (b) indicators of attitude strength may represent two underlying factors, and (c) attitude strength moderates the attitude-candidate choice relationship. Additional results offered some support for the validity of two new attitude strength constructs: higher order attitudes (participants' attitudes about their attitudes) and polarization of candidate attitudes (the absolute value of the difference in attitudes toward Bush and Kerry).     

Perception of political candidates based on their stand on abortion and taxes.

This study investigated whether young voters would vote for and volunteer to work for the election campaign of a presidential candidate, given the candidate's background and positions on two major campaign issues. Findings indicate that, although voter-candidate agreement on a single issue may be enough for a voter to vote for a candidate, agreement on both issues may be necessary before a voter agrees to volunteer to work for the candidate's election campaign.     

Identification with television newscasters and Korean college students' voting intentions and political activities

In 2004, many prominent newscasters ran as candidates in the Korean general election and won. The present study examines whether young voters' identification with newscasters was significantly associated with Korean voting behaviour as well as with other forms of political participation. Analysis of 270 respondents showed that identification with newscasters contributed significantly to young Koreans' intentions to vote for newscasters and to their active involvement in other forms of campaign participation, beyond the effects of age, gender, and level of political interest. Additionally, news media exposure, perception of newscaster behaviours, emotional involvement, surveillance motivation and entertainment motivation were all positively related to voters' identification with newscasters.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

Political Intolerance,Right and Left

Research recently published in Political Psychology suggested that political intolerance is more strongly predicted by political conservatism than liberalism. Our findings challenge that conclusion. Participants provided intolerance judgments of several targets and the political objective of these targets (left‐wing vs. right‐wing) was varied between subjects. Across seven judgments, conservatism predicted intolerance of left‐wing targets, while liberalism predicted intolerance of right‐wing targets. These relationships were fully mediated by perceived threat from targets. Moreover, participants were biased against directly opposing political targets: conservatives were more intolerant of a left‐wing target than the opposing right‐wing target (e.g., pro‐gay vs. anti‐gay rights activists), while liberals were more intolerant of a right‐wing target than the opposing left‐wing target. These findings are discussed within the context of the existing political intolerance and motivated reasoning literatures.     

Religious Right,Religious Left,Both, or Neither? Understanding Religio‐Political Identification

In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans’ propensity to identify with religio‐political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio‐political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals’ identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics.     

Beyond de Tocqueville: The roles of vertical and horizontal individualism and conservatism in the 2004 U.S. presidential election

Individualism is a fundamental value to U.S. culture and democracy. We differentiate the horizontal from vertical dimension of individualism to predict voting in the 2004 presidential election. Horizontal individualism (HI) values equality and uniqueness, whereas vertical individualism (VI) values competition and achievement. In line with the value-expressive function of attitudes and voter–politician congruency principles, we show how and when HI and VI affect voters' attitudes and voting. A pilot study revealed that VI correlated with vote; those who scored higher on VI were more likely to vote for Bush. Study 1 replicated these findings with a broader sample and a regression approach. The influence of individualism was less predictive than VI in both studies. In Study 2, we proposed that the effect of VI and HI values on voting decisions is mediated by political conservatism, which in turn predicts voters' trait assessment of candidates and voting decision. Path analysis of the data from a national survey supported our expectation among respondents with high political involvement, the context in which value-expressive attitudes are more pronounced. Taken together, these studies advance our theoretical understanding of HI, VI, and individualism, as well as the process underlying the effect of values on decisions.     

Motivated to Forgive? Partisan Scandals and Party Supporters

In this study, we investigate how partisan motivations shape voters' reactions to a political scandal by drawing on a unique survey experiment fielded immediately after Justin Trudeau's brownface/blackface scandal broke during the 2019 Canadian election. We thus explore motivated reasoning in real time in a competitive and highly partisan election context. Are voters more willing to forgive politicians for past behavior when their own party leader's impropriety is cued? To what extent do personal interests, such as cross-pressures or electoral concerns, affect the motivation to forgive? Our findings show that partisan-motivated reasoning is overwhelmingly powerful, producing politically biased judgments of politicians implicated in scandals. Furthermore, voters' willingness to forgive scandals is also influenced by “strategic” considerations, in that preferences over which political party wins or loses in the election affect opinions about whether someone should be forgiven or whether the scandal is considered important at all. However, we find no evidence that personal involvement in the issue raised by the scandal conditions partisan motivations. We posit that the environment—in this case, a competitive election—is an important consideration for understanding the extent and limits of partisan-motivated reasoning.     

Moral Obstinacy in Political Negotiations

Research in behavioral economics finds that moral considerations bear on the offers that people make and accept in negotiations. This finding is relevant for political negotiations, wherein moral concerns are manifold. However, behavioral economics has yet to incorporate a major theme from moral psychology: People differ, sometimes immensely, in which issues they perceive to be a matter of morality. We review research about the measurement and characteristics of moral convictions. We hypothesize that moral conviction leads to uncompromising bargaining strategies and failed negotiations. We test this theory in three incentivized experiments in which participants bargain over political policies with real payoffs at stake. We find that participants' moral convictions are linked with aggressive bargaining strategies, which helps explain why it is harder to forge bargains on some political issues than others. We also find substantial asymmetries between liberals and conservatives in the intensity of their moral convictions about different issues.     

Candidate Vulnerability and Exposure to Counterattitudinal Information: Evidence From Two U.S. Presidential Elections

Politically motivated selective exposure has traditionally been understood through the lens of long‐standing attitudes and beliefs, but the role of environment in shaping information exposure practices merits further consideration. Citizens might respond to the political environment in their information‐seeking behavior for numerous reasons. Citizens who believe their position is politically vulnerable have specific cognitive and affective needs that may make them uniquely attuned to counterattitudinal information. In the context of a presidential election, this means that as the defeat of a supported candidate appears more likely, attention to counterattitudinal content will increase. Data collected in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections support this prediction, although this relationship was observed primarily among supporters of the Republican candidate in both elections.     

Party Support,Values, and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity

The legitimacy of the electoral process is crucial for the consolidation of democracy. We here focus on individual perceptions of electoral integrity (IPEI) and seek to understand what factors can explain different degrees of IPEI. In particular, we use the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (2010–14) to examine how antiauthoritarian values affect individuals' directional bias, driven by political party support, in evaluating electoral integrity. The results show that IPEI do depend on an interaction of political party support and the strength of antiauthoritarian values. However, the addition of the latter does not lead to a convergence of integrity evaluations among winners and losers, as may be expected under the assumption that antiauthoritarian values drive voters to more carefully monitor and evaluate the electoral process. Instead, it leads to greater polarization between electoral winners and losers. We explain the result with reference to the motivated reasoning literature on biased information processing: While antiauthoritarian convictions lead people to obtain more information on the electoral process, their political leanings bias their reading of this information, which in effect leads to stronger polarization in perceptions.     

The Belief in Majority Determination of Group Decision Outcomes

We proposed and tested a linear model for predicting perceivers' beliefs about the magnitude of popular support for group decision outcomes. Experiment 1 showed that the model performed well when it predicted perceived majority support for group outcomes but poorly when it predicted a belief in minority support. Subjects, in other words, displayed a clear bias toward perceiving group decision outcomes as having been determined by the majority of group members. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked shortly after the November 1992 presidential election to indicate the percentage of the popular vote received on election day by Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot. The results showed that Clinton, who actually received less than majority voter support (43%0), was perceived to have attracted majority support (51.8%). Moreover, 7 months after the election, perceived majority support for Clinton on election day grew stronger (to 56.8%) whereas perceived voter support for Bush and Perot declined. These data illustrate a pervasive belief in majority determination of group decision outcomes.