Disentangling the Importance of Psychological Predispositions and Social Constructions in the Organization of American Political Ideology

Ideological preferences within the American electorate are contingent on both the environmental conditions that provide the content of the contemporary political debate and internal predispositions that motivate people to hold liberal or conservative policy preferences. In this article we apply Jost, Federico, and Napier's (2009) top-down/bottom-up theory of political attitude formation to a genetically informative population sample. In doing so, we further develop the theory by operationalizing the top-down pathway to be a function of the social environment and the bottom-up pathway as a latent set of genetic factors. By merging insights from psychology, behavioral genetics, and political science, we find strong support for the top-down/bottom-up framework that segregates the two independent pathways in the formation of political attitudes and identifies a different pattern of relationships between political attitudes at each level of analysis.     

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Individuals with similar political orientations may find themselves in dissimilar social and political surroundings, with important consequences for the flow of political information among citizens. Analyses of data from the post-election survey of the 1900 National Election Study show that some individuals reside within extensive networks of political discussion and communication, whereas others are politically isolated. With respect to presidential candidate preference in 1900, some citizens in networks were surrounded by discussants who agreed with their preference, others by discussants who held ambiguous and undetermined preferences, and still others by discussants who held politically divergent preferences. These preference distributions have various implications for the formation of political opinion and for levels of political engagement and turnout.     

Role of Advertising in Forming the Image of Politicians: Comparative Analysis of Poland,France, and Germany

This article presents an analysis of the influence of political advertisements on forming the image of politicians and the voting behavior of citizens. The very important issues are attitude to the candidates and estimation of their personal qualities. After a critical analysis of current models of the influence of political advertisements on the voters, the authors derived the sequential model of the influence of political advertisement on voting behavior. Experiments in three countries were conducted in order to verify this model: Poland (1995 presidential election), France (presidential elections in 1995), and Germany (general election in 1994). The results confirm the dependencies described in the model. The results also allow for distinguishing three types of impact that political advertisements may have on voting decisions: (1) strengthening former voting preferences; (2) weakening the former preferences and their change or reverse in an extreme case; and (3) lack of impact or small fluctuations in voting preferences accompanied by simultaneous reconfiguration of a politician's image in the voters' minds (or reargumentation as far as the motives of one's decision are concerned). The results obtained in the research also allow for deriving a number of practical clues concerning the possibilities of making more efficient political ads.     

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 sophistication plays an important role in moderating the translation of needs into political preferences within the economic domain. The present article extends this work by offering a theoretical model of the heterogeneous translation of personality dispositions into political preferences across issues and issue domains. We argue that these needs structure preferences directly for highly symbolic issues like those in the social domain, but they structure preferences indirectly through partisanship for difficult issues like those in the economic domain. We test this theory utilizing a national survey experiment in the United States and explore its broader implications for both the literature on the psychological determinants of political ideology and for debates over the “culture war” in the United States.     

Linking Genes and Political Orientations: Testing the Cognitive Ability as Mediator Hypothesis

Recent research has demonstrated that genetic differences explain a sizeable fraction of the variance in political orientations, but little is known about the pathways through which genes might affect political preferences. In this article, we use a uniquely assembled dataset of almost 1,000 Swedish male twin pairs containing detailed information on cognitive ability and political attitudes in order to further examine the genetic and environmental causes of political orientations. Our study makes three distinct contributions to our understanding of the etiology of political orientations: (1) we report heritability estimates across different dimensions of political ideology; (2) we show that cognitive ability and political orientations are related; and (3) we provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive ability mediates part of the genetic influence on political orientations. These findings provide important clues about the nature of the complex pathways from molecular genetic variation to political orientations.     

Religion and Political Decision Making

Influential political theorists suggest that religious differences in political life may be overcome through shared commitment to political processes. In this article, I subject the underlying assumptions of this proposition to empirical inquiry. When faced with substantive conflict over policy outcomes, do religious persons defer to a political process for resolution? And if so, to which political process do they defer? Through a novel interview exercise with 61 respondents from a variety of religious backgrounds, I find a general willingness to defer to a legitimate political process, even if it results in an undesirable outcome that violates religious (or other) political preferences. However, I also find that a political process need not be democratic to be seen as legitimate, and that process preferences do not map onto religious differences.     

Differences in Media Preference Mediate the Link Between Personality and Political Orientation

Research has consistently demonstrated that political liberalism is predicted by the personality trait Openness to Experience and conservatism by trait Conscientiousness. Less well studied, however, is how trait personality influences political orientation. The present study investigated whether differences in media preference might mediate the links between personality and political orientation. Participants completed measures of Big Five personality, media preferences, and political orientation. Results revealed that increased preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical media genres, as well as decreased preferences for Communal/Popular media genres, mediated the association between Openness to Experience and liberalism. In contrast, greater preferences for Communal/Popular and Thrilling/Action genres, as well as lower preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical genres mediated the link between Conscientiousness and conservatism.     

Culture and Japanese Citizen Influence on the Transboundary Air Pollution Issue in Northeast Asia

This paper outlines a general approach for analyzing the role of culture in international environmental policymaking. It draws on work in anthropology and foreign policy analysis. The first step is to view culture as a “toolkit of environmental ideas.” The second step, relative to a given research topic, is to delimit broad definitions of culture to more workable forms. Three forms are offered (following Hudson, 1997a): culture as organization of environmental meaning, as shared value preferences in environmental matters, and as templates for environmental action. The third step is to answer three basic questions relative to the specific definition of culture used: (a) Who draws what environmentally related ideas from the ideas toolkit? (b) How are these ideas used in the political arena? (c) How do these ideas, originally drawn upon for political purposes, change and in turn lead to changes in the set of environmentally related ideas in the culture? Ideas, once they have entered the political arena, are assumed to be embodied in a “discourse.” The terminology of discourse (and the body of theory built up around it) is used as a vehicle for examining the role of culture in international environmental policymaking. A practical application of this approach is presented in relation to the role of culture in the Japanese public's influence in Japan on policymaking on the northeast Asian transboundary air pollution issue.     

Are Conservatives Less Likely to be Prosocial Than Liberals? From Games to Ideology,Political Preferences and Voting

Do political preferences reflect individual differences in interpersonal orientations? Are conservatives less other‐regarding than liberals? On the basis of past theorising, we hypothesised that, relative to individuals with prosocial orientations, those with individualistic and competitive orientations should be more likely to endorse conservative political preferences and vote for conservative parties. This hypothesis was supported in three independent studies conducted in Italy (Studies 1 and 2) and the Netherlands (Study 3). Consistent with hypotheses, a cross‐sectional study revealed that individualists and competitors endorsed stronger conservative political preferences than did prosocials; moreover, this effect was independent of the association between need for structure and conservative political preferences (Study 1). The predicted association of social value orientation and voting was observed in both a four‐week (Study 2) and an eight‐month (Study 3) longitudinal study. Taken together, the findings provide novel support for the claim that interpersonal orientations, as measured with experimental games rooted in game theory, are important to understanding differences in ideology at the societal level. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Communication,Influence, and Informational Asymmetries among Voters

The costs of political information vary dramatically across individuals, and these costs help explain why some individuals become politically expert while others demonstrate low levels of political knowledge and awareness. An attractive alternative, particularly for those with high information costs, is to rely on information and advice taken from others who are politically expert. This paper focuses on the complications that arise when the informant and the recipient do not share preferences. A series of small group experiments show that subjects tend to weight expertise more heavily than shared preferences in selecting informants, thereby exposing themselves to diverse views and biased information. Experimental subjects employ several heuristic devices in evaluating the reliability of this information, but depending on their own levels of information, these heuristics often lead subjects either to dismiss advice that conflicts with their own prior judgments or to dismiss advice that comes from an informant with divergent preferences. Hence these heuristics produce important consequences for patterns of political influence, as well as reducing the potential for political change.     

Images Versus Issues in the 1984 Presidential Election Differences Between Men and Women

Recent accounts of male and female personality development suggest that members of each sex differ in the orientations and capacities they bring to their experience of the political world. This article explores the relative importance of respondents’ images of the candidates and respondents’ political positions to predictions of males’ and females’ candidate preferences. It was predicted that candidate images based on interpersonal communication behavior, as opposed to respondents’ political positions, would be a more powerful predictor of females’ candidate preferences. The opposite pattern was expected to be the case for males’ candidate preferences. These predictions were supported; however, the data analysis also indicated that both candidate images and politkal positions contributed significantly to predictions of females’ candidate preferences.     

Ratio Bias and Policy Preferences: How Equivalency Framing of Numbers Can Affect Attitudes

Numbers permeate modern political communication. While current scholarship on framing effects has focused on the persuasive effects of words and arguments, this article shows that framing of numbers can also substantially affect policy preferences. Such effects are caused by ratio bias, which is a general tendency to focus on numerators and pay insufficient attention to denominators in ratios. Using a population‐based survey experiment, I demonstrate how differently framed but logically equivalent representations of the exact same numerical value can have large effects on citizens' preferences regarding salient political issues such as education and taxes. Furthermore, the effects of numerical framing are found across most groups of the population, largely regardless of their political predisposition and their general ability to understand and use numerical information. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of framing effects and the role played by numbers in public opinion formation.     

The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders1

Recent public opinion polls have suggested that there is a striking lack of public support for national political leaders and institutions. The two studies discussed in this paper explore why public evaluations of political leaders and institutions are low. In particular, they examine the role of perceived injustice in creating dislike for and distrust of leaders and institutions. This focus upon justice is contrasted with the more traditional focus upon the level of outcomes received from the political system and upon congruence in citizen-leader policy preferences. The results strongly support a focus upon justice by showing that judgments of injustice exercise an influence upon leadership evaluations and in stitutional endorsements which is independent of beliefs about the level of outcomes the political system is providing to citizens or of public support for government policies. In fact, both studies suggest that judgments of justice or injustice have more influence upon the endorsement of political leaders and institutions than do outcome-related concerns.     

Partner Preferences as a Function of Gender,Age, Political Orientation and Level of Education

An important current debate concerns the originof gender differences in partner preferences. Thesedifferences have been explained both in terms ofevolutionary theory and in terms of social role theory. The present study determines the relativestrengths of both perspectives by investigating, apartfrom gender, the influence of three other importantfactors on partner preferences and for which the two approaches offer divergent hypotheses: age,political orientation and level of education of therespondent. About 95% of the participants were WhiteDutch citizens, the rest were Dutch with one or twoparents from a different ethnic background.Participants were requested to write down the mostimportant characteristics of a potential partner(open-ended format), followed by an instruction toindicate the importance of 39 pre-selected characteristics. Resultsshow that men and women have highly similar preferencesfor characteristics in a potential partner. In addition,it is demonstrated that on crucial characteristics from an evolutionary perspective (i.e.,physical attractiveness and status) significantinteractions between age, political orientation, levelof education and/or gender of the respondents emerge.Most results offer support for a social role theoryof human mate selection. It is concluded that becausegender on its own merely explains a small proportion ofthe total variance in human mate selection, it is important to include other factors, not onlyin order to facilitate our understanding of the fullcomplexity of partner preferences, but also in order tomake theoretical progress in this area.     

Understanding responses to political conflict: interactive effects of the need for closure and salient conflict schemas

Two studies examined the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and preferences for conflict-resolution strategies in 2 different samples of elite political actors. Although research has suggested that high need for closure should be associated with competitiveness, the authors argue that this relationship should be strongest among political actors with a hostile conflict schema, or representation of what a conflict is and how it should be dealt with. The authors provide evidence for this hypothesis using archival survey data on American foreign-policy officials' attitudes toward international conflict at the height of the Cold War (Study 1) and their own data on the relationship between the need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences among samples of activists from 2 political parties in Poland: a centrist party with a reputation for cooperativeness and an extremist party with a reputation for confrontation (Study 2). The broader implications of these findings are discussed.     

Can Voters Predict Changes in Theor Own Attitudes?

Although scholars have established that voters have unstable preferences (e.g., Converse, 1964; Zaller, 1992) and that they are not accurate when recalling past preferences (e.g., Markus, 1986; Niemi, Katz, & Newman, 1980; Smith, 1984), existing research has not systematically explored whether voters can accurately predict the changing nature of their own opinions. The question of whether whether people recognize the instability of their political preferences was explored in a random sample of Pennsylvania registered voters who were surveyed in August and October 1996, during the presidential election campaign. The first survey elicited respondents' positions on two political issues (welfare reform and the environment) and on the two major candidates, and also asked them to estimate the likelihood that each of these positions would change during the next 2 months. The second survey elicited positions at that time and also asked voters to recall their prior positions. Measured both by expectations and recall, respondents tended to underestimate the degree to which their own positions would change or had changed over time. This research has implications for the use of public opinion polling and more broadly for the practice of democratic politics.     

Mothers,daughters, and the socialization of political women

Using biographical data from what we call a focused sample of 36 elite women, the conjugal power structure of their parental families is examined to assess its impact upon the development of political women. The results revealed that the mothers of elite political women scored higher on indices of independence both within the family structure and outside the home than did the mothers of elite nonpolitical women. The fathers of the elite political women tended to show more respect and love for their wives than did the fathers of the elite nonpolitical women. The fathers of elite political women also tended to view their work as interesting and fun rather than as just a job. The elite political women were also less likely to have brothers, particularly older brothers, than the nonpolitical women. This finding suggests that female involvement in politics is not necessarily derived from cross-sex-role preferences. The study suggests that in terms of political socialization, the father's behavior and achievements are not as critical for his daughter as they are for his son. Their importance for the daughter must be filtered through the effect the father and his behavior have on the mother and the sex-role ideology held by the family.     

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.     

Priming the Sleeping Giant: The Dynamics of Latino Political Identity and Vote Choice

Latinos are commonly referred to as the “sleeping giant” in American politics, and interest in the political potential of this fastest‐growing American ethnic group has risen in recent years. This article examines the influence of Latino political identity on voting preferences in the 2006 California gubernatorial election. A survey experiment linking Latino identity to support for either the Democratic or Republican candidate finds that vote preferences were influenced by group cues and that this effect was strongest in increasing support for the Democratic candidate among Latino Republicans and independents. The influence of Latino political identity is modeled as a two‐step process of social identification and group influence, both of which are found to interact with prior partisanship. These findings support a model of political identity that views identity as malleable and subject to contextual influences.     

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 influences on ideology as well as the role of personality factors. Virtually all of this research begins with the assumption that it is possible to understand the determinants and consequences of ideology via a unidimensional conceptualization. We argue that a unidimensional model of ideology provides an incomplete basis for the study of political ideology. We show that two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences. More importantly, we demonstrate that the determinants of these two ideological dimensions are vastly different across a wide range of variables. Focusing on a single ideological dimension obscures these differences and, in some cases, makes it difficult to observe important determinants of ideology. We also show that this multidimensionality leads to a significant amount of heterogeneity in the structure of ideology that must be modeled to fully understand the structure and determinants of political attitudes.