When and how politicians' disrespect affects voters' trust in the political system: The roles of social judgments and category prototypicality

We propose that one politician's disrespectful behavior can spill over to voters' generalized judgments of politicians and thereby affect trust in the political system. We delineate the spillover effect along the basic dimensions of social judgment, communion, and agency. Moreover, we argue that any spillover effect is contingent on the focal politicians' category prototypicality, that is, their representativeness of politicians as such. Conducting an experiment (N = 392) and a field study (N = 273), we found that politicians' respect only affected trust through generalized communion ratings. This spillover only occurred if the observed politician was perceived as prototypical. Our findings provide new insights on when and how individual politicians may be able to undermine voters' trust in the political system.     

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.     

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.     

Tracing the Boundaries of Motivated Reasoning: How Deliberative Minipublics Can Improve Voter Knowledge

A large body of work shows that reasoning motivated by partisan cues and prior attitudes leads to unreflective decisions and disparities in empirical beliefs across groups. Surprisingly little research, however, has tested the limits of motivated reasoning. We argue that the publicly circulated findings of deliberative minipublics can spark a more reflective motivation in voters when these bodies provide policy-relevant factual information. To test that proposition, we conducted a survey experiment using information generated by one such minipublic during an election. Results showed that exposure to the minipublic's findings improved the accuracy of voters' empirical beliefs regarding a ballot proposition on the regulation of genetically modified seeds. This treatment effect transcended voters' partisan identities and prior environmental attitudes. In some instances, the respondents showing the greatest knowledge gains were those who a directional motivated-reasoning account would have expected to resist the treatment most effectively, owing to party identity or prior attitudes.     

Should Candidates Smile to Win Elections? An Application of Automated Face Recognition Technology

Previous studies examining whether the faces of candidates affect election outcomes commonly measure study participants' subjective judgment of various characteristics of candidates, which participants infer based solely on the photographic images of candidates. We, instead, develop a smile index of such images objectively with automated face‐recognition technology. The advantage of applying this new technology is that the automated process of measuring facial traits is by design independent of voters' subjective evaluations of candidate attributes, based on the images, and thus allows us to estimate “undiluted” effects of facial appearance per se on election outcomes. The results of regression analysis using Japanese and Australian data show that the smile index has statistically significant and substantial effects on the vote share of candidates even after controlling for other covariates.     

The Federal Face of Voting: Are Elected Officials Held Accountable for the Functions Relevant to Their Office?

Federalism is designed to enhance democratic representation because it gives citizens the opportunity to shape policymaking at multiple levels of government. This design feature is premised on the assumption that individuals make distinctions in the responsibilities that pertain to different levels of government and link these distinctions to their voting decisions. Citizens are expected to sanction politicians for those policy decisions over which their level of government has responsibility. This paper draws on work in both political and social psychology to develop a theoretical framework consistent with the federalist view of democratic representation to explain how people make voting decisions. Individuals who were able to vote in elections at all three levels of government (national, state, and local) in 2002 were surveyed, allowing a full test of the federalist voting model. Findings show that while citizens do make distinctions among levels of government when evaluating issues, they only link these distinctions to their voting decisions if those issue attitudes are highly accessible. Implications for democratic representation and future research are discussed.     

Motivational and Emotional Consequences of Self-Engagement: Voting in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

The role played by self-engagement in the prediction and consequences of goal-directed behavior was examined. Components of the Triangle Model of Responsibility were measured 4 days prior to the 2000 U.S. presidential election, and reported voting and reactions to the election were measured the day after the election. In support of the model, engagement in voting was highest when the guidelines for voting were perceived as clear, when the individual perceived personal control over voting, when the individual perceived voting as relevant to his or her role as a citizen, and when who won the election was important to the individual. Engagement in voting was strongly related to reports of actually voting in the election, and completely mediated the relationship between the other predictors and reported voting. Engagement was also related to a variety of behavioral activities (e.g., watching the presidential and vice-presidential debates, staying up late to watch the election results) indicative of investment in the election. Finally, being engaged in the act of voting prior to the election was strongly related to being in a heightened state of uncertainty and anxiety as a function of not knowing the outcome of the election. The importance of self-engagement in predicting behavior and emotional consequences to behavior is discussed.     

Positive Social Pressure and Prosocial Motivation: Evidence from a Large‐Scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization

Political scientists are increasingly exploring the psychological underpinnings of voting behavior using field experimental techniques. Research in psychology demonstrates that positive reinforcement—what I describe as positive social pressure—motivates prosocial behavior. A distinctive feature of the current study is the focus on key subgroups of voters, namely unmarried women and minorities. Attention to these voter subgroups allows us to build upon findings reported in previous studies that leave questions about the generalizability of the reported effects of positive social pressure to key demographic subgroups of voters largely unanswered. This article reports the results of a large‐scale randomized field experiment designed to investigate the impact of positive social pressure on voter turnout. The experiment was conducted during the November 2009 gubernatorial election in New Jersey, and the results suggest positive social pressure mobilizes voters. Moreover, the effects appear to be robust across subgroups of voters, including minorities and unmarried women, and both lower‐ and higher‐propensity voters.     

Voting at 16? 16–17-Year-Old Germans Vote as Correctly as Adults

Lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 years has recently been a hot topic of the political debate in many democratic countries. This study investigated whether the voting quality of 16–17-year-olds is inferior to that of the voting population. Shortly before the 2021 German federal election, two samples, representative for age and gender, indicated personal preferences about various political issues and weighted them according to importance, allowing for the calculation of individual expected values for political parties. Participants then indicated their voting choice. These choices were normatively correct when individuals voted for the party that best reflected their preferences, that is, the one maximizing the expected value. Results show that the voting decisions of 16–17-year-olds were as good as those by eligible voters. The study indicates that the exclusion of 16–17-year-old Germans in democratic elections cannot be justified by their lack of decision-making ability.     

Not practicing what they preached! Exploring negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians’ hypocrisy on party attitudes,voting intentions,and political trust

ABSTRACT

Political hypocrisy – a frequent feature of contemporary politics – oftentimes occurs when politicians resign from office and then engage in behavior that is in fundamental opposition to the standpoints they originally campaigned for as incumbents. Previous research has neglected to examine negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians’ hypocritical behavior. Drawing from the inclusion/exclusion model and the feelings-as-information model, we conducted two experiments in two different countries and used different stimuli to increase external validity. Results suggest a dual process account of scandal spillover effects (an attitudinal and emotional mechanism) revealing that hypocrisy negatively affected both attitudes and emotions toward an ex-politician. Mediation analysis further showed that evaluations in turn negatively affected attitudes and voting intentions for the party the hypocritical politician used to belong to (attitudinal spillover process). No effects on general political trust emerged. In contrast, negative emotions had no effect on party attitudes and voting intentions but decreased political trust toward politicians in general (emotional spillover process). In line with the inclusion/exclusion model, the results help to explain inconsistent findings in previous studies that did not account for the suggested dual process account of spillover effects and underline the eroding effects of hypocrisy.     

The Persistence of Erroneous Information in Memory: The Effect of Valence on the Acceptance of Corrected Information

People often have difficulty changing previously held, but erroneous, beliefs. This finding is particularly worrisome in politics where misinformation is regularly distributed about political candidates. We examined whether initial inferences about a fictional political candidate could be corrected, and whether people's willingness to accept a correction was influenced by the valence of the information being corrected. Participants read a list of statements describing a politician running for re‐election in which a negative, positive or neutral piece of information about the politician was later corrected. Results showed that receiving a correction reduced reliance on the original information for all types of information: positive, negative and neutral. Results also showed that participants tended to rely on negative information the most when answering inference questions, regardless of whether it was corrected or not. Results have implications for decision‐making in politics and other applied areas.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Speaking two “Languages” in America: A semantic space analysis of how presidential candidates and their supporters represent abstract political concepts differently

In this article we report a computational semantic analysis of the presidential candidates’ speeches in the two major political parties in the USA. In Study One, we modeled the political semantic spaces as a function of party, candidate, and time of election, and findings revealed patterns of differences in the semantic representation of key political concepts and the changing landscapes in which the presidential candidates align or misalign with their parties in terms of the representation and organization of politically central concepts. Our models further showed that the 2016 US presidential nominees had distinct conceptual representations from those of previous election years, and these patterns did not necessarily align with their respective political parties’ average representation of the key political concepts. In Study Two, structural equation modeling demonstrated that reported political engagement among voters differentially predicted reported likelihoods of voting for Clinton versus Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Study Three indicated that Republicans and Democrats showed distinct, systematic word association patterns for the same concepts/terms, which could be reliably distinguished using machine learning methods. These studies suggest that given an individual’s political beliefs, we can make reliable predictions about how they understand words, and given how an individual understands those same words, we can also predict an individual’s political beliefs. Our study provides a bridge between semantic space models and abstract representations of political concepts on the one hand, and the representations of political concepts and citizens’ voting behavior on the other.     

What Voters Do: Information Search During Election Campaigns

Learning about political candidates before voting can be a cognitively taxing task, given that the information environment of a campaign may be chaotic and complicated. In response, voters may adopt decision strategies that guide their processing of campaign information. This paper reports results from a series of process-tracing experiments designed to learn how voters in a presidential primary election adopt and use such strategies. Different voters adopt different strategies, with the choice of strategy dependent on the campaign environment and individual voter characteristics. The adoption of particular strategies can have implications for how voters evaluate candidates.     

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.     

A New Look at Celebrity Endorsements in Politics: Investigating the Impact of Scandalous Celebrity Endorsers and Politicians’ Best Responses

When a celebrity receives negative news coverage, his or her endorsements of politicians can pose negative consequences for the politicians. We investigated such negative consequences with the help of two experimental studies. In Study 1 (celebrity involved in tax scandal), we manipulated whether an endorsement was initiated by a politician or a celebrity (i.e., controllability) in a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment. We also manipulated politicians’ responses (i.e., no response vs. response). Study 2 was a conceptual replication of the first experiment (celebrity involved in a real estate scandal). Results of Study 1 revealed that politicians are perceived to be more in control of self-initiated endorsements than other-initiated ones. Perceived controllability, in turn, influenced feelings of anger and pity, eventually affecting voting intentions. For self-initiated endorsements, no response appears to be the best reaction. By contrast, public response is advised when the endorsement was initiated by another entity. Results were replicated in Study 2. However, particular responses of a political candidate revealed no influences in connection with a real estate scandal. We explain our findings by applying the theory of planned behavior, attribution theory, and situational crisis communication theory.     

Does Anxiety Improve Voters' Decision Making?

Affective Intelligence (AI) theory proposes to answer a fundamental question about democracy: how it succeeds even though most citizens pay little attention to politics. AI contends that, when circumstances generate sufficient anxiety, citizens make informed and thoughtful political decisions. In Ladd and Lenz (2008 ), we showed that two simpler depictions of anxiety's role can explain the vote interactions that apparently support AI. Here, we again replicate Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen's (2000 )'s voting model, which they contend supports AI, and again show that it is vulnerable to these alternative explanations, regardless of how candidate choice is measured. We also briefly review the broader literature and discuss Brader's (2005, 2006 ) important experimental results. Although the literature undoubtedly supports other aspects of AI, few studies directly test AI's voting claims, which were the focus of our reassessment. In our view, the only study that does so while ruling out the two alternatives is our analysis of the 1980 ANES Major Panel ( Ladd & Lenz, 2008 ), which finds no support for AI, but ample support for the alternatives. None of the responses to Ladd and Lenz (2008 ) addresses these findings. Overall, evidence that anxiety helps solve the problem of voter competence remains sparse and vulnerable to alternative explanations.     

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.     

The Consequences of Collective Discontent: A New Measure of Zeitgeist Predicts Voting for Extreme Parties

In recent years, extreme right‐wing and left‐wing political parties and actors have gained popularity in many Western countries. What motivates people to vote for extreme right‐ or left‐wing parties? In previous research, we showed that a collectively shared sense of doom and gloom about society can exist among citizens who, individually, experience high well‐being. Previous research developed an operationalization of this collective societal discontent as an aspect of Zeitgeist, which can be compared to personal experiences (van der Bles, Postmes, & Meijer, 2015 ). In the present research, we investigated whether this Zeitgeist of societal discontent predicts voting for extreme parties. We conducted a field study during the 2015 Dutch provincial elections (N = 407). Results showed that collective societal discontent (Zeitgeist) predicted voting for extreme parties but that personal discontent did not. Results also showed that pessimistic Zeitgeist was associated with lower education levels and tabloid‐style media consumption. These findings advance our understanding of the discontents that fuel extreme voting outcomes: Global and abstract (negative) beliefs about society are more consequential than concrete personal experiences.