Reactions to China-linked Fake News: Experimental Evidence from Taiwan

China is accused of conducting disinformation campaigns on Taiwan's social media. Existing studies on foreign interventions in democratic societies predict that such disinformation campaigns should lead to increasing partisan polarization within Taiwan. We argue that a backlash effect, making Taiwan's citizens more united against China, is equally plausible. We conduct a survey experiment exposing participants to a real-life rumour and rebuttal to test these competing hypotheses. We find, at best, mixed evidence for polarization. Although neither rumour nor rebuttal mention China, there is consistent evidence of backlash against China. Most notably, participants across the political spectrum are more inclined to support Taiwanese independence after viewing the rumour rebuttal. These findings indicate that citizens may put aside partisanship when confronted with false news that is plausibly linked to an external actor. We conclude by discussing the broader applicability of our theory and implications for cross-Strait relations.

Emotion and Politics: Noncognitive Psychological Biases in Public Opinion

Contemporary politics is noteworthy for its emotional character. Emotions shape and, in turn, are elicited by partisan polarization, public opinion, and political attitudes. In this article, we outline recent work in the field of emotion and politics with an emphasis on the relationship between emotion and polarization, issue attitudes, information processing, and views on democratic governance. We also highlight a growing body of scholarship that examines the racial and gender differences in emotion's ability to affect political behavior. We conclude with a discussion of unaddressed questions and suggestions for future directions for scholars working in this area of growing importance. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the US Electorate, 1980–2016

Past the half-century mark of Converse's (1964) field-defining essay, the nature of political ideology in the mass public and how it has changed in response to partisan polarization remains enigmatic. To test the ideological structure of US public opinion, I develop and implement a Bayesian dynamic ordinal item response theory model. In contrast to static scaling procedures, this method allows for changes in the mappings between issue attitudes and the underlying ideological dimension over time. The results indicate that over the last forty years, mass attitudes on a range of long-standing policy controversies better fit a unidimensional ideological structure. As among elites, the left–right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary US politics.

Life in the Middle

For almost thirty years, political scientists have believed that the US Senate would be less affected by partisan polarization due to the existence of a handful of moderate senators who would act as power brokers between the two sides, yet year after year we see partisan gridlock. Life in the Middle argues that the belief in the powerful, pivotal moderate neglects their electoral circumstances and overestimates their legislative power. Indeed, not all senators are elected under equal circumstances where the modern centrist has to balance between two conflicting constituencies like Susan Collins in Maine, or represents a state where the opposition outnumbers their base like Joe Manchin in West Virginia. Using data compiled from the Congressional Record, the book examines the legislative behavior of moderates and finds that they seldom amend legislation to their preferences, rarely speak on the record, and often lose on final votes. Using unique interview data with nineteen legislative directors and six retired centrist senators, it also finds that the behind-the-scenes conversations mirror the on-stage behavior where centrists are not influential or viewed as pivotal by party leaders. Furthermore, moderates reported less satisfaction with legislative outcomes than their peers. Life in the Middle suggests that lawmaking needs to be re-evaluated as being much more variable and less reliant on the work of moderates and more on party leaders. Indeed, the mainstream concerns about polarization and its negative effects of increased gridlock and ideological legislation may be true.

Violence and Voting in the United States: How School Shootings Affect Elections

How do citizens change their voting decisions after their communities experience catastrophic violent events? The literature on the behavioral effects of violence, on the one hand, and on political behavior, on the other, suggest different answers to this question. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the influence of indiscriminate, rampage-style school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican Parties at the county level in US presidential elections (1980–2016). We find that although voter turnout does not change, the vote share of the Democratic Party increases by an average of nearly 5 percentage points in counties that experienced shootings—a remarkable shift in an age of partisan polarization and close presidential elections. These results show that school shootings do have important electoral consequences and bring to the fore the need to further examine the effects of different forms of violence on political behavior.

A method for exploring attitude systems by combining Belief Network Analysis and Item Response Theory (ResIN)

Belief network analysis (BNA) is a new class of methods with strong potential to research the organization and development of abstract meaning systems. By mapping the attitude system, this method provides a more profound understanding of often “fuzzy” concepts such as ideologies, worldviews, and norm systems. BNA therefore holds potential implications for a plethora of socially relevant issues. For example, by informing the architecture of extreme belief sets or lines of conflict underlying partisan polarization. Despite the huge potential of this approach, it has some major limitations. Indeed, BNA methods start from the simplistic assumption that opposing groups should be perfectly symmetric in their attitudes (e.g. the more democrats are positive, the more republicans should be negative about each topic). Another important aspect of BNA methods is that they are often grounded on new, instead of well-established theories. This sometimes results in problems of interpretation and reliability of the results.In this article, we introduce a new method by combining BNA with item response theory (IRT). We refer to it as the Response-Item Network (or ResIN) method. This method has the advantage of being grounded in the well-developed psychometrics literature. Furthermore, it allows us to analyze attitudes from different groups without assuming symmetric behavior. This allows us to explore more deeply relationships and differences in the attitude system.Besides validating ResIN using IRT, we also test this method on real data, showing that it produces new insights compared to both classical BNA and IRT. Indeed, we are able to easily distinguish attitudes which belong to the republican and to the democrat side, even in counter-intuitive situations. We furthermore validated the reliability of these results by relying on additional data, such as self-identification measurements.

Is Cancer Immune from Partisan Polarization? How Partisan Identity Motivates Opposition to Preventative Cancer Vaccination in the U.S.

As one of the leading causes of death in the United States, cancer impacts the lives of Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. Correspondingly, we might expect experimental cancer preventatives to be more-or-less “immune” to partisan polarization. Experiences with the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, however, suggest that even amid an unprecedented public health threat, some Americans were nevertheless motivated by political partisanship – particularly on the ideological right – to reject life-saving preventatives. In this study, I investigate whether tying partisan accomplishments in funding cancer prevention research to vaccine development might influence public acceptance of “personalized cancer vaccines,” which prevent the onset of cancer using tumor detection and mitigation mechanisms informed by one’s DNA. In a pre-registered analysis plan and survey experiment, I find that Republicans are less likely (in the absence of elite cues) to intend to receive personalized cancer vaccines and/or recommend that others do the same. Experimentally, I find that when respondents are exposed to information wherein Democrats claim credit for taking action to fund cancer research, polarization tends to increase; such that Republicans become even less likely to intend to receive a vaccine. I conclude by discussing how these findings can motivate effective political communication aimed at resolving one of the greatest public health crises of our time.