The Effects of Politician’s Moral Violations on Voters' Moral Emotions

Existing empirical research on voters’ responses to individual politicians’ moral transgressions pays limited attention to moral emotions, although moral emotions are an integral part of voters’ moral judgment. This study looks at U.S. voters’ discrete moral emotional responses to politician’s moral violations and examines how these discrete moral emotional responses are dependent on voters’ own moral principles and the extent to which they identify with a political party. We report on a 5 × 3 between-subjects experiment where 2026 U.S. respondents reacted to politicians’ violations of one of five moral foundations defined by Moral Foundations Theory. We randomly vary which moral foundation is violated and the partisanship of the politician. While voters’ own moral principles somewhat condition moral emotional responses, we find that voters’ moral emotional responses mostly depend on partisan identification. When voters share party identity with a politician committing a moral violation, they respond with less anger, contempt, disgust and shame than when they do not share party identity. The effect is greater among strong partisans. However, we find limited evidence that specific moral emotions are activated by violations of particular moral foundations, thereby challenging Moral Foundations Theory.

Republicans, Not Democrats, Are More Likely to Endorse Anti-Vaccine Misinformation

Vaccine safety skeptics are often thought to be more likely to self-identify as Democrats (vs. Independents or Republicans). Recent studies, however, suggest that childhood vaccine misinformation is either more common among Republicans, or is uninfluenced by partisan identification (PID). Uncertainty about the partisan underpinnings of vaccine misinformation acceptance is important, as it could complicate efforts to pursue pro-vaccine health policies. I theorize that Republicans should be more likely to endorse anti-vaccine misinformation, as they tend to express more-negative views toward scientific experts. Across six demographically and nationally representative surveys, I find that—while few Americans think that “anti-vaxxers” are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats—Republican PID is significantly associated with the belief that childhood vaccines can cause autism. Consistent with theoretical expectations, effect is strongly mediated by anti-expert attitudes—an effect which supplemental panel analyses suggest is unlikely to be reverse causal.

Putting US First: How Outgroup Hostilities and Defense of the Status Quo Motivate White Evangelical Affect Toward Candidates in U.S. Elections 2004 to 2016

How do voters construct feelings toward inparty elites? More specifically, how do they do so when they lack a shared policy agenda or shared salient social identity with candidates beyond partisan identification? In this paper, I investigate this puzzle by developing a theory of Putting America First to explain white evangelical affect toward Republican presidential candidates from 2004 to 2016. Using ANES surveys from 2004 to 2016, I test the effectiveness of this model of candidate affect. I find that shared outgroup hostility, what I call Putting Us First, motivates positive affect for presidential candidates among white evangelicals, regardless of shared policy objectives and descriptive representation. Overtime, white evangelicals’ affect is driven by outgroup hostilities rather than Culture Wars values. Overall, this informs our understanding of voter affect toward candidates and the increasingly important role of social outgroup hostility in defense of the status quo.

Social identity shapes antecedents and functional outcomes of moral emotion expression in online networks

As social interactions increasingly occur through social media platforms, intergroup affective phenomena such as “outrage firestorms” and “cancel culture” have emerged with notable consequences for society. In this research, we examine how social identity shapes the antecedents and functional outcomes of moral emotion expression online. Across four pre-registered experiments (N = 1,712), we find robust evidence that the inclusion of moral-emotional expressions in political messages has a causal influence on intentions to share the messages on social media. We find that individual differences in the strength of partisan identification is a consistent predictor of sharing messages with moral-emotional expressions, but little evidence that brief manipulations of identity salience increased sharing. Negative moral emotion expression in social media messages also causes the message author to be perceived as more strongly identified among their partisan ingroup, but less open-minded and less worthy of conversation to outgroup members. These experiments highlight the role of social identity in affective phenomena in the digital age, and showcase how moral emotion expressions in online networks can serve ingroup reputation functions while at the same time hinder discourse between political groups.

Visualizing Partisan Identification Switching in the General Social Survey Panel, 2016–2020

This visualization captures shifts in partisan identification in the 2016–2020 General Social Survey Panel. Although most partisans remained stable in their identifications, a significant proportion of respondents either shifted to the opposing party or became independents. These patterns have important implications for our understanding of recent party realignment, trends in partisanship, and the care needed when using party identification as an independent variable.

How Asians React to Discrimination Does Not Depend on Their Party Identification

How do individuals respond to discrimination against their group? The authors help answer this normatively important question by conducting a survey with a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,482 Asians living in the United States during December 2020. In the survey, the authors provide respondents with truthful information about the increasing prevalence of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and ask them to write about what this makes them feel or think about life in America. Using automatic text analysis tools to analyze this rich, novel set of personal reflections, the authors show in this visualization that Asian reactions to discrimination do not meaningfully differ across partisan identification. These findings extend the large literature showing partisan differences in perceptions of racial discrimination and its effects by the general public and show at least one way in which partisan polarization does not influence American views.

Who Cares If You Vote? Partisan Pressure and Social Norms of Voting

Social norms are important in explaining why people vote, but where do those norms come from and is social pressure motivated by partisanship? In this article, we use political discussion network data to examine the role of party identification in shaping the relationship between injunctive norms, civic duty and voter turnout. More specifically, we examine the extent to which both the application of injunctive norms and their impact on turnout is affected by shared partisan identification. We find that citizens are more likely to perceive normative pressure to vote from fellow partisans, a phenomenon we refer to as “partisan pressure”. However we do not find consistent evidence for the hypothesis that turnout is more closely related to the approval or disapproval of discussants who share a partisanship. By separating the role of social pressure from that of normative beliefs we also demonstrate that injunctive norms affect voter turnout both directly and indirectly by increasing civic duty.

“I’m with her” or “we’re with her”? Personal versus group leader-based identities and types of political participation

In a region where personalistic politics and charismatic leaders have long been a characteristic of the political landscape, there has been little research exploring the relationship between individuals’ identification with leaders and its relationship with political participation. Using original survey data from Argentina in 2016, the findings from this study demonstrate a few key points. Firstly, that identities form around political leaders and that identification plays an important role in political participation. Secondly, while personal identification with a leader is related with atomized and collective participation, the relationship between collective identification that is shared with other supporters of the political leader and both types of participation is even stronger. Additionally, these identification measures are more strongly associated with political action in support of a leader than frequently used variables such as partisan identification and ideology. This suggests that the study of political participation, especially in those contexts with more personalized political systems such as are often found in Latin America, should not ignore the role of personal and especially group leader-based identity.

Priming the Party

This chapter advances a direct examination of presidential campaign strategies by analyzing the contents of presidential advertisements broadcasted on television in recent cycles. The analyses are suggestive and largely explorative, but they suggest overall that presidential campaigns have increasingly featured partisan cues in their appeals on television, presumably to activate latent predispositions among partisans in their camps and to trigger the salience of social identity processes rooted in partisan identification. I interpret this evidence to support the notion of a base maximizing strategy as opposed to base expansion efforts.