Choosing the Right Candidate: Observational and Experimental Evidence that Conservatives and Liberals Prefer Powerful and Warm Candidate Personalities,Respectively

A comprehensive literature relates voters’ electoral decisions to their perceptions of candidates’ personalities. Yet the mechanisms through which voters are attracted to certain candidates and not to others remain largely unresolved. To answer this question, this article integrates two recent interdisciplinary insights. First, leader and candidate preferences are found to be strongly dependent on levels of contextual conflict. Second, individual differences in political ideology are shown to be rooted in psychological orientations leading conservatives and liberals to perceive society in fundamentally different ways: Conservatives tend to perceive the social world as dangerous and threatening, whereas liberals to a larger degree see society as a safe place characterized by cooperation. Based on this, it is predicted that conservatives and liberals will also prefer different candidate personalities. Specifically, conservatives are predicted to value candidate power and “strong leadership” more than liberals, whereas liberals are predicted to value candidate warmth more than conservatives. The prediction is supported observationally using the 1984–2008 American National Election Studies and experimentally in two original experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. Consequences and scope conditions for trait-based voting are discussed.     

Political Information, Political Involvement, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. Here, we argue that two “evaluative motivations”—general investment of the self in politics and extremity of partisanship—serve as moderators of this relationship. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associated with a tendency to approach politics in an ideological fashion among individuals high in both types of evaluative motivation. Results supported this hypothesis, revealing that information was more strongly associated with ideological constraint and with a tendency to give polarized evaluations of conservatives and liberals among those who highly invest the self in politics and those with more extreme partisanship. As such, this study suggests that information and involvement interact to shape the use of ideology.     

Allen C. Guelzo, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Redeeming the Great Emancipator</Emphasis>

In the latest of his many books on Lincoln, Allen C. Guelzo argues that the “redeemer president” is himself in need of redemption—redemption from a contemporary mindset that refuses to acknowledge moral indebtedness. Challenging various falsifications of the past, from the neo-abolitionist claim of “self emancipation” to simplistic accounts of the postwar failure of emancipation, Guelzo offers a richly textured and fearless brief for Lincoln’s crucial role in emancipation.     

Politics,Nostalgia, and the Strange Estrangements of <Emphasis Type="Italic">The American Political Tradition</Emphasis>

This essay concerns the writerly features of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. Of particular interest is how Hofstadter structured his arguments in the book, his modes and methods. There is also speculation as to whether readers today should feel nostalgia for Hofstadter’s verve and wit as a writer when the idea of the political in the book is so narrow, concerned primarily with economic motivations and interests. The two issues—memorable observation and the shrinking of the political—can hardly be disentangled. The “realism” of the historical figures in the book created the space for some of Hofstadter’s more memorable and cutting observations.     

De-agrarianization, <Emphasis Type="Italic">re</Emphasis>-agrarianization and local economic development: Re-orientating livelihoods in African artisanal mining communities

This article contributes to the debate on livelihood diversification in rural sub-Saharan Africa, focusing specifically on the growing economic importance of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the region. The precipitous decline in the value of many export crops and the removal of subsidies on crucial inputs such as fertilizers have made smallholder production unviable, forcing many farmers to ‘branch out’ into non-farm activities to supplement their incomes. One of the more popular destinations for poor farmers is the low-tech ASM sector which, because of its low barriers to entry, has absorbed millions of rural Africans over the past two decades, the majority of whom are engaged in the extraction of near-surface mineral deposits located on concessions that have been demarcated to multinational corporations. The efforts made hitherto to control this illegal mining activity, both through force and regulation, however, have had little effect, forcing many of the region’s governments and private sector partners to ‘re-think’ their approaches. One strategy that has gained considerable attention throughout the region is intensified support for agrarian-orientated activities, many of which, despite the problems plaguing smallholder agricultural sector and challenges with making it more economically sustainable, are being lauded as appropriate ‘alternative’ sources of employment to artisanal mining. After examining where artisanal mining fits into the de-agrarianization ‘puzzle’ in sub-Saharan Africa, the article critiques the efficacy of ‘re-agrarianization’ as a strategy for addressing the region’s illegal mining problem. A case study of Ghana is used to shed further light on these issues.     

Waller R. Newell: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tyrants: A History of Power,Injustice, and Terror</Emphasis>

Newell offers a typology of tyrants: the profit-and-pleasure-seeking “garden variety”; the would-be “reformers”; and the genocidal “millenarians.” Ranging widely across the globe and through the centuries, he provides a link between political philosophy and tyrannical practice that is often missing in the scholarly literature.     

Ideology and Political Alienation

A substantial literature over the years has focused on the relationship between political alienation and ideology. Much of this research contends that conservatives are more alienated than liberals because philosophically they believe that the best government is that which governs least. A close reading of the literature, however, reveals little consistency in the empirical findings. Survey data from Norway, Sweden, and the United States are used to provide a more extensive and consistent test of the hypothesis. Ideology is defined as both left/right self-identification and policy preference on economic and "new political" issues. The evidence reveals that in Scandinavia higher levels of alienation are found among conservatives, whereas in the US the left has been consistently more alienated, except on "new politics" issues. The discrepancy between the citizen's preferred ideological orientation and that which the public perceives the government to take, is used to explain the different findings for the three countries and the shifts in the relationship between ideology and alienation across time.     

Debating Same-Sex Marriage: Lessons from <Emphasis Type="Italic">Loving</Emphasis>, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Roe</Emphasis>, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Reynolds</Emphasis>

The United States Supreme Court, in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage (SSM). With Republicans now controlling the Congress and presidency, and with value-traditionalists and ‘strict’ constitutionalists influencing the party’s legislative agenda and judicial nominees, Obergefell’s future and the contours of SSM rights are uncertain. Proponents assume the decision will delegitimate opponents, just as Loving v. Virginia (1967) accelerated the delegitimation of racial segregationists. SSM opponents counter with the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and argue that, like Roe, Obergefell undermines the democratic process, which is better suited to resolve a highly-charged moral dispute. Like Roe, Obergefell will not resolve the debate but, instead, trigger a durable opposition. We add a third possible path, drawing on the evolving public discourse on polygamy since the Supreme Court upheld prohibitions in Reynolds v. United States (1878). The politics of polygamy shows that, if SSM opponents are delegitimated, they may reemerge as legitimate participants in the public sphere. These paths offer insights into uncertainties, contingencies, and predictions regarding the durability of SSM resistance and other oppositional movements. They also lead to revisionist interpretations of the effect on public discourse flowing from these three seminal court decisions. The politics of interracial marriage (after Loving) shunned the losing political faction from the public forum, while those of abortion (after Roe), and, recently, polygamy, illustrate a more vibrant, pluralist model of deliberation. Whether SSM opponents will mimic a Roe model, or follow the trajectory of Loving or Reynolds, is now the question.