What Motivates Reasoning? A Theory of Goal‐Dependent Political Evaluation

Rather than exhibiting bias or open‐minded reasoning at baseline, we argue that information processing is motivated by whatever goals a context makes salient. Thus, if politics feels like debate, people will be motivated to argue for their side. If politics feels like deliberation, they will be motivated to seek consensus through open‐minded processing. Results from three experiments demonstrate: (1) Politics evokes thoughts similar to conflictual contexts and dissimilar from deliberative contexts. (2) Consequently, information labeled “political” primes the motivation to counterargue, leading to opinion polarization. Absent such labeling, no such motivation is evident, explaining why bias is common but not inherent to politics. (3) Despite this capacity for bias, people can be motivated to actively process and accept counterattitudinal information by simply making the value of open‐mindedness salient. This suggests open‐minded discourse is possible even absent motivation to evaluate information accurately. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for political discourse.     

When Does Negativity Demobilize? Tracing the Conditional Effect of Negative Campaigning on Voter Turnout

Do negative campaign advertisements affect voter turnout? Existing literature on this topic has produced conflicting empirical results. Some scholars show that negativity is demobilizing. Others show that negativity is mobilizing. Still others show that negativity has no effect on turnout. Relying on the psychology of decision making, this research argues and shows that this empirical stalemate is due to the fact that existing work ignores a crucial factor: the timing of exposure to negativity. Two independent empirical tests trace the conditional effect of negativity. The first test relies on data from the 2004 presidential campaign. The second test considers the effect of negativity over a broader period of time by considering elections 1976 to 2000. Taken together, both tests reinforce that negativity can only demobilize when two conditions are met: (1) a person is exposed to negativity after selecting a preferred candidate and (2) the negativity is about this selected candidate.     

How Negativity Can Increase and Decrease Voter Turnout: The Effect of Timing

Negative ads dominate campaign communication, but scholars continue to disagree over the effects of negativity on voter turnout. While some studies show that negativity leads to a lower likelihood of turnout, others find precisely the opposite. In this article, I leverage the role of timing to unify findings that were heretofore perceived as largely conflicting. I use the same data to show that at a certain time exposure to negativity can be mobilizing, but at other points in time exposure can be demobilizing. A combination of observational data and experimental results highlight these crucial conditions.     

Accentuating the Negative: Candidate Race and Campaign Strategy

This article examines the impact of candidate race and campaign negativity on candidate evaluations and turnout. Unlike previous research, we argue that candidate race and campaign negativity should be considered simultaneously. In order to test this argument, we conduct a survey experiment of a nationally representative sample of White adults and a replication study. While we find, consistent with previous research, that respondents unfavorably evaluate candidates who decide to sponsor a negative ad, there are two important exceptions to this pattern: When the ad sponsor is Black, among White respondents who view Blacks negatively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately large, while among White respondents who view Blacks positively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately small. More generally, our findings suggest that the effects of candidate attributes and campaign strategy on voter behavior should not be considered in isolation, as they are mutually reinforcing.     

When Trust Matters: The Case of Gun Control

Political Behavior - Declining trust in government is often cited as the cause of declining support for policies that require ideological sacrifices. Yet pivotal to the effect of trust is the...     

Who is Punished? Conditions Affecting Voter Evaluations of Legislators Who Do Not Compromise

In American politics, legislative compromise is often seen as a necessary and desirable aspect of policymaking, yet people also value politicians who stick to their positions. In this article, we consider these conflicting expectations of legislators and ask two intertwined questions: what conditions lead people to punish legislators for not compromising (when legislative action is at stake) and, conversely, what conditions leave people more willing to overlook a legislator’s unwillingness to engage in compromise? Relying on previous research, we suggest that legislator gender, legislator partisanship, and issue area may all affect which legislators are punished for not compromising. Relying on two national experiments, we demonstrate that the extent to which lawmakers are punished for not compromising is conditional on the intersection of the three factors in this study. In general, our results suggest that people may be most willing to overlook unwillingness to engage in compromise when party, gender and issue ownership align than when party, gender, and issue ownership are at odds.